Did Dale K. Myers graduate from the Gary Aguilar School of Charm?

[Benjamin Cole]

They have not refused my application yet.

Although as Grouch Marx said, "I don't want to be a part of any group that will have me."

[Tom Graves]

They have not refused my application yet.

Although as Grouch Marx said, "I don't want to be a part of any group that will have me."

Maybe you can disabuse them of the silly, silly, silly Single Bullet Theory over there!!!

[Bill Brown]

They have not refused my application yet.

Although as Grouch Marx said, "I don't want to be a part of any group that will have me."

Ben, we just approved you as a member an hour ago.

[John Corbett]

The conman known as Donald "I Am Not a Rapist" / "I Am Not a Pedophile" Trump is the worst thing that's ever happened to this country.

That's why "former" KGB counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin installed him as our "president" on 20 January 2017.

Do you have any idea how comical your TDS rants have become?

[Tom Graves]

Do you have any idea how comical your TDS rants have become?

Do you have any idea how zombified you are by sixty-six years of KGB* disinformation, "active measures," and strategic deception counterintelligence operations -- operations which culminated in "former" KGB counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin's installing "useful idiot" (or worse) Donald Trump as our "President" on 20 January 2017?

*Today's SVR and FSB


Libertarians are the worst.

Especially Trump-supporting Libertarians.

[John Corbett]

Do you have any idea how zombified you are by sixty-six years of KGB* disinformation, "active measures," and strategic deception counterintelligence operations -- operations which culminated in "former" KGB counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin's installing "useful idiot" (or worse) Donald Trump as our "President" on 20 January 2017?

*Today's SVR and FSB


Libertarians are the worst.

Especially Trump-supporting Libertarians.

If they were so clever, why did they lose the Cold War. The Soviet Union is no more. Neither is the KGB. Eight former Warsaw Pact nations are now part of NATO. The KGB even failed in their coup d'état to oust Gorbachev. The Rooskies can't even conquer Ukraine. And you think they have been pulling the strings on our country. That's funny.

FYI: The KGB was only in existence for 37 years, not 66.

[Tom Graves]

If the Russians were so clever, why did they lose the Cold War? The Soviet Union is no more. Neither is the KGB. FYI: The KGB was only in existence for 37 years, not 66.

Educate your ignorant Libertarian self, Corbett.

The KGB -- "Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti" / "Committee for State Security" -- which was comprised of the First Chief Directorate (foreign espionage and assassinations) and the mysterious Second Chief Directorate (domestic espionage and overall counterintelligence) was formed from the OGPU/NKVD/MVD, etc. -- whose original incarnation was formed in 1917 -- in 1953. In 1992, after "the USSR lost the Cold War," the aforementioned FCD and the SCD were renamed the politically correct-sounding SVR and FSB ("Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki" / "Foreign Intelligence Service" and "Federal'naya sluzhba bezopasnosti" / Federal Intelligence Service," respectively.

Factoid: "The weak and powerless" SVR sent "Anna Chapman and The Ten Illegals" (or was it Eleven?) to the U.S. in 2000. They worked their way into positions of influence in our country and weren't rolled up by the gumshoe FBI until 2010.

Speaking of 2010, that was the year that the gumshoe (and possibly mole-ridden) FBI prematurely closed down its investigation of probable KGB* agent Igor Danchenko, the guy who went on to feed Christopher Steele oodles and gobs of false or unfalsifiable "intel" which ended up giving the Steele Dossier a bad name in the minds (sic) of MAGATs.

I could go on and on . . .

The KGB even failed in their coup d'etat against Gorbachev.

ME: What does Masha Gessen suggest in her 2012 book, "The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin," about the August 1991 coup attempt when she wrote on page 115:

Five days after the coup began, Moscow held a funeral for the three young men who died trying to stop the troops. Three Leningrad politicians, including [Marina] Salye, flew in for the ceremony. They joined Nikolai Gonchar, chairman of the Moscow City Council and a prominent democrat at the head of the funeral procession. “The procession kept starting and stopping,” Salye told me later. “And every time we stopped, Gonchar turned to me and said, ‘Marina Yevgeniyevna, what was it?’ He said it about ten times.” But at the end of the day, Gonchar had Salye convinced that the coup was not what it had seemed.

So, what was it? Why did the coup, so many months in the making, fall apart so easily? Indeed, why did it never really take off? Why were the democratic politicians, with the exception of Gorbachev, allowed to move around the country freely and have telephone contact? Why were none of them arrested? Why, in the three days that they ostensibly held power in the Soviet Union, did the hard-liners failed to capture the main communication or transportation hubs? And why did they fall without a fight? Was the coup simply a mediocre attempt by a group of disorganized failures? Or was there something more complicated and more sinister going on? Was there, Salye ultimately came to believe, a carefully engineered arrangement that allowed Yeltsin to remove Gorbachev and broker the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union but also placed him forever in debt to the KGB?

GROK: Gessen sets up the scene with Marina Salye (one of her key sources throughout the book) at the funeral procession for the three young men killed during the coup resistance. Salye describes Nikolai Gonchar repeatedly asking her, “Marina Yevgeniyevna, what was it?”—implying the coup didn’t add up. By the end of the day, Gonchar has convinced Salye that “the coup was not what it had seemed.”

Gessen then poses a series of pointed rhetorical questions about the coup’s bizarrely effortless collapse:

Why did it fall apart so easily after months of preparation?

Why were democratic politicians (except Gorbachev) allowed to move freely and communicate?

Why were no key figures arrested?

Why were communication/transport hubs never seized?

Why did the hard-liners fall “without a fight”?

She immediately follows with the alternatives you quoted: Was it “simply a mediocre attempt by a group of disorganized failures? Or was there something more complicated and more sinister going on?” And then she explicitly attributes the deeper theory to Salye:

“Was there, Salye ultimately came to believe, a carefully engineered arrangement that allowed Yeltsin to remove Gorbachev and broker the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union but also placed him forever in debt to the KGB?”

Does this mean Gessen “suggests” the coup was planned-to-fail for the KGB to stay in power?

Gessen does present the idea—through her most heavily relied-upon source on the Leningrad side of the events (Salye)—that the coup’s failure was not accidental or merely incompetent. Instead, it may have been a deliberately stage-managed or “engineered” transition in which elements tied to the KGB (or hard-liners with KGB connections) allowed Yeltsin to take power and dissolve the USSR peacefully, but at the cost of Yeltsin's owing them a permanent debt. This would effectively let the security services retain covert influence in the new Russia.

By raising the questions herself and then giving Salye’s conclusion the last word in the paragraph, Gessen strongly implies it is a serious, credible interpretation worth taking seriously—especially given how much weight she gives Salye elsewhere in the chapter on pre-coup corruption and Putin’s role.

This fits Gessen’s broader narrative style: she is deeply skeptical of official “the coup was just a clown show” accounts and uses investigative voices like Salye to highlight possible hidden continuities of KGB power into the post-Soviet era.

The passage you cited, above, shows that Gessen does surface exactly that possibility as a plausible explanation for the coup’s strangely convenient failure.