20 March 2004

It was the last day of winter and I was walking into one of the Agency buildings. It was not one of the famous ones, though the Chinese restaurant across the street was said to have a silent partner in the People's Liberation Army. I had to swipe my badge through the card reader so there was an electronic recrod of my appearance. The guards knew me by sight and I had no briefcase, so otherwise I was a non-issue and they continued to talk about basketball.

I was there in the late afternoon, hoping to low-key the visit, clear out some files and continue the slow process of eliminating my presence in that particular office. I was something else across town, in another lower-profile vault. It was much more challenging, and I love the adrenaline rush that goes along with great forces in play.

As I ran the card through the slot I heard the elevator announce the arrival of a car at the ground floor with a sharp "ding."

From it issued a small party in muted Washington business dress. They were escorted by a severe faced young bureaucrat, so I assumed they were outside consultants like me. I registered surprise as they came toward the metal detector.

One of them was a tall man with silver hair. I smiled and stuck out my hand. It was Cedric.

"Hello!" I said. "Are you retired now?"

"Hey!" he responded and gripped mine. "Yep, I'm gone and doing independent work. Just here to help," he smiled broadly.

We did not use names. He was high profile enough at the end of his career that he no longer had to use his alias, couldn't really. He was a legendary operator, one of the great ones who had survived a distinguished career in the transition from trench-coats to satellites and back again.

He was the manager of an activity over which I theoretically had policy oversight responsibility. I spent a lot of time over on his side of the campus, in the Directorate for Operations, trying to figure out what Cedric's organization was up to.

They were doing great things. You would be proud of them if you knew, but they were reluctant enough to tell me, much less a greater audience. That is the problem with the Spy trade. Failure comes with ridicule and publicity. Success comes with silence. Sometimes that silence included those above them in the chain of command. But as they say, operational security is paramount.

The gloves had come off. Lives were at stake then as they are now.

With all the explosions of late it was easy to forget how we felt right after 9-11. We thought the campus where we worked itself was a target that day. After watching the towers come down in New York on the TV I stepped away from a spare desk I was occupying in the emergency relocation facility where they had taken the leadership to get them off the seventh floor of the old Headquarters.

Someone said there was still and airplane up there, unaccounted for, and it was headed our way.

I did not know at the time that the airplane in question had already plowed into a field in the Pennsylvania. I went outside to have a cigarette and watch the attack.

In the weeks that followed I spent a lot of time with Cedric's people. They had some unique skills that were most valuable as we rolled up Afghanistan and began to prepare to take Saddam Hussein down. Policy got mixed up in operations, and vice versa. It was a time of great unease.

I was in Cedric's office one afternoon. We were waiting on something and he had time to kill. He spent an hour spinning tales of his days as a Station Chief out there, dealing with ambiguity and subtlety in the region. He spoke of some of the clown and poseurs in the business, and of some heroes.

He had flown from Washington one night through London and onto another jet and finally into the capital of an ambiguous and subtle country. He had word for the Ruler, who was an ambiguous and subtle man who often had to say one thing and do another.

Cedric arrived at the palace thoroughly jet-lagged and discovered that a considerably less ambiguous delegation from another country was already in the foyer. An alert courtier grabbed Cedric and steered him into a little waiting room with a television and some overstuffed furniture.

"Shhshh!" he said, finger to his lips, and pointed to the couch.

It was have been inconvenient for the chief of the American intelligence presence to mingle with the Ruler's other guests. Hospitality being what it is in the Mid-east, Cedric sat down on the couch and prepared to wait to deliver his message.

The room was still and dark and it had been a long flight. The couch was soft.

Cedric's dream was filled with clocks and the sound of a metronome. He opened his eyes, disoriented, and saw a riding crop methodically slapping the side of a tailored pair of riding breeches. His eyes followed the dark whip up the graceful whip-cord covered curve of a youthful thigh and looked into the lovely eyes of the Ruler's wife.

"I'm glad you are awake, Sleepy-head," she said. "We have been entertaining and quite forgot about you. Your Embassy has been calling all over town. They think you have been kidnapped." She smiled, amused that the chief of spies had been peacefully asleep in the room next to her parlor while radicals railed at the moderates.

Cedric rose from the couch and followed her to see the Ruler and deliver the message. He would have to get the Embassy to call off the dogs, but that could wait. It could just as easily have been exactly what they feared.

That was the nature of business in an ambiguous and subtle place.

I waved as Cedric's party walked past security and toward the underground garage. He waved back and smiled. He looks a lot more relaxed, now that he is retired.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra