Now You See It Now You Don’t

‘Battleship grey! Inconspicuous? Take my word for it,’ declared our camouflage unit’s senior Training Officer, ‘a grey that declares itself to be a battleship is almost guaranteed to be seen!’

            Of course, these days, my knowledge of camouflage paints probably has no equal outside the armed services.

            On what grounds do I make this claim?

            See for yourself. There’s my old uniform on its hook behind my secret studded door. That battledress jacket was once worn by a supernumerary Concealment Officer commissioned to draw enemy fire from Allied airfields by decoy and deception . . . no canvas of any academic painter (a calling in which I have gained no small repute) has ever been on such a colossal scale.

            You’ll recognise our elite shoulder insignia. The scops-owl (a superbly camouflaged species, almost indistinguishable when perched against the bark of a tree).

            But I will not rehearse here the history of DG-SCOPS: the Directorate-General for Secret Camouflage Operations based at Cleremont Park.

 

The Outside Viewing-tank of the Directorate of

Camouflage (1943). Painting by Commander

 J. Yunge-Bateman of the Directorate. A model

of an aircraft carrier floats in the tank.

•

A camoufleur may fool the enemy but he is not in the business of fooling himself . . .

            If only I could now vanish into thick darkness as wholly as we did then.  

            No human eye can penetrate the dark fastnesses of the human spirit where I would wish to wander.

            In the boatshed, above the slipway, Ingrid peered into the gloom.

            ‘I see no ships.’

            ‘Trust me.’ I took her hand, leapt towards the water and, without a splash, disappeared.

            I heard her gasp, bewildered.

            ‘It’s not possible,’ she whispered.

            But it was.

            For three months we’d been refining a special heavy-duty marine paint that a wag in stores, because of its dead matt blackboard-type properties, had labelled Nightschool No. 9.

            By studying the adaptive camouflage of cuttlefish in starlight, together with the spectrometric theories advanced by that master painter of moonlit waters, Julius Olsson RA, and compounding our findings with the principles of M.C. Schwab’s hull-camouflage-through-downlighting system modulated by rheostats (filed in U.S. Patent 2,300,067 and devised to dissipate the under-shadow cast by a battleship by night) the state of nigh invisibility had been achieved for our Mk. 5 experimental hooded coracle into which I’d stepped. 

            ‘It’s as I thought,’ I called from the blackest void. ‘I’m nothing to you.’

            I gripped Ingrid’s wrists and she stepped aboard to fall into my arms.

            ‘Tell me!’ My grip tightened. ‘Has anyone ever mattered to you?’

            ‘I nursed a baby monkey once,’ she murmured. ‘It was everything to me. Everything I ever wished!’

            My hands brushed her shoulder blades. It was as though I had touched a razor-backed mule.

•

As I trod the narrow cinder foot-path that runs between the railway’s boundary fence and the water meadows, I contemplated my crooked shadow in a gibbous moonlight that by my reckoning measured eighty selinolumens.

            At Cleremont Park the Camouflage Directorate had built a Moonlight Vision Chamber above a circular tank on a turntable, presenting a shallow sheet of water for our crypto-shaded model warships, which permitted the measurement of all kinds of marine light effects, from the diffused radiance of starlight to brightest moonlight, so we could judge our visual trickery in miniature from the vantage of an aircraft circling at any altitude.

            I was still contemplating the secrets of nocturnal mimesis, unlocked by that distant peepshow, as I stealthily entered No. 56 by the trade gate.

            In my lab-cum-dispensary, fearful of waking Ingrid, I closed the door and, before I switched on the light, drew the heavy drapes against the prying moon.

            You don’t hear the one that gets you.

            Her kid sister, Lena, came up behind me, unheard.

 

Extract from  Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

(A Bad Case, 2014, Salt.)  

•

Anthony Deverell-Hewells. A Sketch.

(Narrator of Now You See It, Now You Don’t.)

