Untitled Document

13 May 2004

Culture Shock

I understand Don Rumsfeld is in Baghdad this morning, a surprise trip to visit the leadership of the occupying forces.

I don't know what the motivation is, or the action-items he wants to achieve. I would not want to be on the receiving end of the visit. The debacle in the handling of the prisoners continues and may bring down the government in the end. This is a clear violation of "Rumsfeld's Rules," the little paper that was circulated when the Secretary returned to the government.

It was a good paper, filled with the wisdom he gained while serving as Chief of Staff to President Ford. One of the key bullets was: "If you foul up, tell the President and correct it fast. Delay only compounds mistakes."

So he is following his own advice, not delaying, but the horses have left the barn on this one, and are frolicking and racing about in the distant pasture.

The news folks are after the CIA this morning, investigating the treatment of a select few of the al Qaida leadership. It took a few hours to hear a mention of the murder of Nick Berg.

That story in the war of images does not have the staying power- the legs- of the abuse of prisoners.

But I suppose the terrorists are properly held to lower standards of conduct, though none of this would be happening without the wholesale slaughter of innocents.

It is funny how things get turned around, and it is interesting to see how these cultures clash.

I realize now that I have actually not been a government bureaucrat and intelligence officer all these years. I have been on a collection mission to be sure, but it was actually that of an on-the-fly anthropologist.

I spent three decades in a very odd culture. The first fifteen years were in the United States Navy, haze gray and underway, and within that great institution, the small sub-set of the intelligence corps.

It was a hot-house institution, replete with secrets and secret hand-shakes. As emissary of that little culture I was sent to work in the Congress, and later in the great three-letter agencies that collect and hold our secrets.

Consequently, I have had to adapt swiftly to the startlingly different cultures within our government.

Buildings have them, too. Like the Pentagon. Little micro-cultures that are formed by the agony of the commute to get there, or the crushing grayness of life within them.

I imagine there are places of happy culture in this land or around the world. I have not had the luxury of observing many of those. I told my son once that he ought to find a career that does not involve twelve hours a day in a sealed vault with no windows.

Yesterday, I had to summon all my anthroplologic skills. I was immersed in a new culture, one that was strangely familiar though I had never been there before.

I was in an anonymous strip mall somewhere in Maryland. The floor-space cost $12 a square foot, and there were not many people working there. A state-of-the-art command center occupied one annex of the facility. State of the art, circa 1986.

It had been built as part of an effort to secure a contract that did not happen. The long glass walls off the corridor enabled those outside to watch the action on the watch floor, and the wall of projection screens.

But of course it was dark and unoccupied. The smell of the place was of institutional wax. There were nice prints on the walls, and nice work cubicles, circa 1986, unoccupied, and an abandoned reception area, and the people had a bit of a haunted look, as though they expected a blow to fall at any moment.

This branch had been a part of a commercial enterprise that had once operated more trucks than the Department of Defense, had tendrils in every city in America, and a global reach. It had been so big and so powerful that it was almost unimaginable. It was as big as a nation-state.

It was so big that its monopoly was broken up by act of a federal judge, sundered into gigantic regional chunks. The headquarters, manufacturing and research bits were left to continue their strange existence, a head without a body, the ghost nerves still firing at what had been the fingers and toes.

What was left was still almost unimaginably vast. 135,000 people worked in the parts of the company that were left. But things could not continue. The company sleep-walked into declining revenues and lost focus. The balance sheets were negative, and healthy entities within were sold, willy-nilly, to raise cash and attempt to find a core business area.

Small parts of the great company realized that they could not request resources from the Great House. That would bring unwelcome attention from the Comptroller. So they did what they could, working little contracts like small truck-patch farms on the remains of a vast and failed Plantation, with the Overseers riding in the distance, selling off the land and the contents of the outbuildings, the Plantation House falling to wrack and ruin.

The Overseers fired or sold 100,000 employees. The increments were traditionally announced at the morning meeting on Thursday. So with the old imperial culture came another ritual, that of lay-off day. A day of trepidation and fear, deep in the week. Would you have a job on Friday? Hundreds of Thursdays and a hundred thousand gone.

We had a long meeting in a conference room near the Watch Center, dark behind the glass wall. We talked about opportunities to rebuild the business process and exploit some of the key technologies that had been husbanded and nurtured through the dark years of the lay-offs.

There is hope. There is always hope, though these people in this company have lived through a painful time. But the man we went to see leaned forward and gave us an important tip. I found myself thinking of one of Mr Rumsfeld's Rules, one I think should have been remembered better.

"It is easier to get into something than to get out of it."

I have been thinking about that, and exactly how far I am from retirement. But I am now in this culture, and will be interested to learn more about it. There is a proud history, and some strange adaptations to the change. The man told us that the most important thing was about scheduling.

"Never call a meeting on Thursday," he said solemnly. "Especially before lunch."