Cover Your Butt

We saw some tantalizing stuff that went back to the very beginning of the institution that now is NSA yesterday. The memo purported to demonstrate that some people were setting things up to become very powerful in the Secret World.

They had almost three years to get ready for the time of peace. Here is one of the things they did to protect themselves from anyone getting any bright ideas about what they did and who they did it for. This memo is from the repository at Naval Station Crane, Indiana.

The memo is banal bureaucracy distilled. This was the implacable face of an institution that was determined to keep its new-found power and prestige.

Oh, and in a side note, the declassification authority works like this, and is explained by a woman in a position to know:

“When records come to the archives they get a multi-agency review. The project number for the review goes on each box. It is usually NND and a number. When a researcher copies records from a box with a

declassification number, it is necessary to put that project number on each copy, even if the particular document is unclassified. The notation is an indication the records have been reviewed by the archives and the archives can use the project number to verify it. Any publication of a document should have one.”

The marking intact: Read Here.

 

Ghost Letter

(Navy Department Building (“Main Navy”), Washington, D.C. View of the building’s central entrance, on Constitution Avenue NW, across from the foot of 18th Street in Washington, DC.)

I told you yesterday about the memo, found in a search by a comrade through the dusty archives of the greatest conflict in human history. Until the next one, anyway.

In a way, the memo represents a puzzle as profound as the JN-25 Japanese naval code. Some of the pages lack numbers; some might in fact be from different documents. I cannot verify it, and take the matter with more than a single grain of salt. But there are some real villains in this piece, and it is difficult to tell who is wielding the hatchet of accusation.

The memo- or memos- are ghost letters from the past. They were, at one time, classified documents. They were retained at the “SECRET” level, until reviewed and properly declassified under the authority of “003003,” whatever that might be. I jumped down a couple rabbit holes trying to find out this morning, waiting for the dew on the lawn to evaporate so I can cut it.

I was wandering through the electronic records of the Joint Staff to see if I could discover the context for the notation. I managed to find one hit, with guidance for declassification:

 

I think it is safe to assume that whoever wrote the memo had a reasonable certainty that by the time the document got to the National Archives and Records Administration- NARA- the ones who really cared about the struggle would be long gone. This is a fight between ghosts, now. Any documents with the real bombshells are probably long gone, if the contents of the memo are to be believed. The men who orchestrated this had a long time to clean things up between the initial, frantic hearings of blame over Pearl Harbor, and the more polished version that would come once the war was done and the medals distributed.

That tidying up of history is what I don’t know about, nor why the Joint Experimentation Campaign Plan would be the guiding authority for finally telling the story outside the secret world. I think now that everyone is dead who had a dog in the fight it might be time to lift the curtain- but I know from personal experience that there are some secrets who still have their watchdogs on alert, whether their masters have gone.

The scars have healed, but their very existence is a word to the wise. Tread lightly in the land of ghosts.

This story may- or may not- begin with a photograph of a strange and badly copied page, not numbered. I will let it speak for itself, since there is no one alive to say it is not the truth.

“DECLASSIFIED
Authority: 003003

In the Spring of 1942, Commander John R. Redman, USN, took the old story of Jap(anise) deception and added new trimmings. No attempt was made to get verification from Pearl Harbor or to consult the evidence file in OP-20G which had come under his command on February 15. It was made to appear as if this were an “inside story” written by G.I. personnel. And to give the final touch of authenticity, it was published in an official Navy Department Secret Publication called “Black Magic in Communications” (CSF 14941-A) over the signature of Vice Admiral F.J. Horne, USN (Vice Chief of Naval Operations) as of February 15, 1942. The story appears on pages 6-8, inclusive, and carries the caption “Did the Japanese Paint Us a Picture?” The publication itself was undoubtedly “ghost written” by some Naval Reserve officer, but the editor and sponsor was John Redman.

The main effect (if not the intended purpose) of the particular story was to make the Service believe that the old lie was actually true- that Rochefort, Huckins and Williams had been sucked-in by Japanese Radio Deception.

