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To: Red Badger

Eleanor Rigby is The Beatles’ song that seems to be more apropos here.


4 posted on 06/28/2019 2:48:05 PM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: dfwgator; ProudGRITS
"Eleanor Rigby" seems to be a song about the terrifying world of espionage.

Father McKenzie is apparently a Soviet spy who has set up a fake church as a "dead drop" for gathering classified information so it can be transferred to Moscow. Eleanor apparently works for the FBI or maybe HUAC and she's on his trail. When we first meet her, she is poking around the church picking up rice, probably to check if any of the rice grains are being used to hide microfilm. The "face that she keeps in a jar by the door" refers to the disguises that she uses as part of her counter-intelligence trade craft.

We later see McKenzie writing a sermon "that no one will hear" because the church is fake, and weaving microfilm into his socks "in the night when there is nobody there."

Unfortunately for Eleanor, the NKVD learns about her activities and she is abducted and liquidated--sharing the fate of victims of Stalinism like Juliet Poyntz, who was apparently abducted and murdered in 1937 just as she was about to blow the whistle on Soviet spying in the US.

The song concludes gloomily with the line "no one was saved," perhaps hinting that McKenzie himself is headed for the Lyubyanka, where so many Soviet espionage agents ended up during the Stalin era.

85 posted on 06/28/2019 8:36:29 PM PDT by Fiji Hill
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