13 May 2008
 
Executive Order

 
This has been quite a rollercoaster of a few days, and I apologize for being a little low-profile. I got a note from a pal who was concerned that I had been waylaid by hostile attorneys, and I hastened to set the situation stright.
 
There is some lawyer stuff going on- there always is. The big deal downtown is about the Executive Order, though that has not been much in the press, and of course there are other predators prowling around one of my contracts and up to no good.
 
I wrote back to assure my pal that the Fairfax County District Court was not the most immediate problem. First, the rain and energy that has fallen on us has been quite remarkable. Bob Ryan, the local weather icon, was chastised on air when he said the amount of fresh water that dumped on us was enough to give everyone on earth three glasses of fresh water for months.
 
His normal precision was off by a significant order of magnitude- it was enough to provide everyone fresh water for years, had it been captured and not run off across the asphalt or otherwise been wasted.
 
Of course, if it helps the depleted water table at all, that is a good thing.
 
Still, the happy confluence of cold air and gentle Nor'easter that brought the water also dragged along a dank chill. Tunnel 8, along with the rest of Big Pink, is not prepared to deal with the cold. 
 
The replacement of the failing pipes that carry the hot and cold water that give us heat and air conditioning has left us a as a vast cold concrete structure. The replacement had to be done at the change-over of the season. A few short-cuts made long ago resulted in the failure to install the necessary valves at the top an bottom of each column of risers. Accordingly, it is not possible to isolate different zones of the system.
 
It this were an aircraft carrier, a torpedo hit in the lobby could not be remedied by counter-flooding at the service entrance, and the whole mighty edifice would capsize. The fix will result in the installation of the appropriate check-valves that should permit us to stay upright in the event of the most severe attack.
 
Of course, to do so, the whole system had to be drained, and the Board issued an executive order that the contractors would use the change of season to drain the whole system. The workmen have been hauling bright copper pipe and inserting it, length by length, into the walls in a curious procedure With the return of the cold, and unable to distribute hot water to the convectors, the chinks in the windows let it in, and the massive concrete frame gathered it to its hard bosom. 
 
The temperature was in the 40s, twenty degrees lower that average for May. I put on a jacket to work on the proposal that is due at two this afternoon; I gave it a half-assed effort after Nick left last night to go over it and correct some of the more obvious glitches. The government released it only last Tuesday, and it is hard to create a technical document in less than a week, particularly if selfish people want to take Mothers Day to do something with their Mothers.
 
When you lay that over the slightly longer turn-around times for the other two things we are bidding on, it made the sequencing of the tasks a challenge. There is a court fight about the one down south which is disconcerting- I flinch when I hear the word "lawyer" these days- but I was not the lead on that project, just a contributor. There was no impediment to the one for which I am responsible, which is to find thirty people to qualified to analyze what the Iranians are up to, which is a lot.
 
I reviewed around eighty or ninety resumes of people to do that over the weekend, till ten Saturday night, right through Prairie Home Companion and Hot Jazz Saturday Night on the radio- and drafted the technical approach for how to do so all day Sunday while the rains came and soaked everything in chill gray.
 
I am not complaining about the workload, since it is a worthy effort, but I looked at the clock last night, and at 8:45 turned off the computer, took off my jeans, put on a sweater and went to bed.
 
For the first time in weeks I slept to the music alarm, and then through the beeper, and forty-five minutes beyond that. I dreamed several times, and not one of them was a nightmare. Still cold this morning, though the sky is turning blue, and they say we may make it up to the seventies today, 
 
I checked the mail, shivering, as the light came up outside. Siobhan Gorman is a crackerjack reporter. She works for the Baltimore Sun, and her beat covers Fort Meade, home of the National Security Agency. She has some good sources there, and the Agency, which is one of the larger regional employers, exercises tremendous influence.
 
A pal sent along one of her dispatches, which shines a light on the bitter turf-fight that is going on in the waning days of the Bush Administration.
 
The West Virginia primary is today- Hillary’s last hurrah, they say. No one is paying much attention to the Chief Executive, who is showing his contempt for Baghdad-on-the-Potomac by holding the marriage of his daughter in Crawford, Texas, rather than the White House.
 
The story was not in the Post, nor the Times, and that is why Siobhan is to be commended for shining a light on a desperate rear-guard action being fought in the intelligence community.
 
They are re-writing the Executive Order that governs how the IC works. It is a big deal, the biggest in a quarter century. I remember the first time I glibly started a sentence with “Well, EO 12333 clearly states….”
 
You can assert a lot of things about documents few people have read. The EO lays out the authorities of the various players in the shadow world, and sadly, there are those who do not “play well with others.”
 
You would think that the seven years since 9/11 would have brought cohesion. That the appointment of a Director of National Intelligence and the deployment of battalions of new bureaucrats would have fixed the many problems of coordination.
 
At this late date would you believe that a full-scope polygraph good enough for the Central Intelligence Agency is not sufficient to work at NSA? That a clearance at the Defense Department is not good enough for Customs and Border Protection?
 
It is absurd, but there it is. And that is only a symptom of how deep the problems remain.
 
The reforms in legislation have been half-baked, and the result of compromise in the Congress. The new DNI never got the authority to write the budget of his fifteen components, nor the power to hire and fire his subordinate Directors.
 
As such, his powers were as severely limited as Leo’s, as the Engineer of  Big Pink. He could do nothing to one part of the heating system without having to shut down all the rest of it.  Director Mike McConnell is determined to fix the system in the last months of his mandate.
 
His unruly subordinates- led by the fiercely independent folks at Fort Meade- are digging their heels in, and trying to play out the clock in the hopes the next Administration will have a different opinion.
 
I think the IC has to do what we did at Big Pink. Bite the bullet and replace the whole thing. If it means that we shiver for a couple days, that is just the cost of doing the right thing.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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