21 September 2004

Concerned Citizens

I was half-dozing in the audience in Salon Number Two at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Arlington. I had arrived there in sufficient time to get my name card and find a seat in the back. There had been people enjoying high teas in the elegant sitting room off the lobby, mostly women. I have memories of that room, since it was the closest nice place to my office in the Pentagon, and we used it often for special occasions. I moved past it swiftly.

The room was packed with concerned citizens in expensive suits. The Association had captured the Chief Information Officer from a gray Agency to talk about the challenges of the war on terror, and the challenge of spending all the money that was thrown at his Agency immediately after the attack.

Those of us in the expensive suits, men and women, were there to help him with that challenge. It was warm in the room, and though there was plenty of space, the chairs were pressed together so close that my personal space felt violated.

The speech went for about forty minutes. There were no slides or other audio-visual aids, so it was hard to tell the time without juggling my notebook on my knee and the green bottle of San Pelegrino water on my lap and the pen in my hand and jostling the man to my left or right.

There were young people in the audience, or younger, rather. We all seemed to be practicing for the same thing, carefully coiffed and gelled over dark suits.

It was a good speech, measured and well spoken. According to the bio, the man was born in 1950. From my seat near the back, I could see that his hair had been dark, almost black, though it was not now.

He wore a shirt that might not button down, though it appeared that it should, and his jacket was dark and might have been a sport coat. I could not tell, since he never ventured out from behind the podium. Since he is a pretty big deal at the Agency, I assume it was a suit, though I thought he might have spent most of his career in chino slacks and cordovan penny-loafers.

I did not want to doze off this late in the day, so I rose and backed my chair up enough that I could escape. I stood at the back of the room with some other people who had been awake too late the night before, or up too early. Standing made the lethargy fall away. As the number of hands in the air for questions diminished, I raised mine and was recognized.

''Since the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission was that the Director of Central Intelligence was too weak," I said, raising my voice so it would carry from the back of the room, ''Doesn't it follow that any real reform should include the empowerment of your office to make real decisions and force the Agencies to really work together?''

''How do you want me to answer that? Hypothetically?''

''As a concerned citizen,'' I boomed back.

''Depends on the legislation that is going to be passed. I believe the Chief Information Officer's authority should be commensurate with that of the Director of Central Intelligence- or the National Intelligence Director, if that is what he is going to become. If we have a strong central leader, we need a strong information office. If he or she is weak, well, the power should be commensurate.'' He smiled thinly, thinking undoubtedly that a broad mandate to kick ass would be fun indeed, the ability to beat the inter-agency characters into shape.

Not have to conciliate and play well with others for a change.

Fair enough, I thought. The Senate is going to confirm Porter Goss as the next DCI this week, and the legislation that will tell him what to do and how to do it will come next month. There was another question or two before the session ran out of steam. It was five, time to get in the traffic and take our expensive suits home to hang carefully on the wooden hangers.

It was absolutely gorgeous outside. Cool. Warm. Low humidity. I slung the black suit jacket over the passenger seat and put the top down on the car. The information architecture would sort itself out. I was concerned that it would not be done properly, that we would get this wrong in our haste to do something. But these are hasty times, after all. I blinked as I emerged from the parking garage. The sun was brilliant, blinding the drivers headed out to the west, slowing some of them and others not at all.

It didn't matter for me. I was just headed cross town and cut through a neighborhood when the traffic backed up trying to claw onto Route Fifty. When I wheeled into the lot at Big Pink I saw that they had been busy. The green nylon top was over the pool, anchored by stout springs, and most of the furniture on the deck had been dragged away.

I parked right around the time the monsters were beheading Eugene Armstrong in Baghdad . Apparently there is a franchise business in hostages now. I noted that fact along with the information that Bill Murray turned 54 today. There was a picture of him. He has grown a beard and it is gray, along with his hair. It looks like he is fading out. There was a picture of Eugene in better days, too, and he looked a lot like Bill. Or me, for that matter.

The scum made a tape of the murder and I made the mistake of Googling up the video as I waited for my coffee to drip. I don't know what I was thinking. It concerns me, sometimes, how callous I seem to have become.

I forget sometimes I am not a hard case, and that my concern about offices and authorities in this town is really quite irrelevant. I had to punch out of the video. I sat, breathing hard. Stunned. I'm not sure how I am going to get through the rest of the day.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra