Giving Voice to Women in Spy Stories

Let´s talk women in the more or less history of espionage...Automatically, it comes to mind the glamours of Mata Hari and the swings of Josephine Baker and some equally glamorous counterparts of James Bond. However, although unequally represented on the economy of jobs, women working in espionage, all over the world, mean more than that. And, contrary to the generally accepted stereotype, they can do more than being ´honey pots´.

A French freelance author Chloé Aeberhardt had the idea of writing a book about various women from all over the world famous intelligent services. A tremendous and not always successful work because of the secretive and sensitive nature of the work. The book was recently turned into short animated series on Arte that I just finished watching today. 

Truth to be told, the life of women involved in intelligence is limited. The life of a woman in general is limited by family, children, family and house-related obligations. But more and more women are able to make it through and succeed. Because, in fact, there is no intelligence related job that a woman cannot do. Only that society is limiting a woman´s ability to outperform. Sometimes, women too are resigning to accept their limitations, which is also a matter of choice.

The women featured in the TV mini-series (I have the book too and hopefully will be able to read and review it soon) are former operatives of CIA, KGB, French intelligence, Stasi and Mossad. My favorite case, for her freedom is the hero of the episode Yola and Hotel Mossad featuring a former ELAL flight attendant, part of a massive Mossad operation in Sudan aimed to smuggle endangered Ethiopian Jews to Israel. The story was recently featured in a movie on Netflix, The Red Sea Diving Resort but probably the reality was even more complex than the fiction. One of the stories I never heard about was how the Manuel Antonio Noriega was caught out of the Embassy of Vatican where he took refuge following the American invasion of Panama.

Another woman featured in the movie is a former Stasi operative in the then West Germany that was recruted through the so-called Romeo-network of the famous Markus Wolf, the head of the Main Directorate for Reconaissance, the foreign intelligence division of Eas Germany´s Ministry for State Security. The so-called Romeos were Stasi agents sent to the West Germany to recruit women working in top/sensitive working positions. They were usualle falling for the boys and were further recruited to work for the East. At a great extent, the success of this operation confirmed the weakness label of women leading to women being considered as a liability therefore not deem of a trustworthy work within the security network, unless it involved sex. Gabriele Gast, interviewed in the movie, started to collaborate with the East for a purposely love story, but ended up working for convinctions, without accepting any payments.

It´s one of the many new beginnings in she-writing the history with a focus on female actors and although it is just a start, it´s worth continuing because it not only allows to make a difference, but equally create a space for new debates and understandings.

Decadence&Downfall: The Shah of Iran´s Ultimate Party

The Shah of Iran´s tragical story has not only historical consequences for the Pahlavi dynasty itself but equally for the country itself that was thrown in decades of turmoil and abuses. What if the Shah would have understood better that it is about time to really understand its people? Unfortunatelly such projections are too late and historically toxic.

Decadence&Downfall: The Shah of Iran´s Ultima Party was released by BBC in 2017. The 1h30 documentary is primarily featuring the grandiose celebrations of 2,500 Years of Persian monarchy in 1971, where 2,500 guests from all over the world were offered lavish celebrations for three days spending an amount that was three times the annual budget of the rich Switzerland.

The movie features fragments of interviews with the Shah and Farah Diba - speaking a very elegant French and English - as well as with people involved at various level of organising the festivities, from the serving personnel to foreign journalists and local politicians at the time, as the former and loyal diplomat Ardeshir Zahedi, who happened to be the son-in-law of the Shah who never ceased to be a proud Iranian. 

´I have a divine command of doing what I am doing´, is the Shah confessing in one of those interviews. The megalomanic party and his entire court routine and display of outrageous luxury in a country where half of the people still leaved below the poverty line. The display of diamonds and majestic richness was more than part of the westoxification - gharbzadegi - a very popular concept among the opponents of the Shah, introduced by Jalal Al-e Ahmad. It was a statement of independence and of assumed bold stake in a world that was becoming strongly bi-polar therefore with no concerns for the ambitions of the ´King of Kings´ - the title that Shah Reza awarded himself in 1967. But in this respect as well, the Shah ignored the realities. In the end, he was a victim of his and his entourage ´bubble life´. His beloved people would be the victim of his errors until today.

The documentary is relatively fair and informative and the archive recordings are alternating with interviews of various people involved in the preparations of the ceremonies as well as connected with the Iranian monarchy. 