The character of this bristling, irrepressible artist, and camoufleur, Anthony Deverell-Hewells, is alluded to in a number of Eisner’s narratives. The ‘Prof’ was said to have ‘more opinions than the Queen has soldiers.’

            And ‘the professor’s raw complexion rivalled the face of an engineroom stoker ... and, certainly, “the Prof” never ceased to relish stoking up controversy, for the “rummy old coot” had often claimed that he was the first practitioner of Optical Art (a claim that rivalled Picasso’s), and that he had not only invented an invisibility cloak but had caused a battleship to disappear, in a series of trials that had surpassed the Philadelphia Experiment.’

            (Sister Morphine by Catherine Eisner. Page 312, 344, 346 and 403, Dispossession and A Stranger in Blood.)

            It should be noted that Henrietta Goodden’s Camouflage and Art (2007), in a very real sense, omits a number of the Royal College of Art’s alumni who were distinguished serving artists in the camouflage section of the Air Ministry in WW2, whilst only a select rollcall of RCA artists is favoured with inclusion.

 

Set Designers, Couturiers and the Aesthetics of Camoufleurs.

Later I took Ingrid dancing at the Starlight Rooms in Stoneburgh.

            In the event, my invisibility cloak and my self-denying ordinances were needless since, returning through the moonlit park by way of Cleremont Chase, to my surprise she quite voluntarily led me into a New Brutalist pillbox, now adorned with pilasters and rustic trellises, which a foppish stage designer dragooned into our unit had sweetly transformed into a Greek temple for Lord Jewkes of Cleremont.

            In the moonlight, Ingrid’s hair was greyish mauve and her bright red lipstick had turned black, the accident of a not displeasing nocturnal aesthetic.

            Her war paint, like the actinic chlorophyll pigments of military camouflage, changed under certain conditions.

            But her cool grey eyes were no less grey and no less watchful.

            I had been of the belief that I’d trained myself aright in night-time peripheral vision to avoid the blind spot; yet, despite all my best efforts, I hadn’t seen what was there to be had for the taking.

            I repeat: in the night-time deceptions of a camoufleur, the light can become dark and the dark can become light . . . so even a wary seducer can be seduced by a fledgling seductress . . .

Extract from  Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

 

I might, perhaps, have been useful to the War Office in camouflage work, for I had had many years of experience in the very antithesis of the art. It had been my special task to make figures stand out in sharp relief to background, as has to be done in the case of Royalty. One of the essential elements of a majestic wardrobe is visibility.  As a rule. ladies of the Royal Family wear light coloured clothes because such colours are more discernible against a great crowd, most of which will be wearing dark everyday colours.

Norman Hartnell (1901-1979),

Couturier to Queen Elizabeth II.

A Web Link to Catherine Eisner’s published works . . .

Publishers of Catherine Eisner, Salt is one of UK’s foremost independent publishers, committed to the publication of contemporary British literature. Salt Publishing was founded in 1999. 

    For more information :

    https://www.saltpublishing.com/collections/author-catherine-eisner

A BAD CASE and Other Adventures of Disturbed Minds

http://www.saltpublishing.com/products/a-bad-case-9781844719624

From Publisher’s Announcement

What links Clorinda to the mysterious disappearance of her new friend Theresa, in broad daylight, on the streets of New York? What is the true relationship between high-born, nine-year-old Elise von Alpenberg and her sinister guardian, Kepler von Thul? Why does young Marthe’s uneasy interview with the notorious spy, Anthony Blunt, stir up suspicions of complicity against her boss, the Establishment socialite Barbara Ely? And who is the true Fourth Man? And what connects Barbara to Constance Bryde, an unfaithful wife enmeshed in the cat-and-mouse surveillance operations of a divorce solicitor’s enquiry agent? Or how will jilted mistress, Rhona, deliver a long-overdue comeuppance to her Significant Other, the supercilious on-screen Talking Head? And who, you may well wonder, is the next doomed subject of portraitist Deverell-Hewells’s murderous thoughts? And, finally, can Nina discreetly maintain the façade that hides the eternal triangle of her complicated lovelife? These questions and more are answered in Eisner’s third series of mordant case histories intimately documenting bizarre dramas triggered by the subclinical dependencies of disturbed minds.

