Brought to Light CD and Comic Alan Moore (1988)

Brought to Light Thirty Years of Drug Smuggling, Arms Deals, and Covert Action 1988
COMIC BOOK .CBR
Brought to Light Shadowplay CD 1998

AUDIOBOOK SHADOWPLAY .MP3

Brought to Light: Thirty Years of Drug Smuggling, Arms Deals, and Covert Action is an anthology of two political graphic novels, published originally by Eclipse Comics in 1988. Both are based on material from lawsuits filed by the Christic Institute against the US Government. The two stories are Shadowplay: The Secret Team by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, and Flashpoint: The LA Penca Bombing documented by Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan and adapted by Joyce Brabner and Tom Yeates. Brought to Light was edited overall by Joyce Brabner, Catherine Yronwode acted as executive editor, and Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney was the publication designer.

Shadowplay: The Secret Team
Shadowplay: The Secret Team written by Alan Moore and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz with an introduction by Daniel Sheehan (general counsel of TCI). It covers the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and its controversial involvement in the Vietnam War, the Iran-Contra affair, and its relationship with figures like Augusto Pinochet and Manuel Noriega. The narrator of Shadowplay is an aging anthropomorphic American Eagle, a bellicose retired CIA agent.

It was Moore's first major work which was not superhero oriented, it was highly praised for its storytelling and Sienkiewicz's sometimes brutal art. Moore received praise especially for blending the sometimes overwhelming mass of details into a coherent and effective story. Over the years there have been rumours that Moore was unable to travel to America due to the CIA being annoyed at his story in Brought to Light. However this was proved to be no more than a rumour and the real reason was due to Moore not renewing his passport.

The story of "Shadowplay" is of an unseen character (presumably representing the oblivious American public in first-person view of the reader) in a bar, where he is approached by a man-sized, walking, talking eagle. The eagle, from the emblem of the CIA, proceeds to drink alcohol and, in a drunken stupor, divulge all the bloody details of The Agency's sordid past. Early on a reference is made to the number of gallons an olympic swimming pool can hold, and the fact that an adult human body has one gallon of blood; from then on, the victims of CIA activities (directly or indirectly) are quantified in swimming pools filled with blood, each pool representing 20,000 dead. Sienkiewicz's dark, erratic, and blurry images keep the mood of Moore's narration (through the boozing eagle) unnerving, and hazily nightmarish.

Flashpoint: The LA Penca Bombing
lashpoint: The LA Penca Bombing is written by Joyce Brabner, as told to her by Christic Institute clients Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan. It deals with the La Penca bombing which happened during the civil war in Nicaragua in 1984.

Credits for “Flashpoint” list Jonathan Marshall on the introduction, Joyce Brabner writing, and Thomas Yeates illustrating, with letters by Bill Pearson and painting by Sam Parsons. Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan are credited with having told the story to Joyce Brabner.

Thirty Years of Covert War
In the center is a two-page feature by Paul Mavrides, "World Map of 30 Years of Covert Action" detailing election tampering, drug trafficking, assassination, and other crimes committed by the CIA.

Shadowplay CD
Shadowplay was made into an audio CD by Codex Books in 1998. The CD is spoken word with Moore narrating the story himself with music by composer Gary Lloyd.

CD Review
By Alan Moore and Gary Lloyd-In the ten years since Brought to Light was first published, we have become familiar with the idea of a secret government, popularised by Internet conspiracy buffs and, of course, The X-Files, where the obsession with alien cover-ups has been at the expense of the real horrors -- the Contras pulling the tongues of peasants through knife slits in their throats or the bombardment of Laos.This spoken word version of Moore's text is therefore essential listening. Dark electronic backing by Gary Lloyd accompanies Moore's reading of the sinister subject matter. It is only when Moore adopts the character of a grizzled veteran of these campaigns that the horrors begin to seep into your
evening. Voice thick with cancer, punctuated by cocaine snuffles and hacking coughs, the atrocities come thick and fast in the vet's monologue. Everyone has a gallon of blood in their body, a swimming pool holds 20,000 gallons -- the vet describes the casualities adding up to two, sometimes three swimming pools. Sometimes more. It is a typically macabre Moore image, and it works particularly well in this performance.Although the vet's confession covers familiar ground, it is erected on the intricate, sturdy scaffold of the Christic Institute's research. It is this wealth of historical detail that makes Brought to Light a success.
At the end of the performance, silence spools out of the stereo, a hiatus before the complex military industrial music that underpins the reading returns. You sit there gasping, your disbelief hanging out, as the half-forgotten abuses of covert America run through your mind like a herd of devils. Brought to Light is a primer for a revolution in your perception of post-war history, ripe with blood and ink and secrets. (Michael De Abaitua- The Idler magazine)

Interview With Alan Moore About Brought To Light

Then you did Brought to Light, which is very much "real".

Yeah, that's something that I'm very pleased with. That was a piece of work.

It's very hard to get across all that history and so on.

Yeah, well, tell me about it, I'd got forty or fifty years of CIA history to cover and I'd got thirty pages to do it in.

