When I sent my manuscript to TrineDay I had no idea that Kris Millegan’s dad was CIA. Kris had told me his dad was from Montana, but failed to include the detail about his dad being a data analyst for the agency. Instead, it was a recent appearance on the Danny Jones podcast that gave me this relevant data point, which I confirmed by finding this old newspaper blurb:
For more context on what Kris Millegan’s Dad did for the CIA, here’s a description from a PDF copy of an essay about agency exploitation of Anthropologists:
I first learned of Lloyd S. Millegan’s Indonesian research in the 1951 Viking Fund annual report listing him as receiving a predoctoral 1950 fellowship for field- work “to aid anthropological studies in Indonesia since independence, and prospects for future studies” (Viking Fund 1951: 157). His project was the only listed grant without a university affiliation, instead listing his affiliation as “Fair- fax, Virginia.” When I consulted Viking Fund records, I learned that Millegan’s cv listed years of cia employment.
During the war, Millegan worked at oss for Joseph Ralston Hayden, an ad- viser to General Douglas MacArthur (see jrh; Gehrke 1976: 204, 216). Millegan worked on several intelligence and insurgency operations, and during the final months of the war he developed recommendations for the U.S. plan “for the cultural reorganization of the Philippines” (jrh, 42–27).12
The Viking Fund sponsored Millegan’s “Survey of Anthropological Studies in Indonesia since Independence and Prospects for Future Studies,” and Millegan expressed interest in undertaking “similar surveys in Burma, Thailand, Malaya and Indonesia’” (lsm, cv 9/6/50). Millegan’s Viking Fund grant application listed his employment in the cia as a research analyst and chief of the Southeast Asia Branch, from 1946 to 1950.
For even more, here’s Lloyd Millegan in his own words describing the plan he was a part of for the CIA:
Establishing bookstores? Isn’t that kind of like what Lloyd’s son ended up doing? Weird. Regardless, I’m still hopeful TrineDay could be the publisher for MY research. Only time will tell.
One of the most influential voices for conservatives right now is Tucker Carlson, another kid who grew up with a CIA Daddy. Tucker, I believe, will be an integral part in the JD Vance Op we’ll be served up soon. For those who enjoy just sitting back and watching the show, I’m sure Tucker’s rise will be fun grist for the Groypers to gripe about. Who said End Times had to be a drag?
(Gemini refused my request to have the Groyper guppy army wearing clearly marked incel-battery packs, boo! Also, what the hell is the “Grand Fintech Accord, Gemini?)
I’m not going to linger on Tucker, Nick, and guppy Groypers because living in a CIA microcosm, like Missoula, means you get to have your very own CIA-brat act as an informal narrative wrangler ready to shit-talk any outliers who might have the temerity to step out of line, like I did.
This comment has become one of my favorite examples of what I’m up against in Missoula because it shows the degree of slander a brat of the agency gets to wield without any fear of accountability. And the “Abe” he’s chastising for reposting me? I’m willing to bet Pete is talking to Charle “Abe” Abramson, the not-so-simple real estate guy who sits on what feels like ALL the local boards with relevance to the Sean Stevenson case.
For those who haven’t read my spiel on John Talbot, just consult his obituary, it puts plenty of the pieces into place.
Here’s more context describing how this CIA man became a newspaper man:
Sue’s father Don Anderson was publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison and he persuaded John in 1959 there was great opportunity in the newspaper business and particularly in the Lee Newspaper group of which his paper was a member. Anderson is the man after whom the journalism building at the University of Montana is named because he negotiated the purchase of the Anaconda papers in Montana by Lee and lifted the “Copper Collar” from Montana journalism. John worked for Lee in Madison, Muscatine, Iowa, and Billings, MT, before being promoted to publisher in Missoula in 1970. He said to his friends that taking the Missoulian in the 1970s from the era of hot lead and Linotype machines to photocomposition and offset printing was the hardest thing he ever accomplished because of changed jobs and displaced people. John was publisher of the Missoulian until 1980 but worked with a group of Lee papers until 1986. He then left Lee in order to keep his family in Missoula. He designed a news media management course and taught the course at the University of Montana’s School of Journalism until 2002.
Knowing this, how do Missoulians feel about John’s son, Pete Talbot, getting his picture in Daddy’s newspaper masked up like a pussy and handling local voting ballots?
Well, you can’t have feelings about what you don’t know, and the art of not-knowing has been something Missoulians have been doing with their local leaders for a long time, like the longest-serving Mayor of Missoula, John Engen–a jovial alcoholic who once worked at the Missoulian, then disappeared late in his Mayoral reign to treat his alcoholism.
To better grasp how the literati felt about our disappearing Mayor at the time, this old blog post from the freelance writer I made fun of yesterday, Dan Brooks, is perfectly toned for the preferred not-knowing of this town’s citizenry:
Remember when Mayor John Engen sent an open letter to Missoula telling us all he would run for re-election and had won his battle with alcoholism? The election part was not a surprise. We had not known he was an alcoholic, though. Nor had we known that for the past 28 days, an interim mayor had been running the city while he was at an inpatient alcohol treatment program. When he disappeared, communications Director Ginny Merriam told the Missoulian that he was away for unspecified medical reasons. Asked when he would come back, she said “we don’t know. You never know. But in this case you do know because, I repeat, 28-day inpatient alcohol treatment program. Anyway, the point is that the mayor is back and alcohol no longer interferes with the functioning of his life, as it apparently did for an unspecified time.