From one point of view there was no falsehood- it merely asked a question. But, by suggestion and implication, it planted the story in the minds of its readers and was actually the best example of “deception” in “Back Magic.” And the Service literally ate it up.”

In the stories of that long-ago conflict, the great injustice meted out to CDR Joe Rochefort, lead code-breaker in the Pacific Fleet, centers on what happened after his triumph of analysis in predicting the location of the Japanese First Air Fleet (the “Kido Butai) at Midway. I have always understood the matter to be retaliation by Washington for his being right, and the boys at Main Navy getting it wrong.

This casts new light on things. The two great battles of the Spring and early summer of 1942- Coral Sea in May, and Midway in early June- were months in the future.

It looks like the careerists at Main Navy were plotting the overthrow of the men our pal Mac Showers served with in The Dungeon at the 14th Naval District at Pearl literally from the beginning of the war. The game of deception against honorable men in the heat of battle was baked into the pie from the get-go. In Washington there was a cabal of Communications officers that had a vision of a strong and independent Radio Intelligence organization quite apart from traditional Naval Intelligence. In the code world, they had a powerful tool that they intended to harness for career gain and power.

They would play by their own rules, centered in Washington, close to the flagpole at Main Navy and far from the sound of the guns.

The Japanese were purely incidental to what they intended to do.

You can see that this is all a story that some people would prefer to stay buried. Let’s see if we can dig around a little and expose it to some fresh air. Fasten your seat belts. It may be quite a ride.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

The Inside Story

I am not going to get to the sort of robust and fully-developed story that discerning readers have come to expect form the Daily Socotra. Instead, I will give you a preview of what our editorial staff is hard at work on right now for the week to come.

The declassified SECRET document was annotated in December of 1974, about the time many former documents from World War II reached their date of release. We don’t know who wrote it for sure- and the reviewer 31 years ago had some curt comments.

“Guesses only.”

“This must have been prepared by Safford?”

“I cannot remember where it came from.”

“It is inaccurate on matters technical (sic).”

“Pencil comment by who? Rochefort?”

“Holtwick says he believes Safford is not who wrote the Memo.”

That last bit would have referred to LCDR Jack S. Holtiwck, a dashing officer with a trademark mustache who supervised the “boiler room” at Station HYPO in Pearl harbor, and who knew exactly what went down when the Redman Brothers, supported by Joe Wenger back at Main Navy on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC. One thing you learn out in the Fleet is that Washington is never wrong, even if they have to re-write history to prove it. But we will have to get to that as the week unfolds.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Mail Buoy

There was a hell of a string going on about our days in the Fleet. Having achieved full Geezerhood, I had the time to react and reflect as some shipmates swapped sea-stories from our Fleet days.

Vince said: “Reminds me of my squadron days. I had a great mentor: the VA-56 Leading Chief Petty Officer, which is what we called them in those days. He was a grisly old bastard, and he did not hesitate to chew my ass, respectfully of course. BUT he did alert me to the mail buoy business early, and a few other attempts to make me look foolish. His Ensign was NOT going to be embarrassed. Only Ensign in the squadron, of course. Remember in those days, the liberty card issue… well, as an Ensign Duty Officer in-port Cubi in the P.I., I just handed them out. The Master Chief went nuts, since I forgot to read the list of men on restriction, and as the word spread they all got off the ship. Funny what we remember, you know?”

Julio smiled. “At VF-32 embarked in JFK (CV-67), the tradition with newly-reported nugget JO’s was to formally schedule them on the Plan of the Day and the Flight Schedule for a Maritime Air Superiority “Trainer” session (supposedly the latest Northrup-Grumman sophisticated F-14 Tomcat simulator!) located way down in the 7th Deck magazines. Got some hilarious results when some DC or MM Chiefs in the bowels of the ship played along and would give the Ensigns or LTJGs various follow-on confusing directions on the frame number and access hatch to find the trainer, somewhere among the bilges and piles of Mk-82 bombs! The red-faced JO would then be chewed out by the Ops-O or the XO in the ready room for not getting to his assigned Trainer session on time and missing it, while the rest of the squadron tried to suppress giggles…”

