Silent World

Why did I write this book?

After all, efforts to “set the record straight” by stating a case, of which one is certain, have traditionally indicted the teller as guilty as Hell. Accounts which ring true are anonymously derided as the rantings of a fool, by armies of people paid to do exactly that. Books that manage to cut to the quick are buried or flooded or salted with grains of falsehood, like a garden being killed before being flattened under fresh pavement.

Let me disabuse you of any misperception of why I wrote this book and why you are reading it:

I am only in it for the money.

Any genuine insights into recent American history that come out of you reading this book, are purely accidental. If you come away with any epiphanies it means I didn’t throw in enough boobs, bombs, or banal appeals to nationalist fervor to draw your attention away from the important parts of this story.

Silent World is a memoir of my life over the past decade as an unpaid, untrained, unofficial, and therefore unaccountable intelligence operative working for the US and its close allies in Europe and East Africa. It is also a chronicle of how, as one of the key domestic players behind the uprising over the mass illegal wiretapping of Americans, I came to find myself under the jackboot of Big Brother: another victim of The Program, the system that is supposed to protect us all and promote our American values, but in some strange way has only managed to act only as our consensual enslaver. This, even as it offers succor through the division it has sown amongst our people, to external opponents such as Iran or China.

Since 2008 I have been unable to get a job or find funding for any business projects. I live under constant electronic surveillance and am frequently hacked. Resumes and job requests go unanswered, because the emails that send them in don’t get delivered. I live well below the poverty line in the cash and barter economy. And if a few people in the IC have their way, nothing will change in this regard.

And yet I am "free" and generally happy. I am a natural born insurgent in the American revolutionary tradition. I cherish my liberties afforded to me by the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. I’m courageous and patriotic and like America itself, I’m coming back, baby, with both barrels blazing.

Alfred O’Mega

March, 2010