Beware of pretty faces that you find / A pretty face can hide an evil mind…”
—Johnny Rivers, “Secret Agent Man”
“Nuclear war via missiles scared everybody 70 years ago,” Doug Casey writes. “But today it’s not a practical threat. The likely threats, I think, are from more subtle areas—cyber war, bio war, or a new type of guerrilla war.”
There’s another threat that Casey didn’t mention, one that’s been around since humans began noticing the opposite sex, the import of which was immortalized in Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus. Marlowe paid tribute to what he considered the ultimate power in the universe, the face that launched a thousand ships: Helen of Troy. Her kiss was so powerful it sucked the soul from the body of his character, Doctor Faustus. “Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter,” Faustus exclaimed, referring to the god of Roman mythology, and more lovely than Arethusa, the “fair maiden” pursued by the river god Alpheus.
Helen and the Trojan War provides the perfect tribute to women’s power and how it will often overtake men in their attempt to think.
Faustus . . . [imagines] himself in the role of Paris, the man who sparked the Trojan War by taking Helen. He suggests that for the sake of Helen, he would allow his own city, Wittenberg, to be destroyed, just as Troy was. He fantasizes about fighting Menelaus, Helen’s rightful husband, and even defeating Achilles, the greatest warrior in Greek mythology.
Not every man shares Faustus’s obsession, but Marlowe and the myth underscore an often overlooked point: Women have power over men, many of whom hold key positions and err fatally when they’re the targets of feminine charm. And what woman wouldn’t feel exultant to have a fleet of warships — or drones — launched solely on her behalf? It is another of those “subtle threats” that seemingly come from nowhere and are often hidden until they explode.
Religions everywhere have struggled with women’s sexuality and their influence on men, but nothing so far has proven failsafe. In Christian theology Eve sinned first but Adam was ultimately held responsible. According to Mathew 5:28, “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” The moral issue is thereby settled: All men are adulterers and therefore sinners, though their religion offers them a means of redemption.
What about women? Are they branded with sin? Since there was no Elvis or Brad Pitt in 99 A.D. and thus no heartthrob to arouse women’s passions, the Rulers That Be let women off the hook.
A great power can become a great weapon
We’ve seen cases of unknown women destroying the careers of politically ambitious men, such as Gary Hart and his high-profile affair with Donna Rice in 1987. In Hart’s case it coincidentally put another story out that snatched attention from government’s march to economic ruin. The damage to the accused varies, but if the missing Jeffrey Epstein list is any indication the fear of exposure is terrifying. As it should be. The missing list allegedly named big shots having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s hideaway. As we’re seeing with Epstein the mere possibility of illicit sexual activity once again keeps the issue alive while distracting the public from problems that actually affect them. And what remains of government trust after the list appears, then disappears?
There’s another side to women’s power, one that we’ve seen portrayed in movies and literature wherein women sleep with an enemy to achieve a higher-valued goal.
Betty Pack was a real woman working as a spy at MI6 during World War II.
Her clandestine escapades [led] her boss, Sir William Stephenson, [code name Intrepid] to call her unequivocally ‘the greatest unsung heroine of the war.’ Her discovery of the French and Italian naval codes, as well as her work aiding in the decades-long effort to crack the Enigma code, helped the Allies stay a few steps ahead of the Axis powers, and eventually, win the war.
Born in 1910 in Minnesota, Amy Elizabeth “Betty“ Thorpe, whose father was a Marine Corps officer, was sent to the best boarding schools and became well-versed in elite society protocol but “disliked the phoniness of it all.” At age eleven her charm captured the attention of an Italian diplomat, and at 19, pregnant and unsure who the father was, she eventually secured a wedding with Arthur Pack, “a dapper British diplomatic attaché twice her age.”
During years of an uninspiring marriage to Arthur and the various places his assignments took them, she eventually came in contact with John Shelley, head of British intelligence at the British Embassy in Poland. Soon Shelley brought her into Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Her life now had a purpose: Setting honeytraps and gathering intelligence.
During one of her trysts she learned that the Poles had cracked Germany’s fabled Enigma Machine and helped convince Poland to share the findings.
“Alan Turing could not have built his famous computer to crack a later, more complicated version of the Enigma cipher without the assistance of Polish mathematicians.”
Her methods were often daring and ingenious as well as seductive, but she succeeded in acquiring information that gave the British and American military a tactical advantage that changed the course of the war. When she died from cancer in 1963,
Pack said she had no regrets about combining the two oldest professions in the world – spying and prostitution – and said: ‘Wars are not won by respectable methods’.
The “blonde Bond” as some have called her begs attention to the realities of world affairs and their conflict with the moral imperatives of most religions.