JoeMaz jumped on that one. “Vince, you remind me that when I arrived in July of 1970 with VF-84 embarked aboard FDR (CVA-42; the first of a couple Midway-Class CV tours) in Napes I was still an Ensign though I had promoted in June. Yeah I was smart enough to not pin on the JG bars myself. Anyway back then it was only a rear from O-1 to O-2 so I was the only Ensign in the Airwing. The Skipper told they couldn’t waste such a prize and he was going to delay authorizing my promotion for a week or so. My first fleet assignment was as Ready Room Static Display at set hours so the officers in VF-84 could bring their buddies by “to see the Jolly Roger’s official Ensign. They appreciated that I played along in good humor and I got to meet the rest of the airwing. All-in-all, a fun experience that actually help me fit in.”

I had to suppress a chuckle. My welcome aboard my first Fleet command was auspicious, but not the way I wanted it to be. We had spent about a year in the pipeline, from the marching on the Grinder in Pensacola through commissioning, and then orders to the Armed Forces Aviation Intelligence Training Center at Lowery AFB in Denver.

At AFAITC, we were taught the rudiments of our new trade: Imagery analysis, strike warfare, nuclear planning, and once our clearances were processed, an indoctrination into the mysteries of the classified world of sources and Methods.

Then we got our orders. I volunteered for a squadron assigned to the Overseas Family Residence Program, or OFRP, which referred to the USS Midway (CV-41) home parted in Yokosuka, Japan. The Squadron to which I would be assigned was VF-151, flying the venerable F-4 Phantom II Fighter.

The orders also carried a provision for thirty days leave, but I was eager to get on with the great adventure, and decided to take a couple weeks on arrival and see a little bit of the mysterious East before reporting to the ship.

If at this point you are thinking that Ensign Socotra did not quite have the lay of the land, you would be quite right. I cleared up my affairs, packed out my half of the apartment off Colfax Boulevard, and got a Port Call out of Travis Air Force Base in California for points west across the vast Pacific.

Last night of liberty in San Francisco was poignant. I was anxious and unsettled and didn’t even do that good a job of drinking my nerves away.

Eventually, I found myself at Yokota Air Base in the dead of the Kanto Plain night. World Famous Carrier Airwing FIVE had a duty office manned by a sleepy looking petty officer. There was a message directing me to immediately report to Atsugi Air Field for further transportation to the Midway and V-151. I showed my orders to the Petty Officer and explained they granted me leave, and I intended to take it.

He shrugged. Whatever Butterbars decided to do, it was their problem, not his.

At this distance, I cannot remember much more than spending that first day mostly at the patio bar of the Yokota Officer Club, marveling at the rich taste of Kirin Beer, and the delightful taste of the crisp pork and cabbage gyoza dumplings on the plate in front of me. From the patio I could see the chain-link perimeter fence, and beyond that, a Japanese alley.

I think it took me a day to get up the nerve to collect my bags and get a bus to Atsugi, where I decided to touch base with the shore detachment of the Wing before heading up to Tokyo to take a look-see at my new temporary homeland.

It was daylight, so there was a crusty Warrant Officer at the desk. He told me I was in deep shit, UA, and the squadron was pissed. “We don’t have any overhead times for the COD today, but you better have your ass here for the 1400 COD flight tomorrow. I swallowed hard, got a room at the Q for the night, and wondered exactly what sort of hell I had got myself into.

If you want to keep your wits about you, I don’t recommend the first flight in a C-2 Greyhound followed by an arrested landing as the way to do it. The ship was operating a couple hundred miles south of Honshu. If you have not traveled by Carrier Onboard Delivery aircraft, you should know that the seats face aft, for the perfectly good reason that the twin engine turbojet is flying right up the moment that the arresting gear snags the thick steel cross-deck pennant and brings you to an immediate and dramatic halt.