Personally, I am looking forward this weekend to read more about the global entanglements of the former Shah, but this movie is an eye-opening especially as it offers a strong visual approach to the historical identification and continuity with the reign of Cyrus the Great - Khoros, in Persian - who is nowadays under the reign of the Islamic Republic reduced to the silence of history. 

About Racism, in Germany

I am glad that there are so many books taking frontally racism in Germany, especially the everyday racism. That kind of racism that people not born here and with a different skin colour and obvious religious observance has to deal with every day.

Alice Hasters´ Was weisse Menschen über Rassismus hören wollen aber wissen sollten (in my approximate translation What white people don´t want to hear about racism but should know about) is partly a personal memoir of a woman of colour born and living in Germany but partly is an overview of racism atittudes in the everyday life. Indeed, you don´t have to be a Nazi to be a racist. It´s enough to start with that question: Where are you coming from, originally? Or to address in a broken English a person with a non-German sounding name and a darken skin colour. 

´We are here, in Germany´, sounds the micro-agression in the Kita when one parent insists that pork is part of the German culture therefore he requests in a a kindergarten with a high diversity of children to introduce the aforementioned animal on the daily menu. That´s my experience that I will explain in detail on another occasion, maybe.  

The book is written in a very personal, authentic style creating an open dialogue with the reader. It´s a kind request to try changing the way of looking at people, considering more than their hair and their skin colour, but also taking into account historical perspectives and colonial burried past, acknowledged only in the last decade. It is also a request to reconsider critically not only the Enlightment period - which was far from being enligthened, as it revealed a system of thought that lead to racist mindsets, especially in scientific research - but also symbol thinkers and philosophers, like Kant and Hegel. 

Alice Hasters covers a lot of issues, from the family connections and relating to her white German grandparents and relatives, to school relationships, cultural appropriation and the wrongs of acting white. Through the examples, it serves very well as a kind of guide and orientation for white people helping them to stop being racist. As there is nothing like good racism anyway.

I had access to the book in audio format, in the reading of the author.

Another reliable source of information about what does it mean being a POC in Germany is the book by the journalist Marvin Oppong: Ewig anders. 

Rating: 5 stars

´The Education of Kim Jong-Un´

The current North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-Un is often read in an ironic, comic-book like key. Or he is considered a cruel tyrant killing not only his people, but also his own family members - which probably is. But what´s the intelligent approach to his rule?

Jung H. Pak worked for the CIA as intelligence community analyst on Korean issues and is a Brookings Institute Senior Fellow, as well as on author on topics related to Korea, particularly the North. The Education of Kim Jong-Un is a very short - under 50 pages book - yet insightful approach to the man who´s both despised and admired but for sure has a mind of his own, which is mostly unpredictable if following the wrong analysis matrix. 

Compared to other books I´ve read this year about Kim Jong-Un this short introduction is very useful if one wants to get familiar with ´the hardest of the hard targets´. A spoiled boy who lived his own life under the sign of priviledge, that was on a boarding school in Switzerland while his people was starving, Kim wants to raise high. It´s a new type of dictatorship he is practising but placed under times of tremendous change and unpredictibility. Hence, the need of a more elastic, creative approach of his regime and, eventually, post-Kim North Korea.

´Kim has made it clear that he will not tolerate any potential challenges. And his rule through terror and repression - against the backdrop of that pastel wonderland of waterparks - means that the terrorized and the repressed will continue to feed Kim´s illusions and expectations, his grandiose visions of himself and North Korea´s destiny´.

In other words, it´s a smarter game taking place out there than you may read in the media - at the time the book was read, there was not too much a fuss about Kim´s health and the raising of her sister on the top of the party hierarchy. Adding Kim in a box with the stamp of ´Craziness´ on the top of it would have been too easy. The guy who did an over 100 kilotons bomb test in 2017 - for the sake of the comparison, as mentioned in the book, the bomb the Americans threw on Hiroshima had just 15 kilotons - has also the power. Nuclearization is an important asset of this regime and ignoring or deriding it is as dangerous as dancing with the bombs. 

Instead, Jung H.Pak suggests a suple and subtle approach, which involves increasing the regional alliances - particularly between US (that´s from an American perspective that the author considers the facts and further developments), South Korea and Japan, as well as through efforts of cutting the resources that fund the nuclear weapons program, a constant cyber war, raising awareness about human right violations and, one of the most important things, creating an alternative vision for a post-Kim era. What I´ve felt is missing for the analysis is the mention of other - less-democratic - interests in the region, such as China and Russia, which would have create a better picture of the real situation on the ground.

