The Enemy Within
The setting is the Clinton
White House--as interpreted in the movie Contact --and presidential
advisers have convened to discuss an extraterrestrial communication in the form
of an engineering diagram. The plans, says Dr. Eleanor Arroway (Jodie Foster),
are for "some kind of machine."
"A machine? That does what,
doctor?" asks a presidential aide.
"Some kind of a transport,"
Arroway replies.
"It could
be anything," counters National Security Adviser Michael Kitz (James Woods),
who is dubious of extraterrestrial motivations. "It could be a Trojan horse. We
build it, and out pours the entire Vegan army."
That isn't, in the end, what the aliens have in mind, but
the term Trojan horse --the durable ancestor of the expressions fifth
column and mole , and of the modifier stealth --has certainly
been enjoying a prominent vitality these days, as befits an era that values
frontal hostility far less than it does insidious subterfuge. "Year of the
Trojan Horse," proclaimed one New York Times headline the day after the
British Crown Colony of Hong Kong was returned to China. The familiar story of
the Trojan horse appears in Virgil's Aeneid : The horse, with armed men
hidden inside, is presented by the Greek enemy to the besieged city of Troy,
and brought within its walls. It immediately achieves an afterlife as metaphor
(in addition to yielding the admonition "beware of Greeks bearing gifts"). "The
central question," wrote Times correspondent Nicholas D. Kristof in his
Hong Kong dispatch, "is whether Hong Kong amounts to a colossal Trojan horse: a
prize so glorious that China's Communists cannot leave it outside the gates but
which, once inside, will destroy those in power" with its irrepressible example
of roiling capitalism and affluence, and its concentrated economic power.
Trojan
horse has found further application in recent months in the realm of
plastic surgery. The phrase refers to a bodily overhaul so extensive as to
render obsolete all superficial indications of age or identity. "I'm a Trojan
horse," the beneficiary of such procedures, a woman of 42, a self-described
member of Mensa, explained last June to a newspaper reporter, "because what you
see is not what you get. I may look young and bimboesque, but I am nothing of
the sort." Earlier this summer the alleged Mexican drug baron Amado Carrillo
Fuentes apparently died on the operating table while undergoing cosmetic
surgery of Trojan horse amplitude; law-enforcement officials needed to perform
forensic testing to confirm that the decedent was, in fact, Carrillo. Also in
the medical arena are the various kinds of Trojan horse invaders that trick
their way into acceptance by the body's cells, and then cause illness; and the
various kinds of Trojan horse countermeasures, including gene therapy and
vaccines.
The most prevalent use of Trojan horse
today is its cyberuse, now two decades old, where it refers to hard-to-detect
instructions secretly embedded in computer software, making possible various
kinds of unauthorized or unintended outcomes ranging from theft to breach of
security to self-destruction. Trojan horses, long of concern to money managers,
database managers, and weapons experts at the Pentagon, afflicted thousands of
ordinary consumers in the course of an episode concluded by the Federal Trade
Commission last winter. This Trojan horse, which acquired the variant name
Moldovan horse , quietly made users place a long-distance phone call to
Moldova whenever they gained access to a certain pornographic site on the
Internet. Consumers were unaware not only that they were placing such a call,
but also that exiting from the site did not terminate the call. The Moldovan
horse scam was inevitably short-lived. A sudden spike in the aggregate volume
of U.S.-Moldova telephone traffic, followed by the delivery of outlandish phone
bills to individuals, soon suggested the existence of a problem.
One way
to turn almost anything into a conceptual Trojan horse is to attach the word
stealth to it as a modifier. The relatively recent term stealth
candidate has had two meanings. One refers simply to a candidate who seems
not to show up on the political radar screen--George Bush used the term this
way in speaking of his opponent, Michael Dukakis, in 1988. The other, now more
common, meaning harbors an element of deviousness: Stealth candidates in state
and local elections in 1992 and 1994, for example, were Trojan stalking horses
for fundamentalist Christian forces--men and women who emphasized popular,
secular conservative issues in their campaigns but failed to disclose that
their candidacies had been covertly planned and energized by the religious
right. Stealth in both usages obviously builds on the precedent of the
B-2 Stealth Bomber, the strategic aircraft built by the Northop Corp. that can
penetrate enemy air defenses undetected. The aircraft, in turn, eventually gave
rise to the Stealth condom, whose manufacturer was sued by Northop in 1991 for
trademark infringement. The Stealth condoms were red, white, and blue--a Trojan
horse of another color, one might say--and were sold in a deltoid package
reminiscent of the Stealth Bomber's design, bearing the motto "They'll Never
See You Coming." Northop alleged that the condom's name was "likely to cause
confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive," a concern that might have been
more understandable if each condom came with a billion-dollar price tag.
Northrop in the end decided to drop the matter.
ATrojan horse in espionage is a mole , a foreign
agent who has burrowed deep into a society or government. The connotation is of
Cold War provenance and was given broad currency in large part through the
novels of John Le Carré, whose longtime protagonist, the spy master George
Smiley, has pursued moles within British intelligence. Those within a
population who sympathize with an enemy's aims, and may render assistance when
the time is ripe, constitute a fifth column , a term that goes back to
the Spanish Civil War and the remark of a rebel general, Emilio Mola, to the
effect that his four columns of troops would be supplemented by a civilian
quinta columna , a fifth column of sympathizers, in their attack on
Loyalist-held Madrid in 1936. Ernest Hemingway published a play with the title
The Fifth Column in 1938. Numerical terminology (think third
wave , fourth
dimension , fifth
estate ,
sixth
sense ) is an open invitation to extension. Franklin
Roosevelt used the term sixth column in 1942 to refer to
rumor-mongerers, hoarders, and others who unwittingly hampered the war effort;
the term seventh column was applied later to those whose carelessness
led to industrial accidents. If every new refinement since then in the quiet
sapping of our national morale has earned a numerical "column," then by now, I
estimate, we must be up somewhere close to "78 th column" (applied,
maybe, to producers of the weekly network TV movies about bloody domestic
mayhem) and "79 th column" (airplane passengers who bring carry-on
luggage that they know won't fit into the overhead storage bins) or possibly
even higher.
And my sixth sense tells me
that it won't stop there.