If the pilot catches the wire, that is. If he doesn’t, you have to hope he hasn’t cut the power and made a play for the desk and there are enough knots to go flying again rather than sinking into the waves below.

After an hour or so of straight and level flight, we swung into what seemed to be some sort of racetrack pattern, and then the wing dropped as we went into a bank. I caught a flash of something gray down below, and then the intercom crackled something about final, and moments later there was a great crash and we were pressed into our seats as the airplane decelerated abruptly.

This was an experience quite unlike anything I had ever experienced. The ramp began to come down as we taxied out of the landing zone and the wings began to fold up. There was the stink of jet fuel and men in colored jerseys- green and red and yellow and brown- were performing some clearly choreographed movements. Eventually, an individual in a white float coat abled “ATO” wearing mickey-mouse ears and holding a clip board waved at us to unstrap and follow him. We went down a ladder- there was water out there! The surface was blue and whitecapped- the short ladder was greasy below my highly polished low-quarter black shoes.

The ATO guy turned out to be a Lieutenant, and he handed me over to a Petty Officer in dungarees. “You ENS Socotra?” he asked without ceremony. I nodded, being too disoriented by the events of the arrival to do anything else.

“XO wants to see you and he is pissed. Follow me.” He headed rapidly down the passageway and I struggled to keep up as he stepped easily across hatch frames that threated to trip me and send me sprawling headfirst onto the deck. He stopped and opened a door painted black and featuring an emblem with an ominous flaming skull clenching a dagger it its teeth.

This couldn’t possibly end well, I thought, as we entered a long room with padded aircraft-style seats in neat rows. There were a bunch of people in kakis and flight suits there, apparently waiting for something. The Petty office walked up the central aisle and stopped next to a mustachioed figure who was holding an aluminum box containing messages. The Petty Officer pointed to the seat next to him. “The XO will be with you shortly,” then vanished out a door behind the podium at the front of the room.

I sat down gingerly next to man who was about to determine my fate. He looked down, and flipped a page on the message he was reading. The drama was palpable. He finished reading and closed the box with a metallic click. He turned to me and I noted his wyes were the color of seawater.

He spoke slowly at first. “Where the fuck have you been, Socotra?”

I had intended to explain that I had official orders from the Bureau of Naval Personnel, I was entitled to leave, and was sorry about any inconvenience to the big steel boat or any of its occupants, but I didn’t get far. The XO responded with increasing speed and volume about the various offenses I had committed, that House Arrest was like, prior to Captain’s Mast, and that my life, as I knew it, was effectively over.

I swallowed hard. I had not intended to commence my forward deployed experience in the Brig…but that appeared to be precisely where I was headed. I wondered if they still did the bread and water thing as the XO’s tirade went on, and then seemed to reach a crescendo and climax. “Anything you want to say, Socotra?”

I shook my head “no.”

Them the XO smiled. “Welcome to FITRON 151. I’m Lieutenant “Water” Mallon.” He stuck his hand out to shake mine. I extended my hand and realized the room was packed behind us with my new squadron buddies. There was a round of applause for the “XO’s” performance commenced. I smiled uneasily.

“Water” got up and walked back into the crowd wearing a shit-eating grin A tall guy in a green zoom-bag who was later identified as CDR “Petey” Burggren said: “”Water” was the last guy who was UA on his arrival. Welcome aboard. He shook my hand. “Now, this is CDR Denny “Rattler” Wisely, MIG-killer and Silver Star-winning fighter pilot. He is the real XO.”

I looked up. Denny was whipcord slim and in a flight suit with the Squadron nametag on the left breast. He sat down in the seat next to me. He had a thin smile and his dark eyes glittered like his namesake. “Welcome aboard, Son.”

“Thank you, Sir,” I managed to say. Maybe this was going to be OK.

“Now. Tell me where the fuck you have been?”

