Michael Bunker - WICK

Like its sister village, its twin, it was an American city built in a year of freedom, but following the blurring of its purpose—as the conflict which threatened that freedom seemed to disappear—this Warwick had become an inscrutable enigma. It was a camouflage for a freedom, a force seeking purpose in shadows.

Contrary to the age-old wisdom, those who were responsible for the place had decided that this was good and proper enough. Therefore, despite its long-lost mission, Warwick had become, it seemed, a light kept discreetly under a bushel.

To be clear, and to remove any poetic obfuscation, Warwick had been, for many decades, a Cold War era spy school, or, as it was referred to by those who lived there, a charm school . This was its raison d’être, its reason for being. And while its purpose as a school was in some ways sinister, the town itself had maintained much of its charm.

Thousands of individual Americans had been born, raised, and trained in Warwick, all with the explicit purpose of eventually being sent to the Soviet Union to fit seamlessly into that society and, once there, to work to bring about its downfall.

On the surface, the project made sense. It was easier and safer to raise Russians from birth to spy in Russia than to recruit and turn (and then trust) a natural-born Russian.

A Warwickian spy turned loose in Russia was really a clean slate—a tabula rasa . His cover story might be that he was an orphan, or that he had transferred there from somewhere else in the country. He knew nothing of the overall program of which he was but a small part, so he was not such a tremendous risk. He knew no one else, other than his immediate superior, and he knew next to nothing about that superior except very general details of when and where he was to deliver his regular reports. If arrested, he could talk in vague terms of some spy school in America, but as to any specifics, he was ignorant, he was isolated, and his knowledge could not and would not destroy the whole system.

So, while it is admitted that the Warwick system was certainly not cheaper in a strictly economic sense than traditional forms of espionage, it was much less expensive in terms of risk. Turning natural-born Russians against their country, by definition, put the existing spy rings in that country at risk. Years and years of work could be overthrown with one bad bet. On whom would you gamble such expense and value? On someone who had already proved to be a traitor to his own country?

There was a joke that was quite common in Warwick: Are we men or mice? The question was usually asked as if to say, “Who are we to ask questions?” or “What are we in the grand scheme of things?” The punchline was: Who can tell the difference? The humor in the joke lay in an understanding of international spycraft. M.I.C.E. is an acronym that defines the main ways used in the traditional recruitment of foreign intelligence assets. The components include:

Money

Ideology

Coercion or Compromise

Ego or Excitement

For millennia, whether through ancient palace intrigue, medieval religious chicanery, backwards third-world coups, or intricate and advanced intelligence operations, spy handlers and controllers have used many means to turn assets against their own people. All one has to do is to find a target who has access to the information, or people, or materials that one wants. Then you find out what drives them. Can they be bought with money? (Most can.) Can they be swayed by love of country? (Most can’t.) Are they pliable due to some particular ideology they hold that might be considered deviant to their overlords? Perhaps they can be put into some compromising position (honeypots are older than Winnie the Pooh). Or maybe they are just looking for the excitement involved with being a traitor and a spy? Whatever the case, espionage takes and receives all kinds. But… all of this entails great risks to the organization that recruits the spies. One missed call or false turn and the whole system can be in danger of being exposed. Double-agents are as famous as the singular kind.

So why not raise your own spies? That was the thinking that birthed Warwick.

In traditional espionage, any single one of the elements in this M.I.C.E. list could be the motive played upon in the recruitment of a particular human intelligence asset. But in Warwick, the people themselves had been bred to become assets. They were raised and trained to spy as a part of their culture and identity, rather than as a reaction to some perceived personal benefit. When money is the motive for a man to spy against his country, then more money can be used to turn him back against his new masters. The same can be said of most of the M.I.C.E motivations, and a traditional asset, once turned, could be caught out, especially by the sophisticated machinery of modern intelligence. In fact, another joke that was told in Warwick had to do with the notion that the trick was not to build a better mousetrap but, rather, to breed smarter mice. Warwick had been set up as a kind of maze for training better mice. In the process, the line between men and assets had become increasingly blurred.

That was the grand scheme and vision of the military and intelligence officials who’d first conceived of the town, and in accord with this design they built Warwick to look and feel and behave exactly as a typical Russian village might. Its citizens were fully American, but they were indistinguishable from any Russian man or woman on the street. They lived in Russian houses, and they slept in Russian beds. When they went to withdraw money from the bank, they walked into Sberbank and drew out crisp rubles, and when they looked at their wrists to tell the time, they saw a Poljot. These were American citizens, but they were Russians, by culture, habit of mind, and force of personality.

The obvious complications of developing such a people on American soil and giving them the tools of espionage as second nature became problematic once the cold war was believed to have ended.

Some intelligence wonks whose opinions mattered believed that Warwick had become a buggy-whip industry. Not that espionage itself was unnecessary, mind you. Whips still had their place. It was simply that those in the places of power began to question whether it was wise to devote whole factories to their production.

Throughout their history, all of these unique humans, raised and trained in Warwick, had been used as tools of war, in one way or another, amidst the great battles of ideology fought between men of opposing nations. They had been humans treated as a set of assets. They were pawns, played in a global chess game of power. But, when the game had suddenly turned, or seemed to have, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were not simply decommissioned or re-commissioned. They were sacrificed, as pawns will be, to the interests of those who had formed them in secret. Billionaire capitalists privatized the place and kept it under wraps in waiting for… what? Maybe they hoped and prayed for a return to cold war profiteering. (One could go hungry trying to live off of micro-wars.) Whatever the case, a decision was made to fund in private what was no longer feasible to fund from the public trough.

Warwick, though she was as authentically Russian as possible, and though she had been erected on a foundation of duplicity, was no Potemkin Village. In the fifty years since it had come into existence, life had taken its natural course there, as it had in other places, and as it inevitably will wherever people are gathered in groups.

People in Warwick, for the most part, grew up in loving families, raised children who loved, dated, ice-skated on Nizhny Pond, watched Russian movies at Pushkinsky-Cine, worshipped and wed one another in St. Olaf’s Church, and were buried in the cemetery behind it.