Well let’s take a look at the new CIA recruiting commercial aimed at Russians in the military and intelligence services, I think it’s actually quite clever and well-designed – though I have no way of knowing if it’ll be successful. Everything in this video was done intentionally.
Immediately you’ll notice the blue tint – that’s to signify this is taking place in Russia. If this was in Mexico, there would be an orange tint.
Even a few seconds into the video, the math feels strained to me – the protagonist is 35 years old with a paratrooper father who died at 35. But the son was old enough to remember his father telling him stories of cosmonauts – and was 15 when his mother took him to his first Victory Day Parade. I am 35 and was born in 1988 and was 15 in 2003. So when and how did his father die? The Afghan War ended in 1989, the Chechen Wars were in 1994 and 1999. If his father died in Chechnya I guess the math checks out, though it is weird to give such random and weirdly specific details instead of just saying what war his father died in.
There’s also a strangely long shot of a car’s license plate, and it’s wrong. License plates must be in Latin, not Cyrillic.
It is too silly a mistake to have not been deliberate. Furthermore, Я is something of a meme – it’s frequently used as a backwards R by English-speaking graphic artists trying to make their cover design look “Яussian.”
From a marketing perspective, the video doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Spies are typically motivated by money and/or a sense of adventure, and this video addresses neither. If the intended audience is people who already made up their minds to spy, the video doesn’t really address their wants either – like if they’ll be protected, be able to leave the country and get a good life in Florida, etc.
So, what is the point of the video?
The goal here is to get would-be informants to download the Tor browser and use a secure communication channel to contact the CIA. So it almost doesn’t matter what the video itself says, all that matters is that it is spread as far as possible. By making the video a little silly and full of “Easter eggs” for people to hunt down and nitpick, that’s a good thing. More people will share and discuss it.
EDIT 1: I went back to see if the numbers in the alphabet are a clever clue for something – first by replacing the numbers with a corresponding letter in the English alphabet, and then the Russian, turned up nothing except МГАД, but doesn’t really make sense with the ся ending
EDIT 2: Someone in the comments section on my Quora post suggested not including the letters, only the numbers – in which case you get гад, which is an insult roughly equivalent to lizard or reptile.
Ian Kummer
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Did anyone notice the subtitle for the first 60% of that video? “Моя борьба” – or as the CIA’s favourite proxies like to put it – “Mein Kampf”.