I had a suspicion it was going to be a long cruise. I was right.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

Twitter: @jayare303

The Rules

There is always a dynamic tension in communal living. I have seen it here at Big Pink, the place I have lived longer than any other in my life. I moved to the building in 2001, so that is fourteen years. The place is a condominium, so residency is relatively stable. It is diverse, to a degree, but mostly white, and mostly older. A lot of empty-nesters with spikes of rental people. Like me these days. I thought I was going to pull chocks when I sold my unit upstairs, but the place I am in now came available at just the perfect moment.

It is as comfortable as an old shoe, and the pool is virtually at my front door.

It is perfect, and with swimming being the best exercise available to me, I think I will stay another season. Still, I think I am approaching full blown geezer-hood.

This has been a crappy summer for a bunch of reasons- all of them external. Society is changing and increasingly I feel myself like the Clint Eastwood character in “Gran Torino,” standing on my porch and shouting for the kids to Get Off My Lawn. I forget I am a renter sometime, so it technically isn’t actually my lawn, but the changing of the season comes with a subtle change in the generations.

When I got here I was probably a little younger than the median age, and possibly presented as a bit of a flamboyant rebel. I know Ludmilla, Big Pink’s Zampolite, thought so, and corrected my behavior out at the pool early on. I was problematic- as a renter, I was not to be trusted. Clearly i and had no respect for The Rules, since some where unwritten, and hence unknown.

My first encounter with her was not pleasant. I think I had a radio with me one day and was chastised for not having earphones to mute the sound. I wasn’t playing it loudly, or disruptively, but those were The Rules. Over time we became pretty good friends particularly after I actually showed some commitment to the Building by sequentially purchasing a couple units. But she got married and is going to move out when her husband retires next year, and at Willow, Old Jim and Chanteuse Mary are going to flee the city. Van Dyke and his bride are heading out as well, bound for a 55+ community in Florida. I had not considered anything like that- interesting concept, those communities. You move in the the single-level ranch with the attached garage, and progress to the assisted living to the full care to the crematorium out back. Having been through the process with the folks a few years ago, I am comfortable with how it works. I just had not completely wrapped my brain around the act that it was happening to me, too.

The problems started the second weekend the pool was open. A large group of people arrived and set up a buffet lunch, complete with serving dishes and glass bottles of beer and wine. It was quite a production number, set up near the designated smoking area at the north end of the pool. It was a clear violation of the rules. It made me feel uncomfortable, but since everyone was still getting to know one another at the beginning of the season, I was reluctant to approach them directly. Someone finally told them them food and particularly glass containers were not permitted in the enclosure, but the number of guests and the air of resentment made things kind of testy around the pool deck. I ignored it and listened to my book on tape.

I noted similar conduct by different groups over the next few weekends, since my unit faces the fence and the pool table where the wine and beer bottles showed up. I don’t mind people having a good time, but I am on that pool deck every day and a broken wine or beer bottle means something real to me about slashing my feet or those of the kids who play there. Plastic ups or metal thermos jugs would not have raised my hackles in the slightest. Still, the food buffet appears to be incompatible with the rules as posted. There were exceptions back when the Board sponsored the annual pool party, but those days are long gone along with the Big Pink budget surplus.

The polish life-guards, Matt and Pavel, have settled in nicely and we appeared to be getting back to our usual sultry tranquility. At least until yesterday.

At happy Hour time, I walked in to the Willow, and was the first one there. Jim was taking care of a Realtor@ who was showing his condo. I sipped my first drink and looked at my smart phone to kill some time until the regulars showed up. There was a new text on the phone, and my eyes widened. Doc had sent me this note:

“You let me down, Buddy. I was swimming my laps and four young women kept jumping in my lane. I asked them twice to keep to one side of the pool, and after the second time the oldest one told me to “go F**k myself. She was a guest, the pool was for everyone and they could do what they wanted.”” Wish you had been there.”

I texted her right back. I had an encounter with the same young women, who ranged from young teen to maybe eighteen or nineteen, based on the tattoo on the shoulder. No real adults were with them, and I didn’t recognize them.

