Vic Socotra

18 June 2008

Cave dwellers

Comment le Pédé Va T’il?, Part Two

Philipe Thyraud de Vosjoli, Chief of the SDECE

1952 in Washington.

The War years had transformed Washington from a sleepy southern town to the bustling center of a new world. While assigned to the Naval District Intelligence office at the Observatory, I had a room in the Kalorama neighborhood north of Dupont Circle, where the city butts up against Rock Creek Park.

Kalorama is Greek, for “beautiful view,” by the way, and that name dated back to the days when the Navy erected the Observatory on the undeveloped property on Massachusetts Ave. There was a manor house by that name near what is now the intersection of S and 23rd Streets NW, but it was leveled by the District government to drive S street through to Mass Ave.

The Statler Hotel was not far away, but I could not afford anything like that. a great destination, though the old advertising slogan that went “A room and a bath for a buck-and-a-half” had no more relevance than the Motel Six’s connection to that number of dollars for a night’s stay does today.

There were no quarters for enlisted military folks, so we were pretty much on our own, or helped out by our commands to find rooms to rent.

On my boss’s recommendation and connections, I wound up in Kalorama, the heart of the Cave Dwellers, the old-line families who lived in Washington year-round. I was among the most transient of the passers-through in the capital, so it was curious to live among them.

A "cave dweller" was specifically a resident of Kalorama Heights, which that included the residents of the grand houses of Embassy Row. President Wilson's widow, the former Mrs. Gault who might have been the first female president when her husband had his stroke still lived in the house down the street from me. Other typical Cave Dwellers were senior and mid-level bureaucrats in the federal government down the hill. The popular origin of the term might have been the attitude they sported when Franklin Roosevelt came to town.

The old-timers considered the New Deal a socialist plot, and for their part, the Roosevelt Administration considered the entrenched bureaucrats as an un-evolved species of cave people.

The irony is that the Roosevelt Administration substantially increased the number of cave dwellers, who flooded into town with the Great Depression and never left. The War increased their numbers to the bursting point. There was never enough housing to accommodate them all.

It was funny, in a way, that some of the foreigners had been in Kalomora long enough to be Cave Dwellers. Next door to me was “The French School,” part of a worldwide network of French language and cultural centers that were in more than a hundred countries around the world.

It was no surprise that Philipe Thyraud de Vosjoli, Chief of the SDECE, had his office across the street, or that the permanent residence of the French Ambassador was around the corner and on the park on Kalorama Road.

All the major intelligence services had a presence in Washington, starting in the war, and the best officers were those that had been around long enough to achieve Cave Dweller status.

De Vosjoli was a short, balding man who later became the only French intelligence officer ever to defect to the United States. He was certainly a cave dweller, and his office was not far away from the home of Rear Admiral Carl F. Espe, USN.

The Admiral had been a Pacific Destroyerman in WWII, and was well respected in the business. He had been in town on-and-off long enough to be a Cave Dweller himself, and became the 40th Director of Naval Intelligence in December of 1952. He wound up serving until 1956, halfway through the Eisenhower Administration, right through the time that the nuclear navy was being born.

We generally went to work about the same time, and being in uniform, we would often stop and have a few words.

The Admiral had just taken over the helm of the oldest intelligence agency in the US Government, and maybe the most respected. Perhaps seeing me regularly in the morning is why he thought of me. He had a big problem, and the French Service was pretty upset.

I was told that Captain Noble Abrahams, the District Intelligence Officer, wanted to see me. He called me into his office in the big old building at the Observatory and said the DNI needed to see me right away.

One of the Special Agents brought a car around to take me down to the Pentagon, and would wait to bring me back.

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