The Essential Max Brooks: The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z (40 page)

L
ANGLEY
, V
IRGINIA
, USA

[The office of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency could belong to a business executive or doctor or an everyday, small-town high school principal. There are the usual collection of reference books on the shelf, degrees and photos on the wall, and, on his desk, an autographed baseball from Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench. Bob Archer, my host, can see by my face that I was expecting something different. I suspect that is why he chose to conduct our interview here.]

When you think about the CIA, you probably imagine two of our most popular and enduring myths. The first is that our mission is to search the globe for any conceivable threat to the United States, and the second is that we have the power to perform the first. This myth is the by-product of an organization, which, by its very nature, must exist and operate in secrecy. Secrecy is a vacuum and nothing fills a vacuum like paranoid speculation. “Hey, did you hear who killed so and so, I hear it was the CIA. Hey, what about that coup in El Banana Republico, must have been the CIA. Hey, be careful looking at that website, you know who keeps a record of every website anyone's ever looked at ever, the CIA!” This is the image most people had of us before the war, and it's an image we were more than happy to encourage. We wanted bad guys to suspect us, to fear us and maybe think twice before trying to harm any of our citizens. This was the advantage of our image as some kind of omniscient octopus. The only disadvantage was that our own people believed in that image as well, so whenever anything, anywhere occurred without any warning, where do you think the finger was pointed: “Hey, how did that crazy country get those nukes? Where was the CIA? How come all those people were murdered by that fanatic? Where was the CIA? How come, when the dead began coming back to life, we didn't know about it until they were breaking through our living room windows? Where the hell was the goddamn CIA!?!”

The truth was, neither the Central Intelligence Agency nor any of the other official and unofficial U.S. intelligence organizations have ever been some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, global illuminati. For starters, we never had that kind of funding. Even during the blank check days of the cold war, it's just not physically possible to have eyes and ears in every back room, cave, alley, brothel, bunker, office, home, car, and rice paddy across the entire planet. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we were impotent, and maybe we can take credit for some of the things our fans, and our critics, have suspected us of over the years. But if you add up all the crackpot conspiracy theories from Pearl Harbor
¹⁶
to the day before the Great Panic, then you'd have an organization not only more powerful than the United States, but the united efforts of the entire human race.

We're not some shadow superpower with ancient secrets and alien technology. We have very real limitations and extremely finite assets, so why would we waste those assets chasing down each and every potential threat? That goes to the second myth of what an intelligence organization really does. We can't just spread ourselves thin looking for, and hoping to stumble on, new and possible dangers. Instead, we've always had to identify and focus on those that are already clear and present. If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it's the Arab in your backyard, you can't be worrying about the People's Republic of China, and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're going to do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.

But didn't the plague originate in China?

It did, as well as did one of the greatest single Maskirovkas in the history of modern espionage.

I'm sorry?

It was deception, a fake out. The PRC knew they were already our number-one surveillance target. They knew they could never hide the existence of their nationwide “Health and Safety” sweeps. They realized that the best way to mask what they were doing was to hide it in plain sight. Instead of lying about the sweeps themselves, they just lied about what they were sweeping for.

The dissident crackdown?

Bigger, the whole Taiwan Strait incident: the victory of the Taiwan National Independence Party, the assassination of the PRC defense minister, the buildup, the war threats, the demonstrations and subsequent crackdowns were all engineered by the Ministry of State Security and all of it was to divert the world's eye from the real danger growing within China. And it worked! Every shred of intel we had on the PRC, the sudden disappearances, the mass executions, the curfews, the reserve call-ups—everything could easily be explained as standard ChiCom procedure. In fact, it worked so well, we were so convinced that World War III was about to break out in the Taiwan Strait, that we diverted other intel assets from countries where undead outbreaks were just starting to unfold.

The Chinese were that good.

And we were that bad. It wasn't the Agency's finest hour. We were still reeling from the purges…

You mean the reforms?

No, I mean the purges, because that's what they were. When Joe Stalin either shot or imprisoned his best military commanders, he wasn't doing half as much damage to his national security as what that administration did to us with their “reforms.” The last brushfire war was a debacle and guess who took the fall. We'd been ordered to justify a political agenda, then when that agenda became a political liability, those who'd originally given the order now stood back with the crowd and pointed the finger at us. “Who told us we should go to war in the first place? Who mixed us up in all this mess? The CIA!” We couldn't defend ourselves without violating national security. We had to just sit there and take it. And what was the result? Brain drain. Why stick around and be the victim of a political witch hunt when you could escape to the private sector: a fatter paycheck, decent hours, and maybe, just maybe, a little respect and appreciation by the people you work for. We lost a lot of good men and women, a lot of experience, initiative, and priceless analytical reasoning. All we were left with were the dregs, a bunch of brownnosing, myopic eunuchs.