My exercise routine is to tread water vigorously for at least an hour while I listen to a book tape to kill the boredom. Things got rapidly less boring as the young women threw themselves into vigorous activity. They were a curious bunch. One of the older ones had inflatable floaties on her upper arms. The apparent youngest one sat quietly at a table, watching. The other three threw themselves with abandon into the pool, jumping into the lane where my pal the Tibetan lady was swimming her laps. They disrupted that for a while, and then swam over to my side of the pool where I was determinedly trying to stay above the waves caused by the leaping girls. They clambered up the ladder, and then lined up three abreast and did cannonball jumps into the water in front of me.

I am a strong swimmer, but no one wants to have someone jump on you unawares, so I had to focus on what they were doing. I looked up at the clock, noting that I had only twelve minutes to go on the work-out and it probably wasn’t worth taking my waterproof earbuds out and asking them to give me a break for just a couple minutes. The sinking of the Lusitania was the subject of my book on tape, and it suddenly had an immediacy that it had not prior to the arrival of the young women.

This is undoubtedly a generational thing. Not a Millennial vs Baby Boomer thing, or not exactly. There is a Millennial in this someplace, the one responsible for bringing the Gen Z’ers.

I left Willow about the usual time, but Doc’s message still had me frosted. Normally, I make sure that my computer is turned off when I get back from Willow, to prevent inadvertently telling people what I really think. But I made an exception last night and drafted a histrionic note to the Community Manager that the cussing out of a distinguished resident-owner for simply requesting to share her own pool was out of control and verging on anarchy.

I mashed the button on “send” and off it went. Then I considered my next steps. Perhaps I could go out on the patio and tell someone to get off my lawn?

That whole idea of a 55+ community is sounding better and better.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

The Green Fairy, Part 2

(The Green Fairy- in fin de ciecle France, the five pm call to cocktails was called “The Green Hour.”)

It was a fine, fine summer day that had just about everything in it- a high-tech demonstration of a internet search engine that seems to have the potential to change the whole nature of serious analysis for Law Enforcement and Intelligence, a most triumphant swim in refreshing waters, and a visit from the Green Fairy.

The last time I had an encounter with her was courtesy of the Chaldeans at the Liquor Store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That was legendary enough that opposing counsel apparently included it in some scurrilous material impugning my professional reputation.

Completely baseless, of course. As I recall, the Iraqi clerk had proudly boasted that his brand- “Lucid was it’s name, I think- contained the magical ingredient of wormwood, the substance that was said to drive one mad.

“This is real thing, my friend,” he said gesturing at the pyramid of little bottles. “Distilled and macerated whole herbs and botanicals in alcohol and water. It contains grand wormwood, anise, fennel, other whole herbs and botanicals. Pour over a sugar cube. Do not mind the cloudy appearance when you make your cocktail, like a Baghdad sky in spring. Is like jellybean taste from the anise. Is very good. You like.”

I drank it with a friend, since I couldn’t take it on the jet coming back, and was impressed. I had not thought much about it until I noticed the color of Heather’s blouse at Willow yesterday. I was sitting on my usual stool next to Old Jim. The Missile Twins- Steve and Ronnie- were enjoying their weekly outing to my left. Steve was happy that his old missile silo near Wall Drug in South Dakota had been turned over to the National Park Service, and tourists can go down and see where he used to wait to obliterate civilization. “They didn’t even give us a medal when it was over. Cheapskates.”

“The Clinton Administration gave us a certificate of participation in the Cold War,” I said. “Almost the same thing as a parade. I think they didn’t want to hurt the Russian’s feelings.”

Heather greeted me with a little waving of her fingers next to her eyes. With the brilliant emerald of the blouse and her long blonde locks cascading down over her shoulders, she could have been a buxom pixy.
“Green Fairy time,” she announced. “I got a bottle of Absinthe for the bar. I do the ordering now, and what the hell. I felt like having a Sazerac, the official cocktail of New Orleans.”