I mention this hoary tale from 2016 because this year, on December 20, the City of Missoula informed city councillors that it had corrected the $3 million accounting error it discovered six weeks ago and hadn’t told us about until now. They thought they had $4.2 million in their rainy-day fund, but it turns out to be only $600,000. Coincidentally, they discovered it one day before the 2017 mayoral election. Anyway, the point is that this accounting error has been corrected, so nobody needs to worry about it now.
As my dad used to say, once is a mistake and twice is a pattern. He also used to say terrible, biological things about city governments everywhere, and I’m starting to think he was right. The City of Missoula obviously has a problem: it can’t keep a secret for more than six weeks. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, in which I put forth the thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s Town, where everyone is happy because we have no idea what’s happening.
And what happened to the Missoula Independent? Lee Enterprises bought it, killed it 9 months after Dan posted this piece on John Engen, and then they salted the earth by annihilating the Indy’s online archives.
When I wrote yesterday “this is an information war”, Lee Enterprises’ corporate kill-shot of the Missoula Independent is exactly what I’m talking about, and it’s why I took the birthday opportunity three years ago to tell the Indy sellout, Matt Gibson, what I thought about his move to his stupid face.
Just because someone has a CIA Daddy, it doesn’t mean they have to remain in the shadow of the agency for their whole life. Owning the influence, like Kris Millegan has done, is one example of how to successfully evolve beyond the traitorous influence of these corrupt MFers. But what about Pete Talbot?
In 2007, one year before I was hired at the Poverello Center by someone who also might have a CIA Daddy, Pete Talbot gave a political endorsement to Jerry Ballas, a Republican, for Missoula City Council, and he issued this endorsement at 4&20 Blackbirds, the blog I started contributing to in 2010.
So, what’s the connection? The connection is this: Jerry Ballas, I learned from this Pulp article, was the architect who designed the Lee Enterprises building at Higgins and 4th Street, a project overseen by John Talbot and done to specifically rehabilitate Missoula’s downtown core with a newly minted financial tool, called Tax Increment Financing.
Talbot was the Missoulian’s publisher from 1970 to 1980 for Lee Enterprises and continued as a Lee regional vice president until 1986. Carol Van Valkenburg worked with him both at the paper and then at the University of Montana Journalism School. When Talbot died in 2021, Van Valkenburg told me how he had kept Missoula’s historic character alive.
“He was interested in the revitalization of downtown with (former Missoula Mayor) John Toole,” Van Valkenburg recalled. “When Southgate Mall came, that helped the Missoulian tremendously, but John knew that central to the identity of Missoula was the downtown. He was very active making sure it stayed a vital part, while Billings’ and Great Falls’ downtowns were disappearing and being boarded up.”
Jerry Ballas was the Missoulian building architect. He was the son of founding partner Oscar Ballas of Fox, Ballas and Barrow Architects, which also designed the Missoula City Hall, the public library building on Main Street and the University Center on the UM campus. They are all in the “federal modernist” style popular in the mid-20th century, known for a “disdain for ornamentation and fondness for massive forms [that] have sometimes been seen as an expression of efficiency and power — and at other times, as sterile and inhuman,” according to the U.S. General Services Administration. Whatever one thinks about the trend, Ballas did appreciate the river. He stripped the length of the building with windows looking north to the water and downtown.
Amazing.
One more thing to note: Before publishing today’s post I gave Kris Millegan another call and we chatted briefly about his CIA Dad and the things I was uncovering in Montana. Since the overlap between drug trafficking and the CIA has been a specific topic of interest for Millegan, I asked him about it and he said a sparsely populated state with a big, wild border with Canada, makes Montana a natural place of interest for three letter agency attention. Of course.
While active CIA agents aren’t legally allowed to get involved in domestic politics, “former” agents, like Steven A. Cash, have become VERY involved in domestic politics through a “non-profit” called the “Steady State”.
The country is facing the gravest threat to its constitutional democracy since the Civil War. That was the assessment of the current political situation from former national security official Steven Cash ’84 in a lecture and conversation with members of the Vassar community at Rockefeller Hall on September 16.
Cash’s career included stints with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Department of Homeland Security, and the staffs of several congressional committees that oversee and assess national security issues. He is currently Executive Director of The Steady State, a non-profit advocacy organization whose members are former senior national security officials drawn from across the intelligence, diplomatic, homeland security, and defense communities.
Cash opened his talk by observing that his campus visits are usually happy occasions, such as class reunions. “This one isn’t fun,” he said, characterizing his talk as a warning and “call to action” for students and others who attended.
If you don’t understand the kind of “call to action” Steven Cash is pushing, here’s some of an X post I came across this morning while writing this post:
I hope the dots I’ve been connecting recently have been helpful for readers who want to know how we got here, who helped fuck things up, and why no one is coming to save us. After being served two more restraining orders yesterday by two people who don’t like what I’ve been writing about, it’s pretty obvious how effectively over the target I have been.
Thanks for reading!