Published this year

Pages        :       244pp

Format     :       Paperback

Trim Size :       203 x 127mm

Publisher :       Salt Publishing (21 Jan. 2015)

Language :       English

ISBN-10   :       1844719626

ISBN-13   :       978-1844719624

From Publisher’s Clippings File for Catherine Eisner’s Fiction

A meticulous recorder of behaviour, pitch-perfect on accents and the faultlines between class, sex and age, Eisner imbues each account with an unsettling verisimilitude that reaches its peak in ‘An Unreined Mind’. 

Cathi Unsworth The Guardian

Eisner’s collection is subtitled, Hidden Lives of Love, Madness, Murder, Loss and Deception, and while the sense of madness and loss is amplified by the book’s extraordinary and disturbing cover, there is also a tremendous sense of fun here. The title story is the last testament of its asexual narrator. It’s a odd story, full of strange characters and erotic imagery: the narrator’s husband refers to her as his ‘long noodle’, and poor Uncle Irving’s body has to be identified by dental records – all that is left of him is his toupee. The stories in this collection are dark and the characters are ‘driven by bizarre and sometimes criminal compulsions.’

Carys Bray Postnatal Confession

I’ve long been an admirer of Catherine Eisner’s piquant and highly original fictions in the literary journal, ‘Ambit’, and of her singularly rich pictorial and sensuous prose. Here at last she is given a very much broader canvas for her character studies of women at the end of their tether, though it’s the minute detail of their dysfunctional, drug-dependant (and even criminal) lives I admire so much. 

Johanna Behrendt  Editor

Eisner herself intrigues me almost as much as her work. This is because she is profoundly knowledgeable in so many different fields: she understands the pop scene of the 1960s; she obviously knows a lot about the publishing industry; she exhibits more than a passing acquaintance with a wide range of ‘mind-altering substances’; she is erudite, although she wears her learning lightly, pronouncing telling mots justes upon the giants (and some of the minnows) of Western civilisation’s authors, artists and musicians across many centuries; she understands Latin and several European languages besides English; she has an acute ear for dialect (in A Bad Case, southern Irish, especially) as well as the varying cadences of speech that derive from differences in social standing; and, if she has not lived among the British aristocracy, she has clearly had opportunities to observe it at first hand. Wow!

Christina James  Crime Novelist

Eisner has mastered the twist in the tale and her stories cascade vividly into derangement.
Cameron Woodhead  The Age 

. . . a genuinely unsettling voice, at once comic, intelligent and slightly, scarily deranged . . . a true technical triumph. 
Kate Clanchy  MsLexia

Erotic . . . enthralling . . . very pictorial . . . very original.
Neville Marten  Ink

Extracts from Narrative (Pages 145 – 196 A Bad Case)

In the humdrum is the beginning of murder.

        Since breakfast, by slow degrees, a dark cloud had descended upon my consciousness, assuming a quality of sinister significance to which I was compelled to give thought.

        I shivered, and at last conceded that an acute and homicidal hatred, with all the cunning of actual lunacy, now exercised an absolute mastery over my will. 

        I removed my fountain-pen from the breast pocket of my medical white coat and marked an X on the breakfast tablecloth beneath an offensively large bread crumb.

       Just then I did not wish to be reminded of my marriage to Ingrid but once the idea had gripped my mind no steps I took could shake it off.

       For mad I most certainly was that morning of the abandoned breadcrumb.

       Once the grotesque problem of murder began to dominate my thoughts, it haunted me like a presence, and temptation grew apace.  

       The descent into Hell is easy.

Do I need to describe my wife when an artist greater than myself has captured her essence . . . It’s a living likeness! For long ago she had reached that moment in the passage of a woman’s life when, as it is said, the mirror no longer returns the expected consoling reflection and, therefore, must be turned to the wall.