I was embarrassed that I had no idea what she was talking about. Jim saw the blank look and explained from his years working behind the bar rather than in front of it. “It’s a Cajun version of a cognac or whiskey cocktail. Take two jiggers of rye whiskey, a half a jigger of absinthe, a sugar cube and a lemon peel and serve up in an Old Fashioned glass with two dashes of Peychaud Bitttrers. Not Angostura. The original was made with a cognac called Sazerac de Forge et Fils. Some scholars claim it is America’s oldest cocktail.”

“Never heard of it,” I said. “Isn’t that sort of a winter drink?”

“Depends on what sort of summer day you had,” said Heather. “And I think I will have one.” Brett the bartender looked over at Heather and he asked if she was serious. She said she was and we all did the pixy thing with our fingers. Summertime. He and Jasper huddled at the far end of the bar, and I saw bottles moving in the dim light and the flare of a match. He returned with a small snifter a quarter filled with blonde liquor and a singed yellow peel floating it in.

He slid the bottle of absinthe on the bar so we could see it. I took a picture to document the brand.

(Prior to 2009, Absente sold in the U.S. contained no grande wormwood- Artemisia absinthium- a substance that had been banned in the early 20th Century due to its reported hallucinogenic effect. Following the re-legalization of genuine absinthe in the U.S. in 2007, the importer introduced a reformulated version that includes wormwood in an apparent effort to improve its consumer appeal. The new label proclaims, “Now With Wormwood!”)

Brett the bartender nodded with approval.

Heather said she didn’t get the expensive stuff- of the two brands offered by the distributor, this was only $50 a bottle. We had been talking about some trash literature as the Missile Twins ordered some food. I might like to play as a book tape while I treaded water in the pool. His recommendation is a book called “Florida Roadkill,” by Tim Dorsey. “It is like those Carl Hiaasan thrillers only crazier.”

“That would be pretty nuts,” I said. “There appears to be a lot of stuff I am not aware of these days. I’ll give Dorsey a try. It gets awful boring in the pool after an hour of treading water.”

“You ought to try it with wormwood, ” growled Jim.

“You know what? I just might. But honestly, the Vodka seems to work just fine.”

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Not Personally Responsible

(Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta’s Official portrait. I lifted it off the Government server like everyone else does).

I have been bustling around this morning. The dashboard on the Panzer has been yelling at me quite insistently about getting “AO” servie, whatever that might be, for the past couple weeks. I finally got around to taking it in this morning, and there are a couple things to do this morning that look vaguely like work, and maybe the walk back from the dealer after dropping off the car got me energized. I organized some socks and took the plastic bags off some of the ancient drycleaning in the closet.

I had to do something, since the mail was nothing but bad news this morning. It turns out it wasn’t 4.1 million of us who had the dirty laundry of our lives betrayed to the PRC. It wasn’t 14 million, either. It was 18 million.

Ms Katherine Archueta, the OPM Director has been up on the Hill testifying to the Senate about the colossal incompetence in her organization, which predictably verged on frank appeal for more money to seal the barn doors in her IT shop after the ponies were long gone.

There is more good news beyond that. I have been waiting for my little letter to arrive, informing me of something I already know, which is to say that it is not a question of “if” I am going to get attacked, or have my life and bank account stolen, it is simply a matter of when. I know exactly who is responsible.

Director Archuleta doesn’t. She testified that no one is personally accountable for the breach. Her organization literally handed over the root password to the intruders and likely never would have figured it out on its own.

“We have legacy systems that are very old,” she said. That is the money part. “It’s an enterprise-wide problem.” it gets better, really. She went on to say that “If there’s anyone to blame, it’s the perpetrators. Their concentrated, very well-funded efforts to come into our system are what we’re concerned about.”

Some of my friends have already got their letters, notifying them that they have been had. Others got emails from the Office, starting on the 8th of June. Turns out there was a problem with that, as one pal called the Office to verify the validity of the electronic mail, since there was the direction to click on a link embedded in it to contact the credit monitoring organization.

That is exactly what the hackers do. Don’t ever click on a link.

