Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the State. —James J. Angleton.
 
[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]
 
When Senator Phil Fist, “The Man Who (Almost) Killed Poker,” decided to make a second attempt at passing The PEACE (Poker Elimination and Criminalization Enforcement) amendment, he made the decision to strike deceptively—not at poker directly, but at those government officials whom, he believed, were protecting poker. At the first meeting of the Un-American Games Committee’s hold’em hearings, Senator Fist, careful to name no names, called these government officials “Pokeristas.”
 
Special Agent Miller Harlow Thatcher, Chief of the FBI Card Squad, knew very well that he was the “Pokerista” Senator Fist did not name. Thatcher also knew a deceptive deal when he saw one. He had, in fact, learned the art of deception from a true master.
 
In the late 1950’s Washington, D.C.’s most famous poker game was played by “Kim and Jim.” Jim was James Angleton, the CIA’s Chief of Counter-Intelligence. America’s “Spy Catcher” Kim was Harold “Kim” Philby, his counterpart in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. They had met in London during World War II. Philby taught Angleton the art and craft of espionage and Angleton, in turn, taught Philby the ins and outs of poker.
 
Whenever Philby visited Washington he and his close friend Angleton picked up their wartime poker game. Soon anybody who was anybody in Washington power circles wanted to play in Kim and Jim’s game. Regulars included J. Edgar Hoover, Douglas MacArthur, Joseph McCarthy, and two very young Congressmen—Dick Nixon and Phil Fist. What no player, especially Angleton, ever suspected was that Philby was a double agent working for the KGB.
 
One night at the poker table Angleton, looking to shake Philby off a draw, looked him straight in the eye and said, to the amazement of all at the table, “Kim, I know you’re really a Russian spy.” Philby without hesitation replied, “In that case, Comrade Jim, I raise you 100 rubles.” Everyone at the table laughed. The laugher at Jim and Kim’s game continued until the day Philby defected to the Soviet Union and Angleton was “reassigned.”
 
Angleton’s mental angst over his utter failure to recognize Philby as a Soviet spy tipped him into a paranoid state that resulted in a growing suspicion that almost all poker players were, like Philby, KGB agents. This paranoid fantasy might have gone nowhere if Angleton’s reassignment had not been to the CIA’s “domestic intelligence” program. To the illegal surveillance of political dissidents, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez, Angleton added subversive “pink poker players” such as Cyrus Eisenberg, rumored to be a “card comrade” of Fidel Castro and Delia Harris, “a known Las Vegas poker agitator.”
 
Years later Angleton was again forced to resign and his pink poker player files, officially ordered destroyed, were secretly transferred to the FBI Card Squad who added them to their own illegal surveillance of poker players.
 
One of those poker files was labeled, “Fist, Philip, Deceptive Dealer.” The day that Senator Fist’s Un-American Games Committee subpoenaed Special Agent Miller Harlow Thatcher, Chief of the FBI Card Squad, to testify as to why he had sprung from jail a poker player that Fist wanted to use as a scapegoat in a public trial, Agent Thatcher decided to make his own deceptive poker deal and ruin Phil Fist forever.
 
(To be continued in the next issue of Poker Player)