                                                                   Royal Portraitist Prof. Anthony Deverell-Hewells

                                                                   Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

Stoneburgh Spy Campus (Pt. 3): Religio-politico-criminalistics in Profiling MI6’s Predestined Mole

‘Joseph Stalin studied for the priesthood,’ remarked Professor Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s lecturer on politico-criminalistics). ‘Felix Dzerzhinsky, “the iron fist” and founder of the Cheka, considered becoming a Jesuit priest; likewise, MI6 double agent George Blake wanted to be a priest; and, not so incidentally, the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt was the grandson of an Anglican bishop . . . examples that should remind us that, when evaluating such zealots in thraldom to Communism, the dividing line between a political ideologue and a religious idealist can be blurred, especially when their New Testament insists they should sell their possessions and divide them among their poorer brethren, according to need. (Acts 2:45.)
      ‘Marx, as you know, said much the same thing: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’
      But, in my own view, that is NOT the true thrust of the professor’s lecture on Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality, since I believe that in his veering off to discuss a number of psychopathic personalities from recent newspaper headlines — thematically-linked by murder — Weissener was mounting a persuasive case for a more intense examination of those Intelligence personnel warranting enhanced security vetting, with a dutiful concern to identify signs of an active muscular religiosity hidden beneath the secret agent’s mask of cool reason.

The Embodiment of Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology: 
Composite portraiture by Francis Galton, made from 
multiple-exposure photographs of violent criminals.
(Curiously, this resultant composite is not unlike a craggy portrait
of Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener, if truth be told.)  

     By good fortune, I took at the time copious precise notes of Prof. Weissener’s lecture so the following text is, I believe, a faithful transcription of his thoughts. And, since it was a public discourse, I therefore do not accept I am in breach of the presumption of confidentiality or of legal privilege in regard to any information disclosed.

Three Murderers Hanging from a Single Thread.

[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ] In the Intelligence services, Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology (CPIP) teaches us to to look for behavioural patterns in certain classifications of dysfunctionality so we can better determine our analysis of the characteristics of a suspect. For example, the instructive crime pattern that emerges from study of the following cases – whose distinct commonality in sharing a CPIP profile has passed unremarked by forensic criminologists practising outside our own specialist field – can alert us to rogue agents suborned and bribed by foreign powers; agents compromised by fatal inherited weaknesses of extreme ideological beliefs that can remain undiscovered, even at the highest levels of security clearance.
       It was Sir Francis Galton FRS who in the late 19th Century introduced us to the technique of  ‘Composite Portraiture of Criminal Types’ by combining, through repeated exposure, photographs of many unrelated violent felons to produce a single blended image of the criminal archetype . . . a rudimentary, but effective, early analytical process we now regard as the personification of our CPIP methodology. 
      Composite Portraiture of Criminality? Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology? The doubters among you are correct in your demands for hard evidence of the theory in practice, although I am obviously prevented by confidentiality constraints from citing cases identified within the Service.
      And so I must refer you, correspondingly, to instances found in a number of true crimes of recent decades . . . for the connexions I identify here are profoundly disturbing should we discover this sinister behavioural pattern replicated in the personnel files of serving operatives . . .

1982 An ‘Angel of Death.’ A 46-year-old drifter from Aberdeen, Scotland, stalked a Hollywood film star, then, in broad daylight outside her home, stabbed her in the torso ten times with a 14 cm knife, nearly killing her. The perpetrator believed that he was on a divine ‘mission’ to kill the actress and take her ‘with [him] to the hearafter [sic], the better life, God’s kingdom.’ He served almost 14 years in prison for the assault. He was then extradited to the UK in 1996 to be tried for a 1966 robbery/murder. The accused, who saw himself as ‘the benevolent angel of death’, was found not guilty by diminished responsibility in 1997 and committed to a British psychiatric hospital, where he died of heart failure in 2004 at age 68.

