18 December 2009
 
The Bureau

Federal Office Building Number 2- 1990- the Navy Annex

The snow is coming tonight, they say, maybe heavy. It will not be the first of the year, though if it is as bad as they say, it will snarl the capital for days.
 
I remember my first real Washington snowfall. It was Veteran’s Day of 1987, a blizzard so pernicious in timing and intensity that it caught us at work at the Navy Annex and made the commute home an epic seven hours. It put us almost into the rhythm of Civil War times, since it would have been faster to walk the fifteen miles back out to Fairfax than it was to drive.
 
I have to be in Charlottesville before the white stuff starts to fall, so if you don’t hear from me for a while, don’t be concerned. It just means Washington is closed, like it was, back in the day.
 
I was at the Bureau back then, though we didn’t call it by the traditional name. In some paroxysm of modernization, I had been ordered to report to the Naval Military Personnel Command (NMPC) which had always been called the Bureau of Personnel (BuPers) since time immemorial, or at least since Millie Doyle signed on as a GS-1 and began running the Navy Intelligence Community.
 
I don’t know where they did those things when the Bureau was an office in the larger Bureau of Navigation, one of the miscellaneous activities attached to the big shore command. I assume it was at the Navy Yard downtown at some point, and then at Main Navy, the World War One temporary structure that flanked the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial.
 
From there, It migrated to The Intelligence Assignments Office was in the Sixth wing of Federal Office Building No. 2 for several decades on the bluff above the Pentagon, and for one awful moment, directly under the flight path of American Airlines Flight 77, the one flown by the murderer Hani Hanjou.
 
The Navy Annex, as it is known even today, is on Columbia Pike. It was built as a warehouse in 1941, at the same time as the massive Pentagon below, and never intended to be a permanent structure, which is why it is still in use almost seventy years later. It was to the identical plan of dun-colored brick as the Census Department (and Naval Intelligence) complex that is now being razed at Suitland, Maryland, so there is hope that it will be destroyed sometime in the future, even as the 8th Wing was destroyed to accommodate the Air Force Memorial.

Arlington Cemetery is always a looming presence across the street and beyond the low ornamental stone wall.

For the career officer, the assumption is that ultimately we would move from the uncontrolled parking along the wall going up the hill to something more permanent on the other side. We would jog the perimeter sometimes to burn off frustration with the unreasonable expectations of the people we dealt with, and joked that we hoped that we would not be buried with an eternal view of the Annex.

Rex is going home there to Arlington, to lie beside Dee, who passed away fourteen years before him.

Interestingly, the FY2000 Defense Authorizations Act included provisions that eventually would transfer the whole 37-acre Navy property to the cemetery to accommodate increased usage. It is entirely possible to consider the prospect that one day I could be buried under where my desk- and Rex’s- was located.  

I know for sure where the office was in July 1962, when Rex, Dee and Earl came back from Moscow.
 
Rex was to be The Detailer, the guy who cut the orders for all the intelligence personnel- all male, in those days- and who at times was viewed as the all-powerful face of the Navy to the supplicants, or the lackey to the Director of Naval Intelligence, depending on where you were watching the movie.
 
Promotion timing, selection boards, community management, all that stuff was done from Rex’s desk, and the phones never stopped ringing.
 
John Kennedy was still alive and Camelot was in full flower when Rex took the desk.
 
So was Millie Doyle, one of the great originals of Naval Intelligence, though she wouldn’t acknowledge it. Mille started with BuPers when it was still part of the Bureau of Navigation, which is more years than I would like to think, and she still thought Emory Sourbeer was the greatest Detailer who ever lived.
 
All the rest of us were held to that standard, and naturally we were found wanting to some degree.
 
The office I remember was on the ground floor of the sixth corridor, and our office code was “4411,” or, Restricted Line and Staff Corps Intelligence Assignments. You could still smoke at your desk in Federal buildings then, and my second year on the job, when they made it illegal and I had moved over to the desk by the window, I could open it and lean outside without ever missing a phone call.
 
Ancient lore in the office, older than the Spider Monkey plant named Captain West, though not nearly as old as Millie, held that Pers-4411 had once been all the way up on the fourth deck, in the open bays near the Pers-44 headquarters.
 
That was too close for comfort, and meant the Detailer could be summoned directly into the office of the Big Navy officers who reported directly up to Chief NavPers, the three-star Admiral who imagined that he commanded our little tribe of officers.
 
We knew it was actually the DNI who ran our lives, and that made for a bit of a challenge in the job, having a bifurcated chain of command.
 
It was the triumph of one senior Detailer to seize a re-organizational opportunity to get 4411 our own little office down below, where we could work in blissful anonymity near the Surface and General Unrestricted Line sausage factory.
 
It was often said that the only person a Detailer could lie to was another Detailer, since like Lewis Carroll, we knew that it was absolutely possible to believe two impossible things before breakfast, and that the most extraordinary- and foolish- of things sometimes were quite true.
 
The officers we talked to on the phone, and the Attaches we recruited for posts overseas just assumed we were lying all the time.
 
That much had not changed in the office, though many other things had. Millie had served in the office when Rex was there.
 
I remember attending her funeral years ago, with a little gaggle of her boys and girls that had watched her mastery of the personnel system down through the years.
 
She helped Rex do what he had to do. There were delicate circumstances that came up in the course of the job, and the unwritten rule of the Personnel Manual was that you could do anything not restricted by the laws of physics so long as it was in the interest of the Navy.
 
Millie could subvert any new system with a few days study, and she would have helped Rex manage the special circumstances that came along with the little strips of paper and special racks to hold them that showed the Projected Rotation Date (PRD) for every officer on the great rotation of naval orders.
 
The Service is always a reactive organization, and the personnel system is always the tail being wagged by the Navy dog growling seaward form the nation’s beaches.
 
The Missile Crisis had come and gone while Rex was living and working in the heart of the enemy- if you think the duck-and-cover Civil Defense drills that presaged our collective doom were intense here, imagine what they were like in the Soviet Union.
 
A respected pal wrote me about what it was like when Rex was the Detailer. He said that as he grows older, the Navy recedes farther and farther into the past. Today's community continues to change with the times.
 
In his day, which overlapped Rex, he said “It really was entirely different. There were only a few dozen of us who came in as designated intelligence officers and moved up the ladder. The entire community back then was only about 280 officers, primarily LCDR and above from Restricted Line Transfer.“
 
“The billets we had as junior officers were entirely different than today's community. A number of us had some fascinating adventures doing things that simply are not being done any more. Several of us could write books about some of the remarkable (and sometimes pretty dumb) things we did, and survived.”
 
As an example, the former DNI thought “…of a fellow named Jack, who volunteered to be air-dropped onto an abandoned Soviet floating ice station, thence to be picked up via a jury-rigged "hook and snatch" operation using an airplane grabbing a wire being held up by a balloon. Jack was on the other end of the wire. He was then winched up into the airplane.”
 
“It actually worked. Can you imagine?”
 
I can imagine, all right. Rex could, too, I think. At his desk in the Navy Annex in 1962 and 1963, he began to get calls from the Pentagon about a new emphasis area that the personnel folks were expected to resource with talented officers.
 
President Kennedy had a new priority in his foreign policy, one that had a little swagger to it after the uncertainty of the Missile Crisis. The Navy was going to try to meet the new requirement.
 
There was a growing insurgency overseas, and it was critical to regional security that the United States intervene.
 
Rex nodded at the instructions, and starting making some calls to talk to people about a place called Vietnam.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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