‘Simpsons’ Fan Exposes This Classic Side Character As the Daughter of A ‘CIA Spook’
There is a non-zero chance that a character in the Simpsons canon was directly responsible for arming Afghan Mujahideen fighters — including Osama bin Laden — during the Soviet-Afghan War, and I’m not talking about George H.W. Bush.
Ever since the show’s inception, the Simpsons writers’ room has been full of the kind of worldly, annoying nerds who play My Dinner with Andre arcade games and say things like “Spring forth, burly protector, and save me!” For a cartoon about the dumbest fictional town in America, The Simpsons had some serious brainiacs crafting the immaculate Golden Age seasons, and the Harvard-educated comedy writers were constantly sneaking esoteric references to classic literature and world history into many of the best episodes of television ever.
As such, we can hardly call it a coincidence that, in the Season Four episode “New Kid on the Block,” the Simpson kids’ hip new babysitter Laura Powers just so happened to let it slip that her estranged father was once stationed in a hotly contested city in Afghanistan, definitely during the war with the USSR and probably as part of a since-declassified covert ops campaign called “Operation Cyclone.”
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International affairs buff and Simpsons fan comfy_wol recently revealed the evidence supporting his theory that Mr. Powers was a “CIA Spook” in a viral Reddit thread that is likely to pique the interest of Two Guys From Quantico:
comfy_wol’s theory revolves around this line from the scene wherein Laura orders food from a restaurant called Two Guys in Kabul, then telling Bart and Lisa, “We used to eat this when my dad was stationed in Vandahar. Take your kafta bi sanya and dip it in the labna.”
“Vandahar isn’t a real place,” comfy_wol wrote, “but Kandahar is a city in Afghanistan, capital of Kandahar province. Being somewhere in Afghanistan is consistent with them ordering food from Two Guys From Kabul.” As comfy_wol pointed out, at the time of the release of “New Kid on the Block,” Laura was canonically 13 to 15 years old, which means her father would have likely been stationed in Kandahar/Vandahar smack-dab in the middle of the Soviet-Afghan War.
During the war, Kandahar was brutally contested by both the Soviet-backed government and the mujahideen forces, which would have made the presence of an American military/intelligence officer a potentially Cold-War-escalating international event, but it wouldn't have been unheard of. comfy_wol brought up Operation Cyclone, the CIA’s program to covertly funnel funds and arms to the guerrilla forces in the Soviet-Afghan War, noting that CIA officers frequently visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan border during the operation.
“The joke is that Laura is casually admitting that the USA actually had operatives on the ground during the Soviet-Afghan war, in direct conflict with the Soviet Union, the kind of thing which could have started a major war between the superpowers,” comfy_wol wrote. “What she took away from this was that the food was pretty good.”
Seeing as legendary Simpsons writer, late-night host and know-it-all Conan O’Brien wrote “New Kid on the Block,” it certainly seems like he intended for a fellow smart aleck to connect the dots on Laura’s dad, but, until O’Brien comments on the connection himself, we can’t be sure — let’s just hope that we get to him before the KGB does.