2000 Loner Kills ‘Friend for Afterlife’. An Edinburgh-born university lecturer who battered a Cambridge graduate to death with a rolling pin because he wanted a ‘friend in the afterlife’ was convicted of the manslaughter of his victim. The lecturer, who said he had never had a girlfriend and was still a virgin, told  the court: ‘I didn’t want to be alone in the afterlife. I didn’t want to be alone . . . I thought I could have a positive relationship with [the victim] in the afterlife.’ He claimed he attempted to commit suicide by taking a drug overdose and slashing his wrists. He did not die but went on the run and was arrested 12 days later.

2001 Killer Wedded ‘Forever in Heaven’. A teacher, originally from Oban, Strathclyde, shot dead a 19-year-old Italian schoolgirl who had spurned him, before turning the gun on himself near Turin. He shot her three times in the back and twice in the head. He then leant against the back of her car, and shot himself in the mouth. In his suicide note to the schoolgirl’s mother, he stated that he was going to kill her daughter, and himself, because she was ‘leaving him forever’. Once dead, the two would remain ‘joined together forever in heaven’.

George Blake: The Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ]  You ask: The common factors in these three cases?       
       (1) The killers are of Scottish origin; (2) Their victims were intended as Companions-in-Death in the Afterlife; (3) That these killers trusted they were to be spared divine punishment for this mortal sin suggests they also possessed a vestigial sense (or more) of the singularity of Calvinistic predestination, a belief not wholly dispelled within the Scottish Presbyterian tradition that holds to the theology of John Calvin.
       The purely Scottish notion of a ‘fey’ cast of mind applies, I believe, to the three murderers cited, insofar as the veil that separates this world from the next was to be effectively breached, by their reckoning, when they attempted to drag their elected companions-in-death with them through the celestial portal. 
       This certainty in the triumph of mortality over death is shared by a number of Scottish Calvinist-inclined sects who cleave to a belief in the Calvinistic Elect, the Chosen Ones singled out for Salvation. Similarly, it was this specific belief that sustained the murderous modus operandi of George Blake, master spy for the Soviets and a Colonel of Foreign Intelligence in their secret service. 
      Murderous?
      By Blake’s treachery it’s believed more than forty British agents in the field met their deaths, their names exposed in reports to his Russian masters. His sentence totalling 42 years imprisonment for espionage is said to reflect his remorseless betrayal of agents executed by the Stasi or the KGB.
      The title of this lecture is Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality, and my intention is to show that the crime pattern of the three Scottish murderers can be seen to resemble that of George Blake who, like them, sought absolution through casuistry rooted in an apologist’s atavistic Calvinism. 
      Far fetched? 
      In his youth in Amsterdam, Blake wanted to be a priest in the strict Calvinist Church of the working class of the Netherlands. He came to believe that freewill is an illusion; that everything is preordained and sins themselves are part of God’s will. In a real sense he believed in the Judas Paradox.

In the religious system to which I adhered [wrote Blake, confined at Wormwood Scrubs prison] the doctrine of predestination occupied a central position and I had given this doctrine much thought. I had no difficulty in accepting it as it fitted in completely with my concept of God the Creator of Heaven and Earth, All-powerful, All-knowing, the King of the Universe, without whom not one sparrow falls to the ground and by whom the very hairs of our head are numbered (Matthew 10- 29, 30). There was no room in this system for such a thing as casualty or accident and, even less, freewill on the part of a human being . . . I believe our reaction to events is also predestined . . . Fatalism is not sitting back and accepting what has occurred. It is also the impulses which force you to act in a particular way. That is why I believe it is justified for someone to say, ‘You cannot punish me for my sins because my sins were put inside me and are not my fault.’

In 1966, Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison and fled to the USSR.

I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Revisited.