Are you still interested in that kind of stuff?

Um, well, you know, up to a point. It was quite a revelation when I actually researched it - well, no, it wasn't a revelation entirely, having grown up in the '60s I'd been exposed to more bizarre conspiracy theories than most but this wasn't conspiracy theory, it was conspiracy fact. It was an artistic challenge putting it all together. I was very pleased with the final result. I heard a nice little story from a film director who's actually making a film based upon the memoirs of a spook who was a part of most of the ventures that we talk about in Brought to Light, including all the Miami stuff, all the stuff in Vietnam in Operation Phoenix and all that sort of stuff, this guy was a veteran of those campaigns. The director of the film gave him a copy of Brought to Light and said "Here, see what you think of this," and the guy came back in the next morning - as the director described it to me, this spook came in in a state of semi-shock. For one thing he was surprized by some of the things that we knew and had printed, little things like the Australian CIA bugging facility which no-one's supposed to know about and the hand that it had in overthrowing Gough Whitlam's Labour government. But the thing that he was most shaken by was the characterization of the Eagle. He just said "That's us. That's all of us guys. That's us!"

Did you think that he was made to look evil or something?

No, I think that he was shaken because it was true.

Because you had the personality of it?

Well, the thing is that these guys are sort of defiant about what they believe and then they end up killing themselves, so many of them. They're so defiant that what they're doing is right for the world; is the only realistic way of proceeding politically; and then they [kill themselves] so they must have felt pretty fucking good about themselves all the while, mustn't they? And you know, they're real, they get cancers. Alright, I know lots of people get cancers but there's a certain sort of spook, people who've done rotten fucking things for their living, they've got a lot of demons and I think that Brought to Light was the most successful satire that I've ever done. Satire in the old sense, satire in the sense of doing a grotesque and unflattering portrait of somebody that is nevertheless true, that even they can't disagree with it.

It must have been great when you heard that.

It certainly was. I mean the Christic Institute themselves pretty much got stamped into the turf.

They lost their lawsuit, did they?

Well, they had the lawsuit thrown out, because the judge said they hadn't got enough evidence. [Laughs]. They'd got an aerodrome full of evidence but the judge was not really working to that kind of agenda. When I went over to visit them, in I don't know '85 or '86, whenever it was, the day after I left Washington they blew up the car of the head of the Christic Institute, I think it was a guy called Father Bill Ryan, they blew up his car. About a week before I'd got there someone had blown a hole through the wall using military explosives in the middle of the night and gone through some files. Like, you know, this was real. They got stamped out of existence by CIA lawsuits. We got a letter - you see, I did it as a piece of music as well with an electronic musician called Gary Lloyd, who's almost done some stuff with Iain Banks -

- You mean it was spoken word with -

- Spoken word with music. Gary did the music. We brought it out on a label called Codex, I think it's still available. Codex, they're a record company from Brighton, and we brought it out as a spoken word piece, the whole of Brought to Light. But I know that Gary at one point was talking to Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys and I think that Gary was hoping that maybe Jello would put it out on his label.

Was it Alternative Tentacles?

Yeah, Alternative Tentacles. We got a very nice communication back from Jello Biafra more or less saying "Look, I think it's great but the CIA have just completely stamped the Christic Institute into the turf, destroyed them with lawsuits. If they can do that to the Christic Institute they can certainly do that to Jello Biafra," and so he reluctantly kind of declined, it was a bit too hot for him to handle. So Codex brought it out over here. I believe that Bizarre magazine made it one their CDs of the millennium, which was nice. Yeah, so you know, the information's still out there. And I mean, these days, do I still keep an eye upon what the CIA are doing in the world or the intelligence community? Not really closely. I just assume that almost any shit that happens has probably got one of these kind of half-arsed Men from UNCLE set-ups behind it. You know, one of the main things I learnt with Brought to Light was that yes, there is a conspiracy but the conspiracy is largely done by people who are corrupt and stupid. You've only got to look at the CIA plots to get rid of Castro. You're not dealing with realists here.

Cigars that blow up.

And they were planning to stage the Second Coming in the Bay of Pigs, with a firework display and a loudspeaker taking the part of Jesus to tell the no doubt superstitious and backward Cubans that Jesus was on hand and that they should renounce Castro.

Jesus!

They believed this was going to work. This was the same as the exploding cigars; the chemicals to make Castro's beard fall out, thus robbing him of his virility in the eyes of the Cuban people; these were all serious plans! So yeah there is a conspiracy, there's lots of conspiracies.

But there's also a systemic corruption where the police might take on informers and they might end up protecting criminal gangs and so on. And with double-agents and triple-agents you end up with total chaos.

You do! The thing is, that's exactly it: chaos. If you've got one conspiracy going on in the world, that might be something to worry about but that conspiracy itself will have a couple of sub-conspiracies going on within it and there are probably in the end more factions than there are people. It's a chaotic situation. Nobody's in control. You're not talking about conspiracy theory, you're talking about fractal mathematics. [Laughs] When the maths gets complex enough, then it's a kind of bronco that nobody can successfully hold onto, you know?