07 June 2009
 
Termites

 
(Termite Damage to Interior Walls)
 
I had to get a termite inspection the other day- or, better phrased, had to have someone else get one. It was on a piece of property I have been eying, and the Terminex People have to guarantee that there are no insects ceaselessly gnawing away at the wooden joints that connect the structure to the foundations.
 
Over time, apparently the pesky little buggers will completely eat the wooden fiber away, and the whole thing can come down like a house of cards.
 
The nice thing about the certificate is that the holder-in-due-course then has the option of seeking legal remedy in case the termites were there all along, munching away.
 
I don’t know what I will do with the results of the inspection- it is just another factor like the list of numbers I go over endlessly to see what is in the realm of the possible. I have the advantage of being a private citizen in this matter, with choice.
 
The Government does not. Big Pink, for example, was built to the exacting specifications of Frances Freed and her Czech architect, Vlastimil Koubek. The concrete framing is as hard as 1964, and it will take the application of WMD to bring it down.
 
That was not the case with the Army Security Agency buildings across the street at the Girl’s School the Army occupied in 1941 to conduct secret business against the Japanese Naval and Diplomatic codes, and later, the traffic or our erstwhile Allies, the Soviet Union.
 
I have several pals who worked there later, after the Army pulled out for Fortress Meade over inMaryland and when the Defense Intelligence Agency was established.
 
There is quite a story about how that came to be, and how the Agency left the tranquility of the Buckingham neighborhood to become FortApache over at Bolling Air Force Base on the wrong side of the Anacostia River. But that can wait for another day.
 
What the new Agency had in 1964 was the one stately building and two long barns of wood that had been intended only to last long enough to win a war. Of course, it was never clear which one that was.

The eternal temps were surrounded in double-concertina wire, as befitted their status as being of the highest security rating the government could bestow.
 
Never mind about the termites, or the fact that the walls were no longer plumb and the windows would not close, or that the carpets were woven of toxic material that would poison the analysts if it burned.
 
That was not the worst of it. The engineers who were called in to examine the facilities cheerfully explained that the sprinkler system that had been added in the 1950s would promptly extinguish any blaze.
 
Of course, the extra weight of all that water in the rugs would also cause all three stories to collapse and crush all those inside. The place was undermined with termites and rot.
 
That is the short answer for why the Agency left, and in the course of things, the property was offered up to other elements of the Federal Bureaucracy.
 
The State Department had a need for a new building to accommodate their foreign language training, nothing particularly sensitive in that, and the wire was taken down, and someone leaned on the old wooden buildings and they collapsed into dust.
 
A grand new complex was planned for the site, but unfortunately, they got termites immediately.
 
The story was just revealed last week with the arrest of two of them- career State Department officials who had been spying for Fidel Castro since the complex was commissioned back in the late 1970s.
 
These termites have been gnawing away at the nation’s secrets since the State Department took occupancy of the stately headquarters and the two massive splinterville buildings “A” and “B” in the back yard.
 
I happened to have wormed my way onto the compound the other day. I was curious to see where the old wooden buildings had stood, and traced the path of the old walkways from Big Pink down George Mason Drive. The concrete pedestrian underpasses are still there, though now the double-wire is there to seal them off.
 
There is another one that leads under Route 50, and it is still open. It is pretty scary, though, and smells of urine.
 
Walter Kendall Myers and his lovely spouse are spies of another generation. Let’s face it,Washington is a banal town filled with pasty-gray wage slaves. Most of the big-time spies of the Cold War worked for cash, and not a great deal of it, considering what they sold off.
 
Hannsen, Pelton, Aimes, Walker- the list goes on and on. Small men with small suburban dreams. Banal. Traitorous. Contemptible.
 
Mr. Myers was more in the line of the Soviets who penetrated the government at every level in the 1930s and 40s. He was a True Believer, like Alger Hiss and the other traitors that the Army SIGINTers identified right there at Arlington Hall in the VENONA exploit of Soviet diplomatic communications.
 
Myer had the yacht and the lineage to support his higher truth. His mother was the granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. The family had been prominent here in town for generations.
 
He was well spoken, and if what I read is correct, a dilettante. He came to his political conclusions in the wake of the Vietnam War. He lived in the District, in posh NW, the part that has nothing to do with the squalor south and east of Capitol Hill.
 
We spooks live paycheck to paycheck all of our government lives, accepting our lot in exchange for a certain creature comfort and the certainty that what we do is making a difference for something greater than ourselves.
 
Apparently Mr. Myers had that, too, and was inspired to work for the Cuban revolution by observations of  what he called “the Greedy Oil Companies,” and the crappy American health care system. The lack of revolutionary zeal among the oppressed apparently pissed him off, too, and he determined to do something about it after a trip to Cuba.
 
Mr. Myers started out at the Foreign Service Institute, and eventually wormed his way into State I&R, one of the small-fry (but well respected) branches of the Intelligence Community. They say he had a Top Secret Clearance, but you know the Press. They cannot get anything right, or complete, so it is hard to evaluate what material he might have had access to.
 
He and his wife Gwendolyn certainly provided more than simple aid and comfort to the Cubans. There was a description in the Government filing about their tradecraft, shortwave radios and swapping out shopping carts at the Giant Supermarket and stuff like that.
 
In the end, they weren’t very good. They blew themselves up in retirement when the Government sent an agent masquerading as a Cuban to contact them. They must have been lonely in retirement.
 
Myer claims he didn’t provide documents- I think he was too much of a coward for that- and instead gisted summaries of what he read, and crafted analytic judgments from memory for the boys and girls in Havana.
 
That is useful stuff, even if not Grade A intelligence. It can provide context and nuance to the decision-making process, and the Cubans had other agents riddled through Washington. Ana Montes was their agent within DIA, joining the Communist team in 1985, just as the Agency was settling into their new digs at Bolling.
 
It was part of a comprehensive collection strategy from a determined and hard-nosed Cuban intelligence service.
 
I was not a counterintelligence specialist in my decades as a spook, so this is not authoritative commentary on that score. But knowing history, I would venture a guess that just like their Soviet big brothers, there is probably a Cuban agent in just about every agency that has anything to do with the Cuban portfolio. If they don’t, it is not because they have not tried. They operate like termites.
 
Inexorable.
 
The Times this morning quoted a guy who docked his boat near the Myers in a marina in Ann Arundel County in Maryland said he could have been knocked over with a feather at the revelation. He said the couple was intelligent and gracious. "When I heard they were arrested, I felt like they had arrested Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny."
 
I like the image- Santa and the rabbit puffing big Cuban stogies on the couch in the front parlor. Even Uncle Fidel had something nice to say about the Myers- not that they spied, of course- but if they had, they were swell people and committed to justice.
 
It makes me tired more than angry. The Myers are actually just termites. There is no point in hating the little bugs. You just have to exterminate them.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com