#TinfoilTuesday – Turkey Suspects Bird of Being Israeli Spy

So naturally this headline was way too good to pass up for today’s Tinfoil Tuesday feature. What makes it especially fun is the wordplay on “Turkey” and “Bird,” making this sound like an inter-species squabble instead of an international one.

The Times of Israel reports that a Turkish farmer recently found the carcass of a dead Merops Apiaster, or European bee-eater, on his land and when he discovered a band on the bird’s leg inscribed with the word “Israel,” he alerted authorities. The Turkish Agriculture Ministry then turned the bird over to Ankara’s intelligence services for further investigation. While the band did spark Turkey’s initial interest in the bird, tracking birds with bands is a common practice by the ornithological community. What really raised suspicions was the bird’s single enlarged nostril, which led to Turkish speculation that Mossad surveillance equipment had been planted in the beak…

Apparently, the Turkish media has been abuzz with news about the Israeli “spy bird,” while Israeli officials and media are laughing about the speculation and concern, calling this another instance of the sour and suspicion-laden relations between Israel and its neighboring states like Turkey. Then again, if it were a spy bird, that’s exactly how we might expect Israeli officials to react. That doesn’t prove it is a spy bird, but their incredulity doesn’t prove that it isn’t either. Throughout the history of modern geopolitical spying and intelligence gathering, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that a government’s intelligence community has tried.

What makes the case especially interesting is that Davi Barker just reported last week in the Tinfoil Tuesday feature here at The Silver Underground that DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has outsourced research to a facility in Israel where scientists are working on creating remote control insects that act as drones for the purpose of intelligence gathering, with the possibility of more sinister applications, such as delivering a lethal dose of arsenic to a target. Literally observing insects fly in wind tunnels while measuring nerve activity to specific muscles in order to develop the technology to control their flight is certainly a step beyond putting surveillance equipment in a bird’s beak and tracking it. If there’s serious lab research being conducted on the former, it would be unsurprising to learn that the latter is already happening.

Someone close to me who worked in intelligence for the US Department of Defense for years once told me that at one US intelligence facility during 1980s-era Cold War tensions, the military would receive packages of socks mailed from the Soviet Union. Apparently US intelligence would insert an agent who would wash his or her socks down river from Soviet nuclear facilities and mail them back to the United States where they could be examined for different radioactive particles and the DOD could infer just what kind of nuclear technology the Soviets had or were developing. When you get into the world of intelligence, stories that sound too far-fetched, too “tinfoil hat” to be true, just might be more plausible than you think.

Another interesting note on Davi’s Tinfoil Tuesday piece last week was the recent discovery of bees that literally drink human tears. It’s an adaptation they’ve made in order to get their daily value of salt. Apparently they’ll buzz around people’s faces, land on their eyes, and pretty aggressively persist despite swatting and blinking, even licking at a person’s closed eye slits until they get enough human tear liquid to satisfy their salt requirements. Creeeepy, huh?

Davi was interested in the practical applications of a remote-controlled tear-drinking bee drone that performs retina scans, but I was more fascinated by the poetic elegance of the idea– the government using bee drones to drink human tears for their salt content isn’t far off from what Western governments are doing already, using drones to protect their ability to extract minerals from other countries by feeding off of human tears– that is human suffering. A drone strike in an African or Middle Eastern country helps maintain hegemony over their resources and the monopolization of their resources via the petro-dollar to create artificial demand and value for a currency that otherwise holds no intrinsic value. The cost is civilian casualties and understandable resentment toward Western nations, particularly the United States.

I wonder if these remarkable and frightening applications of technology to intelligence gathering and even covert kill operations will come to horrific fruition, or if future generations will look at the notion of remote-controlled insect assassins and spy birds with the same level of ridicule as we would now view Joseph Stalin’s failed attempt to engineer a hybrid human-ape species of super-warriors of low intelligence, great physical strength, and no qualms about their living conditions.

If the state does manage to successfully co-opt and militarize nature, it will be a truly dark and malevolent “achievement” of human civilization and like the tear-drinking bees, it will metaphorically and powerfully epitomize the death and destruction wrought by humanity’s centuries-long experiment in absolute nation statism with its corresponding, ever-expanding militarism. Only something as vile, evil, and absurd as the absolutist, modern nation state could and would take the birds and the bees– a long-standing metaphor for life, fertility, and reproduction– and literally make them instruments of death, sterility, and extermination.

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