| 07 May 2006 After the Gold Cup I participated in the Virginia Gold Cup experience out in Loudoun County yesterday, the traditional beginning of the outdoors social season, the well-heeled on promenade under a blazing sun with thundering horses and social tents and ladies in hats . . . I saw my son out there, in one of the university tents that had an open bar, and I asked him how the races were going. He said he didn't have an opinion, but had seen a horse go by at one point . . . The Gold Cup is now sponsored by Mercedes-Benz, and they have left the Chrysler part of the corporate logo off the naming rights . . . everyone who is anyone was there, including folks who like to operate below the radar . . . I wore a rumpled seersucker suit of indeterminate age and a dazed look, and the women looked magnificent . . . I am feeling it, today, a little foggy due to exposure to the all the ladies hats and the first exposure of the Spring dresses to the elements . . .maybe that is why things seem so curious . . . the town is in a bigger uproar that usual . . the Moussaoui trial has ended, thank God, and should be cleared out of the Eastern District courthouse before I have to report for Jury Duty next week . . . he will be spending the rest of his days in the Super Max prison in Canyon City, Colorado, shouting alone at blank walls . . . the consensus is that this is infitely preferable than making him the martyr he wished to be . . . and it will be 72 vermin, not virigins, that await him in Colorado . . . I am making hard going of the state of the Community and I am not alone . . . it must have been all the hats yesteday . . . Amid the usual movements associated with change of station and retirement come other abrupt moves that are either portents or slander . . . not one is quite sure . . . there are too many dots being connected that may have no relationship at all . . . For example, Ambassador John Negroponte has moved his staff into new digs at the expanded DIA Center at Bolling Air Force Base . . . first things first, parking is at a premium . . . The Vulture had to leave his car at the Commissary a mile away on more than once occasion when he tried to do business with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence . . . walking is good for the constitution, they say, not to mention humility. . . the Sixth Floor where the staff resides is airy and open and the new building is coming together . . . but the original design for the building had not anticipated the seniority of the new residents . . . Senior executives are in cube-farms, and the interior offices for the associate Directors are small and have no widows . . . at least the occupants of the cubes can see the airplanes taking off from Reagan National Airport across the river . . . We are all reeling with the news that Porter Goss took an abrupt powder as Director of the CIA . . . it was all we could talk about in one of the white tents near the north rail of the gold Cup . . . Kyle ”Dusty” Foggo, a longtime agency plaer whomMr. Goss elevated to the agency's number three position is likewise leaving amid claims his lifelong friendship with Brent R. Wilkes has tainted him with corruption . . . and that Wilkes also played poker with Goss . . . Wilkes is one of the defense contractors who was intimate with Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham . . . and provided the yacht on which the Duke lived while in Washington . . . Mitchell J. Wade, a defense contractor who has admitted bribing the former congressman, told prosecutors that Wilkes had an arrangement with Shirlington Limousine and the Watergate complex, which has caused the wags in town to talk of WatergateGate . . . that talk is salacious in nature and below the Vulture's dignity . . . Mr. Foggo's ties to Mr. Wilkes were being investigated by the Inspector General at CIA . . . which as another dot, is where Mary O. McCarthy was working when she reported failed a polygraph for deception just weeks before retirement . . . McCarthy became the focus of an investigation on the leak of information on secret overseas prison system that had Goss, Deputy Director Calland and other senior officials on the box to set an example . . . I don't know if any of them were at the Gold Cup yesterday . . . if they were they would have been over on Member's Hill, where actor Tommy Lee Jones presideed on the jack Russle Terrier Race, right after Eric Prince's Blackwater Parachute Team dropped down on the steeplechase course with the American Flag and that of the Blackwater International Security Firm, American Flag first . . . The whole thing is a pity . . . the Vulture always liked Mr. Goss, who was kind to the students at NMITC when they came to Washington for their indoctrination to Baghdad on the Potomac . . . but that was before he became senior on the House Intelligence Committee . . . the propaganda machine is working overtime, suggesting that Mike Hayden, Deputy to the Big DNI, is the man to take over CIA and force it into a new and narrower role in the IC . . . the conventional wisdom is that he would concentrating on the collection of HUMINT overseas and changing the center of gravity for analysis to other components of the intelligence community . . . I don't know much for certain this morning, but I do know that it is not good luck in Washington to have a nick-name that has to go in quotation marks . . . you can ask “Scooter” about that . . . Copyright 2006 "Vic" Socotra |