Ancient Web: The Covert Comic Wrote CIA Briefings as Spy Haiku

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Most poets do not pretend their verses were smuggled out of CIA briefings. John Alejandro King, writing as the Covert Comic, decided that government secrecy was an excellent setting for bad office days and unusually short poems.

Enter the Covert Comic's Intelligence Update.

The surviving homepage carries a copyright line beginning in 1998. It introduces King as a poet, covert activist, and intelligence humorist while filling the navigation with mock-official categories: Catwalk of Spies, PostTopSecret, The Naked Intelligence Officer, My War on Terror, and a supposed Universal Declaration of HUMINT Rights. The page quotes praise attributed to several newspapers; those blurbs are the site's own presentation, not independent verification of its audience size.

Its most distinctive creation is Spaiku, a set of mock-classified haiku. King claims, tongue firmly in cheek, to have composed them while attending intelligence briefings. One concerns the agony of an interminable meeting. Another imagines a spy satellite redirected toward thoroughly unprofessional sightseeing.

An entire bureaucratic universe made of jokes

The site's Naked Intelligence Officer plays with multiple definitions of 'naked,' from an officer whose cover has been compromised to someone pretending to be undressed as a disguise. Real Men Don't Get Published presents a convoluted story about a manuscript and an intelligence employee, written in the officious tone it is mocking.

The old-fashioned design helps the performance. Separate themed HTML pages, title graphics, and a persistent navigation menu build a fictional headquarters that readers explore one department at a time. The author repeatedly implies that his identity and work are too secret to describe, then describes them at length.

This is satire, not evidence that the author conducted the covert operations mentioned in the jokes or that the Agency authorized the material. Even the alleged briefings are part of the comic persona.

The site has accumulated changes through 2026, but its persistent 1998 copyright range and self-contained themed pages retain the feel of a web author building a joke world rather than managing a social-media account.

Explore the intelligence parody and the original Spaiku collection.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.