| 25 March 2006 Potomac Potemkin You know what I want to write about this morning, and I can't. I had instructions from the Chairman not to say anything more than “negotiations are continuing at a high level,” and later in the day, a terse note from the business unit instructing me to maintain my “laser focus” on the job at hand. I complied with the note, and did not waste an instant speculating about what it means, or what the personal consequences might be. But when I returned home, and was on my own time, I took some first steps. Applying the business model, I looked around the apartment, seeking activities I might spin off or personnel whose services I might dispense with in the interest of increased efficiency and agility. Having wrung my editorial hands over the great issues of the day for so long, I am only mildly surprised to find that application of the same wry distance to my life brings a zen-like state of acceptance. What will be, will be. There seems to be a lot of that going around in town. Maybe is is a function of the long slide toward the next Presidential election, and the uncertainty of the mid-terms coming up this year. Not that there is not still some grand talk. There was a dinner in McLean the other night, sponsored by the new professional association in town that is trying to broaden their base. They used to be known as a sort of house organ for the big agency in Maryland, and they are broadening their scope. I like the guy that runs it, and I am pulling for him to make it a success. I was not there, since the expense situation being what it is, I did not purchase a membership. But by report, it was a glittering affair as these things go. The room was filled once and future movers and shakers, those in office now, and those who are now with industry. I don't know how they do it, working the early hours that they do and being able to stay alert right through dinner and remarks. The featured speaker was the man in charge of Analysis for the Community, one of the great pillars of the business, along with Collection and Dissemination. You can collect all the intelligence you want, but if you don't understand what it means, it was an expensive waste of time, and useless to send it to anyone. That was supposed to be the point of this whole costly adventure: getting good information quickly to those who need it. I have talked to the Chief Collector, and the Chief Communicator, and come away both impressed with their capabilities and disquieted by the tasks they have been assigned. The Chief Analyst has a cool title, in fact two of them, but I like to think of him as the Minister of Meaning. His credentials are impeccable, starting with the Army long ago as a linguist, and with excellent stints in academia and a career Senior Executive Service gig as head of the only intelligence organization that was not castigated by the 9/11 Commission. He was originally a linguist, which I view as a critical analytic skill. After all, how can you attempt to predict what someone might do if you cannot read the same newspaper, or listen to convsersation in a crowded café? The Minister's specialty is China, and things Chinese, which is timely. By situation he is now perforce a generalist., and forced to concentrate on everything at once. I like his credentials, though I am wary that everyone at the top of the new intelligence Community seems to have come from Foggy Bottom. It's not that I do not respect that small cadre of cerebral Spooks over there, and maybe their position now in the center of things after careers on the periphery is a good thing. But increasingly, it seems to me that we have constructed a Potemkin Village around the management of intelligence, a veneer of reform. Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin constructed elaborate fake villages in the Ukraine and Crimea to convince his lover Catherine the Great that all was well in Russia. Love and power are powerful things, and the truth can often be lost in them. The DNI and his staff appear to be busily erecting a new and elaborate layer of titles, administration and oversight, though I do not think it is about love. I called on several of the people with the grand titles, some of whom swept into their jobs with equally grand plans. They intended to make fundamental change, but found that they had no people, no staff, and few resources. The Agencies they were intended to control were already arrayed in defensive ranks, thousands of eyes glittering. The Minister anticipates an analytic nirvana just around the corner, once the re-invention of the intelligence business was complete. How that was to be accomplished was left to the imagination of the audience. The mantra goes like this: “What you know is first step; who you know is second step, knowing how to use what and who you know is third step.” I knew all along that this was a twelve-step program, somehow, but have been at a loss at how to move beyond the third step. The comfort was in the fact that the Minister understood the problem, that there is a duality in the world by which an idea can be a good thing or a bad thing, all depending on the context. Understanding the context is what analysis is about. So, there was good news from the Analytic village. The bad news is that there appears to be no plan to achieve it, and there are whispers that all resources in the Department of Defense are off the table, untouchable, by direction of the Office of the Vice President. Part of the veneer of change is that the career Spooks are out, and outsiders are in. That starts with the DNI, who is an Ambassador by trade and disposition. His deputy, General Hayden, has been neatly triangulated by controversy over his previous service at NSA, where he began to do some reinvention of his own. A smart associate said the DNI is struggling, and lacks any real program for reinventing the community. But maybe it is just a function of time, and staffing. Perhaps over the next few years we will make some progress. Goodness knows we need it, and the people who have been put in charge of things appear to speak about change with great articulation. It occurs to me that it has been almost 55 months since the nation was galvanized by the attacks on New York and Washington and the empty field in Pennsylvania. After the day that will live in infamy, as FDR so eloquently phrased the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was 45 months and a few days before the secrets of the cosmos were unlocked, and Berlin and Tokyo were crushed into splinters. But it only makes sense that there is a disparity. It is a complicated world, after all. Besides, FDR was serious. When he wanted the atomic bomb, he put brusque cigar-smoking General Leslie Grove on the case, and a free hand. Grove delivered the desired product in three years, even if it took invention of a whole field of physics. We have a different issue. If you need some good words, a whole village of them, I would definitely give the lead to the State Department. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |