Spies are everywhere

There is a TV show from my childhood that made a distinct impression on me. I’m not sure if it was an episode of Twilight Zone, or of something else, but the show portrayed a typical, little American white-bread town going about its wholesome, innocent, American century business.

Clean cut boys in striped tee-shirts rode their shiny Schwinn bikes around. Pigtailed girls skipped rope. Mr. Smiley, the milkman, with his pristine white cap and uniform, dropped bottles of milk on doorsteps. Mr. Friendly, the mailman, greeted Mrs. Mom – perky and aproned – at her door, and handed her a few small bills (electricity: $5/month), and her Saturday Evening Post (cover by Norman Rockwell) and Readers Digest (article on J. Edgar Hoover).  Mr. Dad, having headed off to work in his suit and fedora, is already off the day’s scene. The sun, obviously, is shining.

Yes, it’s Smallville, Little Town, Nice City.

It may not have resembled any place I lived, but it was instantly recognizable as America at mid-century.

Then – cue ominous music – the cameras pulled back to reveal that the town was surrounded by a chain link fence. The signs on the fence were written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Was it Rod Serling on voice over who intoned that what appeared to be any town in the U.S. of A. was, in fact, a spy training center in the Soviet Union.

Commie bastards! Only I wouldn’t have thought “bastards” at that time, I’d have thought “skunks.”  Training themselves – including their evil Communist children – so that they could pass themselves off as real Americans.

Spies could be any where and everywhere.

Was the family across the street that went to the Lithuanian church instead of the regular old parish church actually a group of unrelated infiltrating spies? How about the goofy guy – the one everyone called the Blue Jay – who sat on the second floor porch of the decker just across Main Street from my grandmother’s house and stared out at the passers-by all day. What are you lookin’ at, bub?

One would have thought that the end of the Cold War would have brought a parallel end to the Russians planting spies on our shores, but apparently not.

Needless to say, I am completely fascinated by the latter-day spy ring that’s just been busted. They haven’t been accused of passing on any damaging Top Secret info, but they are being charged with failure to register as foreign agents – how do you do that? show up at the post office and ask to fill out the I spy form? – and money laundering.

Two of the accused spies lived in Cambridge, and were apparently so secure that they bought an $800K home on Trowbridge Street a few weeks ago. The wife of the couple sold real-estate. The husband - he went by Donald Heathfield, the stolen name of some dead Canadian baby of the early 1960’s –had set up some sort of half-baked consulting and software company. But one with an insidious purpose. He wanted to sell some kind of process management solution to governments to help them keep track of their strategic planning. (The company’s name was a mouthful: Future Map Strategic Advisory Services.)

Don’t know how long that website will remain up, but, if nothing else, “Donald Heathfield” sure got American no-sense, business-babble down pretty darned well:

His company is all about “Driving Strategic Anticipation”, and “Driving Strategic Proactivity”. It purports to do this by helping their clients “develop effective strategies for the future,” and “make future strategies actionable.”

Nothing wrong with making future strategies actionable, but if someone could come up with a way to make strategies actionable in the past, well, that’d be the business to beat.

FutureMap, is the one to go to when you’re interested in:

Driving preparedness process,  executing preemptive strategies, engaging stakeholders.

And who isn’t?

And what’s a company without a mission statement?

Future Map enables governments and businesses to develop comprehensive preparedness systems and build a culture of strategic proactivity and anticipatory leadership

With Future Map:

You create a transparent process of proactive re-positioning of the organization's strategy in response to anticipated changes in the environment.

The result is the capacity of your organization to re-invent itself and continuously innovate.

Talk about Buzzword BINGO!  And this is just on the Home Page

Yes, Heathfield certainly got the circum-speak of so much of modern marketing down cold (war):

Client Benefits

Future Map ensures that your organization is always prepared to deal with challenges and take advantage of opportunities, and that your people see further, act faster and execute better than your competitors.

Services

Future Map offers full consulting support and innovative software for systematically managing risks and opportunities; driving intelligence and early warning processes; mapping strategic direction; visualizing anticipated environment; building, sharing and executing proactive organizational strategies amidst uncertainty, complexity and change.

As my friend, Pink Slip reader, and and marketing expert par excellence Valerie always asks when she comes across one of these types of websites – and there are plenty of them out there – But what do it do?  To which I always add, And how do it do it?

Need to know basis, apparently.

What’s a website without a case study, and Future Map’s featured (and likely only – if it even exists) is China Green Future.

China Green Future is a collaborative project by Future Map, Beijing Academy of Soft Technologies and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, containing China anticipated moves towards a Low Carbon Economy along with several possible scenarios.

Any accident that the one and only “customer” is from a fellow-traveler?

Frankly, even before Heathfield got busted, from a business perspective I would have taken one look at this website and said good luck to him.

But he was a Kennedy School (Public Policy) grad, and networking matters. So he may well have had the contacts that would actually purchase his product and services. Organizations waste an awful lot of money on the nebulous and do-nothing.

All of the spies nabbed in this week’s round-up– and there were several other couples with kids among them – passed themselves off for years as Joe and Joan Citizen. Working, buying houses, raising their families. All, apparently, subsidized by SMERSH.

It’s unclear whether they managed to pass anything on to their masters back in the USSR that was of any value, or whether it was all information that could have been readily gotten from newspapers, wikipedia, and blogs. 

Nonetheless, it’s extremely weird and creepy that spies are everywhere.

And what a weird and creepy way to live – kind of like being in the Witness Protection Program.

Psychologically, how can someone actually withstand it?

And you have to ask whether they also realized that, however strident, fragmented, dysfunctional and some times just plain frightening it is living in the US these days – nothing like those nice, calm, prosperous days of the fifties and sixties – life here is still pretty darned good for many (if not most) people. I would guess that most folks, if asked to compare and contrast life here vs. life in Putin’s resource rich but incredibly shrinking oligarchy would rather bring put out their shingle (not to mention raise their kids) here.

But never underestimate the power of a true believer.

Maybe Heathfield et al. really hated the Americansky way of life, and wanted to help The Motherland in any way they could.

Or maybe they loved it here, and were just milking the subsidies they received from The Motherland for all they were worth.

In one of the many articles I read about this story, I saw one that mentioned Czechoslovakia used to have some agents on ground here, too. But when that country un-Communisted itself and split, the agents here asked for asylum. They now thought of themselves as Americans, and wanted to stay home, not go home.

Wonder if this will turn out to be the same deal with this latest rash of spies.

And I wonder if “Donald Heathfield” really thinks that Future Map can take off as a company.  Pretty weak value prop, in my estimation, but I’ve been wrong before.

Anyway, we’ll never know because Future Map, at present and, no doubt, in the anticipatory, strategic future, is no longer open for business.

But, Mr. Heathfield, if this all turns out to be a big mistake, and you are cleared of all wrongdoing, I advise you to get help with positioning your company. You’ll have enough hurdles to overcome, without having prospects scratching their heads and asking, ‘but what do it do?’