But that couldn't have been everyone.

No, of course not. There were some of us who stayed because we actually believed in what we were doing. We weren't in this for money or working conditions, or even the occasional pat on the back. We were in this because we wanted to serve our country. We wanted to keep our people safe. But even with ideals like that there comes a point when you have to realize that the sum of all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero.

So you knew what was really happening.

No…no…I couldn't. There was no way to confirm…

But you had suspicions.

I had…doubts.

Could you be more specific?

No, I'm sorry. But I can say that I broached the subject a number of times to my coworkers.

What happened?

The answer was always the same, “Your funeral.”

And was it?

[Nods.]
I spoke to…someone in a position of authority…just a five-minute meeting, expressing some concerns. He thanked me for coming in and told me he'd look into it right away. The next day I received transfer orders: Buenos Aires, effective immediately.

Did you ever hear of the Warmbrunn-Knight report?

Sure now, but back then…the copy that was originally hand delivered by Paul Knight himself, the one marked “Eyes Only” for the director…it was found at the bottom of the desk of a clerk in the San Antonio field office of the FBI, three years after the Great Panic. It turned out to be academic because right after I was transferred, Israel went public with its statement of “Voluntary Quarantine.” Suddenly the time for advanced warning was over. The facts were out; it was now a question of who would believe them.

V
AALAJARVI
, F
INLAND

[It is spring, “hunting season.” As the weather warms, and the bodies of frozen zombies begin to reanimate, elements of the UN N-For (Northern Force) have arrived for their annual “Sweep and Clear.” Every year the undead's numbers dwindle. At current trends, this area is expected to be completely “Secure” within a decade. Travis D'Ambrosia, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, is here to personally oversee operations. There is a softness to the general's voice, a sadness. Throughout our interview, he struggles to maintain eye contact.]

 

I won't deny mistakes were made. I won't deny we could have been better prepared. I'll be the first one to admit that we let the American people down. I just want the American people to know why.

“What if the Israelis are right?” Those were the first words out of the chairman's mouth the morning after Israel's UN declaration. “I'm not saying they are,” he made sure to stress that point, “I'm just saying, what if?” He wanted candid, not canned, opinions. He was that type of man, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He kept the conversation “hypothetical,” indulging in the fantasy that this was just some intellectual exercise. After all, if the rest of the world wasn't ready to believe something so outrageous, why should the men and women in this room?

We kept up with the charade as long as we could, speaking with a smile or punctuating with a joke…I'm not sure when the transition happened. It was so subtle, I don't think anyone even noticed, but suddenly you had a room full of military professionals, each one with decades of combat experience and more academic training than the average civilian brain surgeon, and all of us speaking openly, and honestly, about the possible threat of walking corpses. It was like…a dam breaking; the taboo was shattered, and the truth just started flooding out. It was…liberating.

So you had had your own private suspicions?

For months before the Israeli declaration; so had the chairman. Everyone in that room had heard something, or suspected something.

Had any of you read the Warmbrunn-Knight report?

No, none of us. I had heard the name, but had no idea about its content. I actually got my hands on a copy about two years after the Great Panic. Most of its military measures were almost line for line in step with our own.

Your own what?

Our proposal to the White House. We outlined a fully comprehensive program, not only to eliminate the threat within the United States, but to roll back and contain it throughout the entire world.

What happened?

The White House loved Phase One. It was cheap, fast, and if executed properly, 100 percent covert. Phase One involved the insertion of Special Forces units into infested areas. Their orders were to investigate, isolate, and eliminate.

Eliminate?

With extreme prejudice.

Those were the Alpha teams?

Yes, sir, and they were extremely successful. Even though their battle record is sealed for the next 140 years, I can say that it remains one of the most outstanding moments in the history of America's elite warriors.

So what went wrong?

Nothing, with Phase One, but the Alpha teams were only supposed to be a stopgap measure. Their mission was never to extinguish the threat, only delay it long enough to buy time for Phase Two.

But Phase Two was never completed.

Never even begun, and herein lies the reason why the American military was caught so shamefully unprepared.

Phase Two required a massive national undertaking, the likes of which hadn't been seen since the darkest days of the Second World War. That kind of effort requires Herculean amounts of both national treasure and national support, both of which, by that point, were nonexistent. The American people had just been through a very long and bloody conflict. They were tired. They'd had enough. Like the 1970s, the pendulum was swinging from a militant stance to a very resentful one.