A Time to Ground, Part II: We Belong to Intelligence

We're finding out what happens when you stress test a form of government built on smart power, hard drugs, and false escapes.

I've had my share of brushes with spycraft, which does visibly wind its way through L.A. on occasion. Cars explode, coroner's reports are sealed -- a British girl, sad on her birthday, unspools between cigarette drags a story about a father who turned down a contract to assassinate Nelson Mandela. He miraculously survived the skydiving "accident" that transpired shortly thereafter, but could only croak out nonwords from his hospital bed about who called the hit and why...

But like many to pass through these realms I had no encounter with anyone clearly synced into the world of Jeffrey Epstein. Sure, I knew an ex-Navy Seal chopper pilot who'd been cornered at a party by Kevin Spacey -- who didn't? -- but Epstein's tentacles, if present at all, did not break the surface of the Hollywood seas, and recently I connected this to a passing mention in a conversation about just how absent the whole Epstein op seemed from the Valley: Silicon, not San Fernando. Was that, I wondered -- borrowing the now semi-infamous utterance that led then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta (now Trump's former Labor Secretary) to cut a non-prosecutorial deal with one of Epstein's several attorneys -- because both "entertainment" and "tech" already, in some sense, belonged to intelligence?