A dancer for the show, under surveillance:
Leah Remini has been making shocking claims about Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology, which she quit in 2013, in her new book.
Now her Dancing With The Stars pro partner Tony Dovolani has alleged that Scientologists followed him.
The ABC vet said members of the church trailed him by car two years ago when he competed with Leah during season 17 of the hit reality show…
‘I know I was followed a few times. I think they try to find anything they can on a person and try to use it against them,’ he told TMZ.
If he saw it a few times, he was under a lot more, and likely had foot, vehicular, and some tech, at least until it became obvious he wasn’t going to yield much advantage. In his case, I don’t know how extensive it was, since I have no idea how much Scientology will budget for someone like her.
If Scientology hired private contractors, they would have specified how long they wanted him covered, and for that period they would have gotten a file with his entire itinerary of activities chronologically cataloged, time stamped photos and videos of him at crucial times, any voice recordings they could have gotten, his contacts, his social circles, familial attachments, purchase history of everything from brands of crackers to computer gear with stores where he purchased it all, vehicle descriptions, background check info, as well as routes and locations frequented, and anything else of significance.
Surveillance is the foundation of intelligence work. Dovolani himself was of little importance to Scientology. He was being surveilled solely to see if he could be turned into an informant on Remini, as I would assume all of her friends, family, and associates probably are, from her husband to distant nieces. If he was having an affair, or taking illicit drugs, then he could have been approached. If I was Remini, knowing this was coming, I would have been tempted to run my own operation, putting hidden cameras and microphones all around him, and then having him simulate an affair with my own CI, and wait to get video of his approach for a television expose to promote my book.
Had Scientology had more pull, such as Fedguv might, they would have intervened at ABC to find someone who was more compromisable than Dovolani before Dovolani was assigned to Remini, and they would have arranged to have that compromisable person assigned to her instead of him. If you are a high enough priority, little which will unfold in your life will be left to chance.
At that Fedguv level, the reach of the machine and the thoroughness with which it operates on a high value target can be unbelievable. That unbelievable quality is exactly how they get ahead of their targets. They are constantly reaching, and looking for options so thoroughly insane that nobody could believe any organization would think as far ahead as they do, or have as much pull, or have as many compromised assets from previous work, out there just floating about. If you are in area where Fedguv regularly operates, such as the criminal realm, I would imagine that the depth of penetration they have achieved in that world over the decades, and the number of criminal confidential informants must be incredible. Who would think Whitey Bulger was a fed asset, as he was planting bodies all over Boston? And yet he was. How many lesser criminals, who weren’t killing people, had they reached out to and formed relationships with?
As an informant, Dovolani could have been used for any number of purposes, from passive intel gathering, to more active measures like planting drugs in her purse for a setup, dropping a covert monitoring app on her phone or tablet, or planting technical devices in her safe zones – areas that would normally be “denied areas” to the surveillance. You can see what a pain in the ass that can become if you are a target. The only sure answer is to limit your exposure by limiting your social circles.
Scientology has run surprisingly robust intelligence operations for some time now, apparently training up their own people and fielding them in conjunction with professional PI’s. In one notable case, they were caught breaking into IRS offices to plant bugs as part of a wide ranging intel gathering/infiltration operation against a large swath of the US government, even including the Justice Department. ( I would assume Hubbard noticed the government using these tactics on Scientology first, and that is what put them on his radar and made him feel turnabout was fair play.) Presumably those operations accomplished something, as they later got IRS non-taxable status, something which experts seemed to think was highly unlikely.
You have to give them credit for class A bowling-ball-size testicles, but that is little different from how many top-level technology or investment-related companies, as well as our own government, operate. Intelligence is paramount in all matters of war, and both business and politics are war, especially as you approach the allocations of billions of dollars. People have no idea the size of the surveillance machine out there both official, and unofficial. I would bet if you live in a major city you will pass two to three professional surveillance people every day, bare minimum, as they go about their intelligence gathering activities for hedgefunds, Fedguv, local LE, and other entities.
You see the risks informants pose, the powers they hold, as well as why they are such common go-to tools of surveillance operations. Almost everyone has friends and associates who can be compromised. Guys who have a covert affair going behind their wife’s back, people who hid some income from the IRS, parents who have a kid with a drug problem, they are all risks of being compromised, and once compromised they are surveillance tools which you willingly grant free access to your life.
Additionally, when you come under coverage, you pull even tighter into your social circle and draw the wagons around to keep the surveillance on the outside. It will heighten your sense of closeness with those around you. As you do this, if one of those on the inside is a compromised informant, you will actually pull even closer to the surveillance, and perhaps reveal more than you would have had you not felt threatened by the decoy team’s theatrics on the outside.
This offers a few lessons as the Apocalypse approaches. One, you don’t have to be interesting to anyone to end up under coverage. If somebody you know becomes a target, or even somebody who knows somebody you know, you can get coverage yourself, laid on with an eye to compromising you so you can be used against your friend/employer/associate. If you spot even one instance of vehicular, foot, or technical, there will be a good chance that you will also see some form of infiltration/informant action. If you aren’t worth the whole package, it is likely you won’t be worth one small part of it. And if it is worth rolling out cars, then recruiting a friend for inside info is just common sense. These things tend to all travel together.
Second, if you might become interesting at some point, just because you know someone from before you got coverage doesn’t mean that they are not surveillance too. Surveillance’s first goal is to identify your entire social circle. Their second goal is to identify a path to get inside somewhere. If the stakes become life or death someday, know who among your friends has poor self-control and is prone to the types of vices that could get them turned. If you found out about those vices, surveillance will know too, and surveillance will use those vices to turn them. Never pull so tight with your group that you can’t see where the weaknesses are, and never ignore someone knowing something they shouldn’t have known. Informants can get access to information through their contacts, and reveal it accidently.
Finally, informants can be useful, to plant disinformation, sow confusion, and thwart your enemy’s objectives. If your community has access to a valuable commodity after the collapse, and there is a possibility someone might try to take it by force, then figuring out where the informants are can allow you to plan your enemy’s attack for them, and guide it to right where you want it to go, simply by controlling what the informant knows. Information, right or wrong, can be a very powerful thing. Understand the risks, know the advantages, and don’t get caught sleeping.
Apocalypse cometh™