[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ]  In Intelligence analysis of potential operatives, the success of clandestine HumInt operations depends on psychometric character studies of the highest accuracy. The integrity of agents is determined by the Service’s established I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Intelligence Clearance criteria for operatives, a finely calibrated values scaling defined by the mnemonic, Ideology, Numeracy, Training, Culture, Languages, Experience, Adaptability, and Resourcefulness.
      Quite evidently, in the case of George Blake, the matrix descriptors Ideology and Culture escaped the net.
      It is my belief that deeply embedded ideology from a subject’s formative years can be awakened (or, in today’s terms, ‘radicalised’) by the very real hostile intent of enemy powers, so the greatest vigilance must be maintained to identify telltale signs or detect unguarded disclosures.
      Interestingly, according to one member of our consulting board of criminologists (a Highland Scot), Calvinistic Predestination is to be regarded as the Scottish ‘Super Ego’ (despite the fact that the total male membership of the Free Presbyterian Church numbers probably less than a hundred followers of scholastic Calvinism). However, his opinion is countered by another Scottish consulting member of our Intelligence board, a Medico-Legal Expert Witness and Consultant Psychiatrist accredited by the Mental Health Tribunal for Scotland. He states: ‘Very few Scottish people are Calvinists now – I  would doubt if it is 1 percent. Even in Scottish Presbyterian churches very few would claim to be Calvinists. The Justified Sinner of James Hogg does not exist now in Scotland as Calvinism is now dead here. I doubt if it did exist.’ 
      And yet, and yet . . . is not the ‘Scottish Super Ego’ a telling phrase for residual Calvinistic belief? Conversely, according to our Scottish consultants, the ‘Scottish Id’ is represented by a drunken philanderer, the Robert Burns of Burns Night (an occasion some believe to be a Dionysian travesty of a Presbyterian Communion Service).  
      Whatever you may conclude, in such notorious cases of pitiless betrayal – regardless of whether the sociopathic narcissist is a serial murderer or an enemy double agent – without doubt it is the Super Ego that takes charge of the deviant volition of the criminal, lured by the idealisation of his double moral standard.

Do what thou wilt.

[Prof. Weissener concludes . . . ]  I have chosen the case of the traitor George Blake to illustrate my thesis, but if you examine carefully our CPIP category of ‘Justified Sinner’ you will see the classification also embraces a criminal such as serial murderer John George Haigh, a convicted fraudster and suspected serial killer John Bodkin Adams, and an occultist and soi-disant secret agent for the British intelligence services Aleister Crowley. . . the commonality of the latter three evidenced by their childhoods when raised within ultra-religious fundamentalist families adherent to the Plymouth Brethren whose founder’s central tenet was belief in ‘predestination’ as the ‘eternal purpose of God’, a conviction that insisted only ‘God’s Elect’ should receive salvation because the Elect are ‘freely justified’.
      As the Great Tempter asserts in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg: ‘. . . is [there] not enough of merit in [the Saviour’s]  great atonement to annihilate all your sins, let them be as heinous and atrocious as they may? And, moreover, do you not acknowledge that God hath pre-ordained and decreed whatsoever comes to pass? Then, how is it that you should deem it in your power to eschew one action of your life, whether good or evil? . . . none of us knows what is pre-ordained, but whatever it is pre-ordained we must do, and none of these things will be laid to our charge.’
      In other words, as Aleister Crowley has it: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ Because, apparently, the Instrument of Divine Retribution makes exceptions for the fireproof brethren of God’s Elect, even if you’re a treacherous British spy branded a double agent with blood on your hands working for the Soviet Union.

          John George Haigh                                   George Blake               
Betrayers of Trust: Predestined ‘Justified’ Sociopaths?    