The Education of Kim Jong-Un is a practical and insightful read about North Korea and its leadership, which includes fine observations and useful future political projections. The future only will tell what´s the best and how things will evolve in the next months and years.

Rating: 4 stars

The State of the Arts of Mathematics in France

Children don´t like mathematics in school, and it´s not only their fault. Actually, the biggest share of this disgrace is due to the old methodologies and lack of understanding, at the institutional level, about the importance of this domain to everyday life.

The series: Conversation sur les mathématiques is part of a collection of publications aimed to outline various scientific domains and their relevance for the everyday life and institutional politics. It reunites dialogues between experts in a domain of study on topics related not only to theoretical and conceptual approaches but also to common relevance.

For instance, why mathematics are important for the everyday life? For instance, for being able to manage your costs and savings, or medical reasons or for setting up your business? What distinguishes a certain policy in the field from a country to another? What are the geopolitics of mathematics nowadays? What happened to France and what are the consequences of the daily decline of the educational measures in this field? What are the failures of communication between the French mathematicians and other scientists?

I´ve read this book of dialogues - among mathematicians with very complex life trajectories - as a long intellectual story, with fascinating insights into the everyday struggles of the scientific elites. I can´t wait to read the other conversations on other theoretical topics as well.

Rating: 4 stars

The Poles of Tehran

From the early 1940s until the end of WWII, Iran hosted between 114,000 and 300, refugees from Poland, that come on the way from Siberia via Uzbekistan. They arrived to the port city of Bandar e-Anzali and they settled in Tehran, but also in Isfahan and other locations like Ahvaz. Most of them left either back to Poland, after the war, or left for New Zealand or UK, but there were also a few - some hundred - that stayed there, settled and eventually married.

Some of the stories of those refugees are the topic of a documentary movie made by the film director and author Khoshrow Sinai, who died this August of Covid 19, The Last Requiem available for free on YouTube (it lasts 1h35). He gathered testimonies of the then refugees between 1971-1983, to which archive films and photos were added.  He is not the only one to cover this topic, among those who documented this Exodus being the photographer Gholam Abdol-Rahimi. 

The wandering started once Poland was occupied by the Germany, with hundred of thousands of people running - sometimes on foot - to the Soviet Union, where they were sent to camps in Siberia. Malnourished and maltreated, some were able to go out and reached Iran, where according to the testimonies they were welcomed with open heart, fed and hosted by the locals. ´They made us feel humans again´, says one of the person interviewed then. Many were sent back to the front but there were many who temporarily or for good worked here, as nannies or music teachers. Polonia, a former bar and restaurant in the centre of Tehran, was a meeting point not only for the local Polish but also by the American and British soldiers stationed in the capital. Sinai is wandering though the Christian cemetery in Tehran or visiting the local church trying to understand what they feel and how they feel now about their past. 

At the time of the production, given the so-called ´friendly´ relations between USSR and Poland, the movie was not distributed in the country, as it openly approaches the hardships the Poles had to suffer on behalf of the Russians. After the end of the Cold War though, Sinai was awarded a high Polish state distinction for his contribution to the understanding of this specific chapter of common history.

Among those hundreds of thousand of refugees, there were also around 1,000 Polish Jews that were saved from the Nazis while being offered temporary refuge in Iran. The survivors, calling themselves ´Tehrani´, do still reunite once the year in Israel to celebrate their escape through Iran. Unfortunately, this topic is not approached in the movie, but in those demented times we live now, it is a good reminder that, in fact, the kindness of the people can easily overpass the craziness of the political regime in power in Tehran. 

Book Review: China´s Next Strategic Advantage. From Imitation to Innovation

 

China´s Next Strategic Advantage. From Imitation to Innovation by George S. Yip and Bruce McKern is an useful introduction to doing business in China, especially for multinational companies. It helps at a great extent - but mostly at a theoretical level - to understand the details of mergings and business management in this country, as well as the state policies in the field of development and innovation.

It combines the features of a business guidance book based on a variety of case studies from various industries. For someone interested in doing business in China, this book can help at a significant extent. For those already operating on the ground, not so much, as they are probably well acquainted already with the limitations of a party system that is present through its structures in any middle-sized entreprise as well as the frequent harassment foreigners operating in the mainland especially are targeted (both legally as physically with police officers visiting them late at night apparently for some regular documents checking). I personally think that such aspects cannot be ignored, especially in a book that has to do with the business developments aimed at a foreigner audience.

Rating: 3 stars