07 January 2010
 
Fifty-Five on Forty-Eight

(The Pentagon, circa 1970)

Fifty-five called me up the other day. He left a note on my machine in the office, and I listened to it, looking at the great pit across the street where the new DARPA building is going to rise and block my view of the low rolling hills of Fairfax County to the west.
 
The note was brusque and all business. He did not call me up to talk about history- if you know Terrible Ted, you know that he is pretty focused on what he is doing at any given time. It is the New Year, like it or not, and he was going over his notes from before the Holidays and making plans to move forward after the enforced joviality of the season.
 
I am down a quart on the holiday spirit, but I am a pro and I always return my calls,
 
He has not given up being Admiral Ted just because he is not wearing the uniform any more. He is another of those forces of nature one encounters in the course of military career. His brand of weather may have been derived from his time as a deck officer, I don’t know. Like Rex, Ted commanded a minesweeper- the USS Persistent (MSO-491).
 
Ted was one of my favorite DNIs. He made things happen, including several really cool initiatives that other people were delighted to take credit for when they worked out well.
The Joint Worldwide Communications System (JWICS) is one of them, the de facto command and control system of the US Government, and another is the Predator drone that is lobbing rockets into al Qaida’s living rooms today.
 
Having served more than 35 years, Ted hung up the stars in 1995, the year that my career took a strange and radical divergence toward Vietnam and North Korea, via Port au Prince.
 
Ted was not responsible for all that, since Fifty-Six was the one who trampled all over my life, but on the whole, I got far more from the experiences than it cost me at the time.
 
In the chronology of things, Rex was Director of Naval Intelligence number Forty-Eight; Fritz Harlfinger was Forty-Seven. Ted fits between Tom, (Fifty-Four) and Mike, (Fifty-Six).
 
It is funny, looking over the list. I did not come on active duty until the year after Rex retired, but one way or another I have known all the Directors since Fritz, one way or another. Maybe more surprisingly, I have liked them all, without exception, warts and all.
 
Being the DNI was a big deal, in its time. He had a major role in controlling, or at least operating, two no-shit National Programs that meant a lot of scurrying around at State and Langley and even bounced into the Oval Office on occasion.
 
The long narrow office suite was located up there on the fifth floor of the old Pentagon. You could see the sky from the windows above the pale dun concrete of the “D” Wing. That suite had its stories, let me tell you.
 
Or not tell you, which is the better course of action. We can certainly talk about the men who have held the office; that much is a matter of public record, even if what they did is not. I also have every confidence that there will be a woman Director, too, one of these days.
 
I think I know who that might be, but that is not the point of this. We are looking back right now, not forward, though goodness knows the past is painting the present with broad -brush strokes.
 
Jack is the current DNI, number sixty-four in the line-up, but he is also something so new that it is old again. Number fifty-five told me about what he did, working for Rex, number forty-eight, to unravel what number forty-seven did on his way out the door.
 
The radio wars of World War Two have been a problem since forever. The splitting of intelligence- an all-source discipline if there ever was one- has been artificially sundered on the rocks of secrecy. My pal Pete wrote a nice appreciation of the whole mess in the context of the latest Islamic loony who tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit with exploding underwear.
 
His blog entry- suitably reviewed by security officials is at http://commonsense4unitedstates.blogspot.com/

Periodically the big Navy, in it’s wisdom and folly, attempts to bring things together into one unified bag. Jack has been charged by a dynamic CNO to bring the cryptologists and the weather guessers and the communicators and the intel weenies all together into one tent. The CNO has given Jack the resources and the rank to do what needs to be done, and there is every chance that Jack will be able to pull it off.
 
At least until he and the CNO move on. We will see all that in Rex’s career, past as prologue, when we get to what Ted told me about actually working for Rex when the decade of the 1970s was all new and things looked dire.
 
That is what we actually got to, when the current events discussion was done. I told Ted that I was working on a sort of half-assed biography of Rex and his times, and that touched off a torrent of recollection.
 
I asked if he had worked for Forty-Eight, and it turned out that Fifty-Five had learned just about everything he knew about intelligence from Rex, the equivalent of a PhD in the art, you might say. Ted would know about that, since his brusque manner conceals an elegant way of thinking and a Georgetown Masters degree in Foreign Service.
 
I learned a lot from both of them.
 
Ted was a Lieutenant Commander, and an up-and-comer, for a newly arrived surface line officer in the intelligence discipline. He was a horse-holder in he front office to the legendary Bobbie Ray Inman, who was Rex’s Executive Assistant and a dauntingly efficient Navy Captain. So efficient, in fact, that Bobbie Ray came back upstairs as a flag officer himself to relieve Rex in a couple years, and then went on to be the first spook to make four stars on his own, and was even nominated to be Secretary of Defense, the first intelligence officer to be so nominated before Bob Gates actually got the job.
 
Bobbie Ray was so good that the Vice Chief scooped him up to be his own Exec, and as Ted said, “When four stars talks to two, the two says “Aye-Aye.”
 
So Rex was left without an Exec for weeks, and cast his net wide for a likely Captain to replace him. No one appeared suitable. Maybe it was the command at sea, since they both had commanded small ships on the big ocean, or maybe it was that internal toughness in Ted that appealed to Rex.
 
Whatever it was, eventually Rex offered the job to Ted, Forty-Eight to the eventual Fifty-Five.
 
Ted took the job, of course, but Rex offered a caution at the time from his hooded eyes.
 
“Ted,” he said gently. “In this job you are going to be giving orders to a lot of Navy Captains. I recommend you be gentle. Someday I will be gone, and you will still be here.”
 
It was an interesting ride, while it lasted, and featured the other real war that continued with savagery in 1971- the war inside the Pentagon.
 
More on that tomorrow.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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