So yes. Despite the Scottish nay-sayers on Stoneburgh’s consulting board of criminologists, a Calvinist Justified Sinner, still ideologically unassailable, actually continues to exist.
      Today, an impenitent George Blake, aged 92, lives in Russia with no regrets for his support of Communism, believing Communism was for him the practical opportunity to put Christian values into practice: ‘Looking back on my life, everything seems logical and natural . . . I felt I was on the wrong side . . .  that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed . . .’
      Heedless of his treason, the nonagenarian Cold War warrior continues to speak of a redemptive utopia in the austerest terms of Calvinistic righteousness: ‘The Communist ideal is too high to achieve . . . and there can only be nominal adherents to it in the end. But I am optimistic, that in time, and it may take thousands of years, that humanity will come to the viewpoint that it would be better to live in a Communist society where people were really equal.’ 
      [End of extract from Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality by Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener.]


Hidden in Plain View . . . a Comrade-in-Death.

Thoughtful Professor Weissener’s thesis has merit: the Calvinist George Blake essentially affirms his fundamentalist belief in the conflation of Communism and Christianity; that is, by relinquishing your possessions to join the meek, who are deemed blessèd, you shall inherit the earth, for the meek are all equal before the Redeemer, and the Lord is maker of them all.

      But does this mean that, to accomplish this, one should set about a course of treason in the knowledge that betrayal of one’s comrades, and their resultant deaths, are to be considered the Elective Will of God and His Divine Plan of Predestination? 
      Are all those sacrificial victims of Blake’s treason considered by him to be his Companions-in-Death in the Afterlife?

From East Germany’s Stasi Files:
Evidence of George Blake’s Betrayal of the West.

     Did the treachery of Anthony Blunt, who unquestioningly put at hazard the lives of one hundred and seventy-five thousand Allied servicemen by betraying the secret of the D-Day landings to his Soviet masters, follow a similar course? For Blunt and his fellow leftwing bien pensants of the 1930s, in the desperate ideological battlefield of Communism versus Fascism, Marxism had become the new religion of the realpolitik, which fulfilled their callow Oedipal desire to kill God-the-Father, the Nobodaddy of Soviet ridicule. 
      In my latest book (A Bad Case, Salt 2014), I describe an East German ‘sleeper cell’ in New York at the height of the Cold War that takes advantage of the ideological camouflage afforded by a ‘God-fearing’ leafy quarter of one of the Five Boroughs that ‘seemed to boast a church on every street corner’.

Yet in no press account of the spy nest have I seen recorded the reasons underlying the choice of that neighborhood for the spy ring’s ‘sleeper agents’. Even now, I continue to speculate on the cunning of the ringleaders and their East German masters. It is my belief they chose for their spy cell a neighborhood that was already shielded from closer inquiry by a cultural stockade, defiant of the reach of federal intelligence bureaux whose pursuit of home-grown terrorism had led them to look the other way.

True then. True today. When national intelligence agencies ‘look the other way’, treasonous intrigue prospers in plain sight.
     Therefore, brethren, so we may make assurance doubly sure: ‘Hail Judas, Patron Saint of Traitors, pray for us sinners, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.’

•

(Postscript)  News Headline 27 October 2015 

Chess Grand Master rejected by GCHQ Intelligence because of his ‘devout’ Christianity and ‘loyalty to God over his country’.  A ‘devout’ science teacher who was rejected for a hush hush job at the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) plans to appeal against that decision at the European Court of Human Rights. The petitioner in the case, a computer forensics specialist and a World Chess Federation Grand Master, insists his admissions to scrutineers of adherence to religious scripture were behind his rejection for a highly prized job following a gruelling selection process at the GCHQ listening station in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He was eventually turned down for the job for ‘national security’ reasons, and later lost an Employment Tribunal. A judgement had ruled that GCHQ were entitled to conclude that ‘the effect those beliefs might have on his behaviour and judgment in the workplace’ raised genuine concerns as to national security issues.

True. It's a tough process. Regulatory ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’ can be daunting.
See: A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html 

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
(In the latter two volumes, Stoneburgh operatives feature in Lovesong in Invisible Ink, Listen Close to Me and Inducement)
see also extracts from the Stoneburgh Files here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/oreville-spy-campus-introduction-to.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
and for more insights on 
Anthony Blunt
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html