Note: The original title of this thread, before Thomas edited it, was: Re: Standing Challenge To Michael Clark (Or Anyone Else Who Wants To Give It A Shot)
I agree with you, generally, about Thomas. But I have not read enough to comment on the specifics that you have presented.
What kind of gets missed, though, is that Heuer confirms that there once was a prevailing theory in intelligence circles to which Thomas is a latter-day adherent.
There was a “Master Plot” theory, which was subsequently derided as the “Monster Plot” (like, monsters living under your bed). To use modern, millennial parlance, it is, or was, “a thing”.
Unfortunately, for Thomas, so were The Beach Boys, and his ascribtion to this theory is akin to him running around and loudly letting people know that The Beach Boys ARE the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Anecdote: I learned how to surf a couple of days before The Beach Boy's first hit single,
Surfin' Safari, was released in June 1962, and three months before their album by the same title was released, so I can say in all honesty that that totally "As I was walking a' alane, I heard twa corbies makin' a mane. The tane untae the tither did say, Whaur sail we gang and dine the day, O. Whaur sail we gang and dine the day? It's in ahint yon auld fail dyke I wot there lies a new slain knight; And naebody kens that he lies there But his hawk and his hound, and his lady fair, O. But his hawk and his hound, and his lady fair. His hound is to the hunting gane His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, His lady ta'en anither mate, So we may mak' our dinner swate, O. So we may mak' our dinner swate. Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane, And I'll pike oot his bonny blue e'en Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair We'll theek oor nest when it grows bare, O. We'll theek oor nest when it grows bare. There's mony a ane for him maks mane But nane sail ken whaur he is gane O'er his white banes when they are bare The wind sail blaw for evermair, O. The wind sail blaw for evermair.'en" band didn't have anything to do with my initial "stoke," which endorphin "high" was achieved on my very first "paddle-out" on the south side of Scripps Pier on Creighton Robinson's 9-0 Al Nelson "gun".
I guess that make me OG, surfin'-wise.
It's ironic, though, that I, after falling in love with their songs
Surfin' Safari and
409, etc, eventually (in the Fall of 1967) fell in love with the music of Jimi Hendrix, who sang the immortal words, "So to you I shall put an end, and you'll never hear surf music again" (in his 1966 song,
Third Stone From The Sun) when I heard
Purple Haze blaring over and over again from a dorm window one day during homecoming week at TCU (where the school colors are purple and white, and, iirc, we beat Texas Tech on a long 4th quarter touchdown pass from quarterback P. D. Shabay to a wide-open-way-down-the-field Bill Ferguson), and that in 1999 I would, on a regular basis, sing "Hey Joe" for a band called "Traffic Jam" at now-gone Molly's Irish Pub in the now-gone Hotel Avion Building on Ceska Street ... in Brno, Czech Republic.
Point being, you chose a bad analogy, Michael.
-- WMT
PS Heuer's Five Paths to Judgement was published in 1987, whereas Bagley's Spy Wars (have you read it, yet?) was not only published twenty years later, but it point-by-point demolishes, with verifiable evidence, Heuer's thesis and conclusions.
As they say,
You can lead a horse to water ...https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames
