12 October 2007

Blackbird

I am glad I am not preparing for meetings in the Kremlin this morning, like Secretaries Rice and Gates are doing this morning. I suspect there will be a curl on the Russian lip when they met Mr. Putin, and the Intermediate Range Missile Treaty and the Conventional Forces in Europe agreement seem ready to fall apart.

With that will go the last treaties between the old USSR and the US. Back to Square One, it appears, and the work of the Administration seems about done. My career was spent half trying to support the intricate construction of all those telephone-book-sized agreements, and the other half dealing with the consequences of something that seemed like victory at the time.

Hell of a way to finish the week, and we all have meetings on Monday. Thank God I don't have to get on an airplane to get back to them.

I suspect it will be a better weekend, though bittersweet, for Al Gore, who got a consolation Nobel Peace Prize for his famous movie about how we are going to hell in a handbasket.

That should make him feel a bit better when he runs into Jimmy Carter, though of course Mr. Carter has the Secret Service with him for life as an entitlement of being President, and Mr. Gore does not. Who knows, though. I imagine Hillary is fuming today about the possibility that Al could sleep-walk into the Democratic Presidential nomination now, sleek and rested.

I will never have to worry about that, but I now have a Nobel Laureate who pulled a political stunt on me, which is a bit of a consolation prize on my side, too.

The moment that Al had me briefly in his cross-hairs was during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The whole thing was surreal. The issue at hand was the status of Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq; the time was the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf War and the coincidental collapse of the Soviet Union.

We were all a little distracted at the time, and disoriented, too. The Main Enemy had abandoned the ramparts, the Wall was down, and every day brought new world of some part of the Evil Empire spinning off into intoxicating freedom.

There should have been great joy, since the Cold War was over. The target data in the missiles was down-loaded and put away in a vault somewhere in Omaha. The long uneasy twilight of fear was done.

Of course, the business of taking apart the great defense machine had to commence before we were quite done with affairs with Saddam, who was still very much there. Encouraged by the current President's father, the Shia in the south and the Kurds in the north rose against him. We failed to do much to support them, and those who took up arms were cut down, along with wives and children and pensioners.

We all agreed it was unfortunate. Eventually, Mr. Hussein paid for his crimes, though his walk to the gallows came at a price so vast that we cannot begin to see the end of it yet.   

Back then, we went to work on disassembling the great war machine. It was a transitional moment for me, the first time I was not concerned with operational intelligence matters. I was introduced to the money side of the business, the great annual torrent of greenbacks that paid for it all.

Congress was turning the valve on the money, tightening the flow. They were determined to harvest a Peace Dividend, and the system was so complex as to defy ordinary human understanding. The only real way they could do it was simple blunt force. They cut the budget, and left it to us to figure out the details at the Pentagon.

There were a lot of possibilities, and the knives came out swiftly. It seemed that some of the wily bureaucrats had not been engaged in supporting the war to liberate Kuwait, but rather had circled their programmatic wagons to defend their projects.

I could ramble on about some of them, things of great mystery and potential now long dead, but others still exist in the Black World, and we will have to leave them alone. There is one that could stand as the poster-child for the whole astonishing enterprise, a symbol of the greatness of a nation, the foolishness of its leaders, and courage of a small number of Spooks.
I am talking about the Blackbird, of course, and that magical airplane can stand as metaphor for it all.

General Mike Hayden is director of the Central Intelligence Agency these days, the Last Man Standing of his generation of active military officers. He has outlasted all his rivals, and he certainly outlasted me, though I remember barging into his office at intervals across three decades and three continents as he rose.

Mike is putting a Blackbird up on a pole near the headquarters building at Langley. He managed to get the sleek jet out of the hands of the Minnesota Air National Guard and delivered to the parking lot last week, just in time to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the CIA.

Why the CIA had its own Air Force has a curious irony that will have to remain secret, since not all the concealment is done even yet. But the Blackbird links Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton directly in a parabolic curve of history, a streaking arc across the heavens.

Blackbird was intended to fly so high and so fast that nothing on earth could stop it. It was a technical success so mind-boggling that it may represent the end of the line for human flight. Anything else is pure rocket.

In the middle of May, 1980, I was standing the eve watch at the headquarters of US Forces Korea, at the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul. The watch ended at eleven, giving me an hour to get back to my hooch before the military curfew commenced at midnight. There was uncertainly and angst in the bunker. The Korean military had killed President Park the previous December, and the graduates of the Korean Military Academy Class Eleven were moving troops in the night.

They failed to report the redeployment to the American General who was in theoretical command. It would be uncharitable to describe the atmosphere on our part as panic; better, it might be termed bemused concern with what our junior partners might be up to.

That could not be said of the huddle of ROK Generals in the conference room who were not graduates of Class Eleven. We had the means to ascertain the situation on the ground, and the folks in the collection management shop had whistled it up. Messages flew between Seoul and Omaha and Kadena. A mission was scheduled and launched from Okinawa. The watchers who monitored the end the of the runway there must have been surprised, since the American reconnaissance flights were normally fairly predictable.

I was nearing the end of the parking lot when I heard the sound of the Blackbird. It was far too high to hear the sound of the engines, but there was unmistakable evidence that it was there, eighty or ninety thousand feet above the Korean capital.

First came a sonic boom, a great basso profoundo note that rattled the windows in the compound. Then there was another. Boom. Boom.

The Colonel up there is doing something over Mach Two, I thought, not as fast as he can go. Using infrared sensors to mark the positions of the troops, Blackbird singing in the dead of night.

Looking down not at the North Koreans, which was normally the case, but at me and my Korean allies.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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