17 January 2010

The Schlesinger Report

(Left to right, Henry Kissinger, Jerry Ford and James Schlesinger)

The rain is gentle this early morning down here in Culpeper County. We are into a January thaw, a break from the shin-licking cold of the last five weeks.
 
There is some storm damage at the little farm. Bit sheets of snow compacted into ice slid down the roof of the barn and angled around the fancy hold-back irons set into the roof and apparently let the big ice sheet hang onto the gutter.
 
Structurally, it was not meant to bear the weight, and the predictable happened. The ice is gone now, and the gutter is bent and bowed off the roof.
 
I sighed. Need a ladder to fix it, and some bigger screws to get it right.
 
Spring is soon enough. To all things their seasons, after all.
 
That is what Henry the K was thinking, back in 1969, when the secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia was being put into effect. Like the big ice sheet on my barn, it was to move a lot of weight someplace that had not experienced it yet, and it strained a lot of things.
 
Bear with me. This is going to be painful but brief, and if we are to get to the end of our story we have to get through the 1970s. We have done it once already, for real, and I have every confidence we can do it again, done over lightly.
 
The Intelligence Community devoted enormous attention in both manpower and resources towards the war. Rex had been responsible for the tactical application of it, flowing Navy manpower forward to achieve Navy goals. Some of it- like the operations in Cambodia in 1969- prepared the ground for other things. Some of them could be said to have had truly national implications.
 
My pal Larry was running agents in Cambodia and actually went there on missions that produced information that went right back to the Oval Office.
 
The Nixon Administration’s real secret plan was to cut a deal- even a bad deal- with the stubborn North Vietnamese to achieve something that could be sold to the taxpayers and the grieving mothers and fathers of the maimed and the dead. The flawed Peace Talks and Peace with Honor are what resulted. The last American combat troops were out of Vietnam by 1973, the same year that Rex won his battle to reinstate the independent office the Director of Naval Intelligence, this time with an actual intelligence officer in charge.
 
Of course, as the U.S. effort in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos wound down, attention turned towards strategic weapons concerns with the Soviet Union.
 
Despite the astonishing number of things, some pointed at Space and others at the bottom of the ocean, some members of the Nixon Administration believed that the community was performing less than adequately.
 
They probably weren’t cleared for some of what was going on, or more likely didn’t care. This is about money and resources, after all.
 
This was well in progress before the second Nixon Administration. I voted for Tricky Dick in that one, hoping that there would be an end to the conflict before I was drafted.
 
The other subtext was that there had been all sorts of strange things that had accompanied the two wars of the 1960s- the one inside and the other overseas.
 
In December 1970, President Nixon commissioned the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to examine the Intelligence Community’s organization and recommend improvements, short of legislation.
 
In March 1971, Deputy OMB Director James R. Schlesinger  issued “A Review of the Intelligence Community,” a tome in forty-seven pages. It noted the IC’s “impressive rise in...size and cost” with the “apparent inability to achieve a commensurate improvement in the scope and overall quality of intelligence products.”
 
Stop me if you have heard this before. The Schlesinger report was not the first and would not be the last by several such commissions, panels and reports that have said the same thing.
 
It really is a hoot to read all the reports and have them all say essentially the same thing, right up through the 9/11 Commission and the Preliminary Report on the Fruit of Kaboom underwear bomber last month.
 
This report identified several areas in which constructive change could take place. A good place to start- and make no mistake, this was a drill about saving some of the enormous amount of money spent lifting submarines off the ocean floor and blasting constellations of satellites into space.
 
I remember the summer that Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, and the pride we all felt at the great gamble. It was only much later that I realized the elegance of the whole thing. ,NASA’s peaceful program was the perfect vehicle on which to hitch the other two space programs: ballistic missiles and space-based reconnaissance.
 
It was not a cover, and it was not an evil plot. It was just a product line of things all built at Lockheed and Boeing,  all built in the same place.  I was in a tour one time at the Lock-Mart vehicle assembly building our in California.
 
There were showing my industry group some solar panels that were going to be attached to the International Space Station. They were articulated for deployment, and as the technician demonstrated the process, I realized that there was a vehicle at the back of the hall as big as a small school bus.

I knew what it was, and nudged one of the Company officials. He grinned and didn’t say anything. It was not on the unclassified tour. Sometimes the best way to hide things is to leave them right in plain sight. I got that feeling about a lot of things in the 1970s.
 
Rex’s time back in Washington was a heady one, no kidding. The DNI had to be a persuasive advocate of Navy’s unique requirements for information from the orbital collectors. The broad ocean is quite a different place from the narrow confined of the Fulda Gap where the garrison forces of the Army and Air Force opposing the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany.
 
With the war in Asia done, there had to be a way to eliminate  “unproductively duplicative” collection systems and improve planning for a future architectural that was not so painfully redundant.
 
I have often been of the opinion the redundancy in combat systems is no vice, if you happen to have your ass on the line, but you can certainly understand where Jim Schlesinger was coming from. We did it all over again after the Berlin Wall fell, and probably could have recycled the same point papers.
 
Anyway, the real thrust of the Schlesinger report was that the president wanted someone to be in charge of the IC and no one had expressed any particular interest in doing it.
 
My pal Mac described how things worked before the War began to wind down, and the Congress and the Administration began to demand a sort of peace dividend. I will have to recount the notes I have on those cocktail napkins tomorrow.
 
I need to get back to Washington. There is a motorcycle show and a baby shower for a woman who is probably old enough to know better. She has been deployed to Afghanistan, so in the great scheme of things, I want to support her vote for life in the midst of the culture of death.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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