Was the Flushing of Agent 13 a Reichenbach Fall?
Did Maxwell Smart's oft-compressed colleague survive to defect to China?
Remember Agent 13? He was Maxwell Smart’s unfortunate colleague assigned to do surveillance from the most awkward and uncomfortable places. Over two seasons, these included a U.S. mailbox, a barber shop towel warmer, a locker at Dulles International Airport, a trash bin, a laundromat washing machine, an ice machine, and a plant pot. When Max discovers Agent 13 in an implausibly small safe in the Chief’s office and asks how he got in there, Agent 13 explains that the Chief gave him the key. When 13 goes missing from the mailbox, Max gloomily concludes he’s “been mailed.”
In a 1989 revival, “Get Smart Again,” a reactivated Agent 13 is delivered to Max’s apartment in a file cabinet just after Max has described him as a top-drawer agent; naturally 13 is stuffed into the bottom drawer. Finally, in “The Nude Bomb,” Max inadvertently flushes 13 out of an airplane toilet in mid-flight. The end of a legend.
Or maybe not? Agent 13 may have eluded CHAOS, but our own super top-secret security guys may be on to him. The U.S. government wants you to know that the giant Chinese cranes used at U.S. ports to load and unload container ships could be spying on us. The Wall Street Journal says, “National-security and Pentagon officials have compared ship-to-shore cranes made by the China-based manufacturer, ZPMC, to a Trojan horse.”
Did 13 survive the flush as Holmes survived the waters of Reichenbach? Did he defect to China to seek revenge? Inquiring minds want to know.
Happily, the Biden administration is all over the invasion of the giant cranes with plans “to invest billions in the domestic manufacturing of cargo cranes,” via subsidies to Mitsui, a Japanese firm. No such cranes have been built in the United States for decades.
Barely had we absorbed the unnerving news that a turncoat Agent 13 could be peaking into our upper floor windows—in “Get Smart” days, Max occasionally had to thwart 13’s voyeurism—when yet another insidious conspiracy was revealed.
The ubiquitous 13, it seems, may also be lurking in our cars, at least if our cars are electrics made in China. Like Santa Claus, the guy is everywhere. How else to explain President Biden’s ordering the Commerce Department to investigate Chinese-made cars as a national-security risk? “Connected vehicles from China could collect sensitive data about our citizens and our infrastructure and send this data back to the People’s Republic of China,” the President said.
Oh no! The Chinese could be privy to the exact time I get picked up my dry cleaning or go sent back to the grocery store to pick up the stuff I forgot the last time I was sent.
Concerned parties are even saying the “H” word. Our readers will remember that back in 2019 the Trump administration banned equipment made by Huawei from U.S. telecom networks on the grounds the devices might include secret “back doors” enabling Chinese eavesdropping. U.S. officials never offered any evidence for the back-door theory. Though never withdrawing the charge, eventually they quietly abandoned it, revealing the anti-Huawei campaign as blatant protectionism.
That fiasco did not stop William Evanina, director of the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center under President Trump, and leading supporter of the Huawei conspiracy theory, from chiming in this time around. Because the cranes carry sophisticated sensors to make sure they are moving the right containers and are networked to allow remote operation, the cranes “can be the new Huawei,” the Journal quotes Mr. Evanina as saying. “It’s the perfect combination of legitimate business that can also masquerade as clandestine intelligence collection.”
Yes, it’s perfect. And today’s cars, incorporating more silicon than steel by dollar value, are perfect also. Similarly perfect is, or will soon be, nearly every manufactured product in a ubiquitously networked world. Agent 13 would find your networked refrigerator spacious compared to many of his prior abodes. Your shoes may not feature a phone as Max’s did, but the tiny radio tag inserted for inventory control knows all.
“The Chinese are spying through your-widget-to-be-named-later” can be used to ban any Chinese product, intensifying a trade war that has already cost the U.S. semiconductor industry tens of billions in lost sales and propelled Chinese competitors along the learning curve.
Huawei is a stronger company today than ever. It designs its own microchips to replace those it once bought from U.S. companies. These are manufactured by China’s leading silicon foundry, which has accelerated its capabilities by two generations since the Huawei ban. Huawei’s latest smart phone is rapidly undercutting the iPhone in China.
Now the White House apparently fears Americans will prefer millions of cheap Chinese electric cars over the expensive versions the U.S. government pays Americans to buy.
The U.S. already enforces a 25% tariff on Chinese vehicles. Why lie and make it about spies? Is the goal to annoy the Chinese even more by slander than by excluding their products? Or is this more of the China hawks inciting Americans into a war we could never win, and might lose in a way we have never lost a war before?