‘The Angel’ tells the supposedly true story, of how an alleged double-agent high in political office cried wolf, on oncoming war, to avert war itself. The stakes were not just a sheep or two, but many potential human casualties between countries. Thus is he not the boy who cried wolf for fun, but dubbed ‘the angel’ – an ‘angel of peace’; not death. When surprise attacks are rendered unsurprising, and planning for them becomes tiresome, they might as well be given up?
Though his exact intentions and actions might be hard to know for sure, what he did could had been a form of skilful means to prevent lose-lose situations of war, turning it around to become ‘win-win’, without need to win any war. A journalist even called him ’20th century’s greatest spy’. With covert acts bound to be discovered sooner or later, he probably knew that he was risking his own life, and even family. The risks were perhaps as calculated as they could be, and deemed worthy?
Even if truly an ‘angel of peace’, he did not escape the eventual ‘angel of death’. He died from a fall from his home balcony under mysterious circumstances, suspected to be murdered. He was not the only ‘fallen angel’. The twists and turns of karmic payback are not easy to predict and decipher. As perceived by the hateful and deluded, even a true Bodhisattva can be perceived as a mara, and a true mara perceived as a Bodhisattva. May all perceive clearly – to live worthy lives, leading only to worthy deaths.
