There is a particular flavor of historical comedy that only emerges in the final weeks of a regime’s chief enforcer, from Beria to Hoover to Barzan al-Tikriti.
The petty grandiosity. The branded reputation for stern cruelty and absolute loyalty. The paranoid sweeps of the bodyguards for traitors. The lashing out at staff over missing trinkets. The locked doors and ever-tightening circles of advisors, none trusted, all pitted against one another.
Anyone who has read enough Soviet history will recognize the smell. Lavrentiy Beria, in the dwindling months before Khrushchev’s pistol found him, was a portrait in this exact register: vain, grasping, drunk on his own myth, convinced that one more aggressive move against perceived enemies would steady him on his pedestal. He was, at that point, the most feared man in the Soviet Union. He was also finished, and did not yet know it.
Kash Patel is in his Beria phase. Sure, we’re not quite Stalin-era Russia yet… yet … but Patel’s lavish paranoia is something Beria would recognize.
Begin with the bourbon. The Director of the FBI has been distributing personalized bottles of Woodford Reserve engraved with his name, the Bureau’s shield, and the styled signature “Ka$h.” He takes the cases on government planes. He hands them out at FBI events, in Vegas, at Quantico, at the Milan Olympics where he was famously filmed chugging beer with the U.S. men’s hockey team. One bottle vanished at a UFC training seminar at Quantico, and Patel reportedly lost his mind, threatening to polygraph and prosecute his own staff over the missing souvenir.