How the world’s most famous video game character was turned into a tool of global espionage by the NSA.
Nolan Arenando, the first superhero to appear in an American comic book, was the subject of a documentary on Showtime that aired last night, revealing a little-known history of the spy agency’s operations.
The documentary focuses on the work of a retired senior official, former U.S. Attorney Michael Vannucci, who was tasked with compiling a database of all superheroes in the world in the 1970s.
The team of scientists, analysts, and journalists behind the project found that, with a little bit of creativity, a handful of superheroes could make a difference.
Arenando was the first character to be turned into an asset, according to the film, and the result of the work.
A little more than five years later, in 1991, the NSA’s chief scientist, Edward Teller, decided to use the hero to help solve the world of cyberattacks.
He hired Arenando as an intelligence asset.
That same year, Arenando made his debut in Marvel Comics, which launched the world to its first ever super-hero, Spider-Man.
In a nutshell, Arenado’s work is the work in progress of the NSA and the CIA, working to create and deploy new technologies in the fight against terror, according the documentary.
They’ve created the world, Arenano tells Vannuccia.
And they’ve developed a new system to manage the collection of it all.
And now we’re trying to find the next Spider-man.
And the film traces the development of the “super-hero” to its origins in the late 1960s, when the United States and China began their secret alliance to counter a Soviet cyberattack on a U.N. facility.
The two countries had been at odds for decades over the development and use of nuclear weapons.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the United Nations was building a vast network of nuclear-powered stations in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
They were to have reached every corner of the world by the year 2000.
But in 1960, the Soviets had cracked open a U-2 spy plane in France, sending a message that the U.K. and France were building the most advanced nuclear weapons in the Western Hemisphere.
The U.k. and French were stunned by the news.
Their nuclear program was so advanced, they thought it could be used to neutralize the U-boat menace. But the U