The black hat.
The law of diminishing returns: it's the bane of bath salts enthusiasts and fabulist storytellers the world over. Sure, that first hit was good; but it takes an increasingly potent dosage to deliver a thrill that approaches your very first time.
Fortunately, global media icon John McAfee appears to understand this phenomenon. (We're not saying that Mr. McAfee is necessarily pioneering a new form of reality entertainment, but we're not saying he isn't, either.) In his latest missive, posted under the title "A Clear and Present Danger," he claims to have hired 29 "pillow talk masters" to spy on Belize officials, and in so doing uncovered links between the Central American nation and the terrorist organization Hezbollah.
Ever since Mr. McAfee's first titillating blog posts after the murder of his neighbor Greg Faull, the story spun by the antivirus pioneer has never failed to get weirder. In the first chapters of the saga, he told tales of clever disguises and held forth on his experiences in sex tourism. In what seemed like his pièce de résistance, two Vice journalists embedded with Mr. McAfee, published a photo of the fugitive that outed his hiding place.
Which seemed to beg the question, would Mr. McAfee do next to maintain our interest. Well, here's a summary of Mr. McAfee's latest bid for our attention:
- After Belize police raided Mr. McAfee's home in April, he purchased 75 cheap laptops, loaded them with keystroke monitoring software, and gifted them to various Belize officials.
- He hired 23 women and 6 men as operatives, and sicced them on Belize's two national phone companies. "These men and women were given simple training on how to access and load software on someone's computer while they slept, or ate, or made long phone calls etc. It's dead simple if you're sleeping with someone ..."
- "Eight of the women became so accomplished that they ended up living with me."
- Throughout the operation, he emailed the Belize prime minister Dean Barrow, asking for an apology for the police raid. "A simple apology, in the early stages at least, would have stopped this whole affair."
- With no apology forthcoming, Mr. McAfee says he dug into Belize's National Security and Immigration ministries, which he alleges were knee-deep in a human-trafficking schema.
- A surprising number of the new arrivals to Belize, Mr. McAfee says, were Lebanese men.
- It should be noted here that for our man behind the curtain, it's a thin line between spymaster and pimp. A phone call with an operative posted to Mr. McAfee's site begins with, "How is my favorite tart today?" and ends at, "Why don't you come home, because I miss your ass anyway." (The recording is appended to the bottom of this post.)
- Frankly, after listening to that, we got a little distracted from the allegation that started all this. “Belize is clearly the central player in a larger network whose goal is to infiltrate the U.S. with individuals having links to terrorist organizations,” claims Mr. McAfee.
- The scheme involves the Zeta drug cartel, which, ominously, may be helping Hezbollah transport "something similar, in weight and size," to the drug packages the cartel slips into the U.S.
- Luckily for us, Mr. McAfee managed to infiltrate a Hezbollah camp.
Lucky, because he's promised to write about it at a later date.