That alarmed a lot of us. The OPM has already put our Social Security numbers, addresses and other personal information into hackers’ hands.

It turned out we had every reason to be uneasy. According to multiple Federal government sources, phishing messages appeared almost immediately after the real messages were sent.

According to the Post, “one senior official said that Department of Defense (DoD) security believes the original OPM hackers obtained a copy of the real CSID announcement e-mail and modified it for their own criminal purposes. It was because of this actual attack, and the e-mail notification’s poor design, that on June 15 over internal networks, the DoD announced, “THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, WITH OPM AND CSID SUPPORT, HAS SUSPENDED FURTHER NOTIFICATIONS TO DOD PERSONNEL UNTIL AN IMPROVED, MORE SECURE NOTIFICATION AND RESPONSE PROCESS IS IN PLACE.”

Fine. Just fine. Anyone who tells you that our friends here in Washington are here to help really needs to see a credit counsellor.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Travel Broadens One

It is no secret that things are pretty slow in the business of providing all-source intelligence analysts to the Federal Government. It was a pretty hot business sector when there were two or three major wars going on, but now not so much. A lot of us who were in the business for several decades are looking around for other opportunities, since there do not appear to be many around these parts. Property values in the Ballston neighborhood have sunk 10%, something I never would have imaged.

I was talking to my former co-worker Melissa the other day, and she is the smartest business person I know. She has decided to get ou t of the Intelligence sector and diversify. She got me really pumped as we talked about some potential tours for her agency. I was a travel agent a while back, and dreamed up really cool trips to support the Congressman.

An example was one I have talked about before: “Rep. Bill’s Fabulous Denied Areas and Great Hotels of Asia Tour!”

Visit Taipei (Grand Hotel!) Hong Kong (The Peninsula!), Hanoi (Sofitel Metropole!), Saigon “Historic Rex!), Bangkok (The Oriental) and Rangoon (The Strand!) and Singapore (Raffles!). Live life as a pasha did in the days of Empire!

Anyway, Melissa actually has a travel agency, and this is what we are working on at the moment- a work in progress, but some ideas for grand fun!

Ready to set off on travel and adventure? Let Ships and Shores Travel, LLC do the planning for you.

As a Cruise Planners franchise we have access to travel vendors for every type of trip. We also serve as an American Express Travel Representative, having a tremendous reputation for quality, service, and very competitive pricing for ALL of your travel needs. We can help you discover exciting adventures around the world.

Cruises, Land Vacations, Destination Weddings, Group Tours, Adventure Travel – we can find the right travel option for you.

One of our specialty areas is group trips and tours. Here are a few tours we have in the planning stages:

The War in the West
General Ulysses Grant may have won the Civil War with his triumphs on the Mississippi River. Tour the sites of his greatest victories at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Jackson and Vicksburg, the Gibraltar of the Confederacy! Travel in luxury in a retro tribute to Mark Twain’s life on the River: the Queen of the Mississippi delivers an experience unlike any other riverboat. Launched in 2012 and modeled after traditional Victorian-style riverboats of the late 1800s, she was the first paddle wheeler built for the Mississippi River in nearly 20 years. Queen of the Mississippi offers passengers modern amenities and comforts including large staterooms with private balconies, hotel-style bathrooms, complimentary room service, Wi-Fi, and more.

Transporting guests back in time in the most elegant fashion, the experience aboard Queen of the Mississippi is a seamless blend of old and new. Beneath her historic décor, gleaming woodwork and brass fixtures is a framework of modern cruise ship technology that provides passengers with the most comfortable and upscale vacation imaginable on the Mississippi River!

Band of Brothers Tour!
Land on the Normandy Beaches! Follow the path of George Patton’s triumphant Third Army as he drove a dagger into the heart of the Nazi homeland! Combine fine dining, wine sampling and the stark history of the greatest conflict in human history!

A Fortress Like No Other:
Tour the impregnable Maginot Line, the ultimate fortress that the Germans ignored! It all remains today, a line of concrete forts, obstacles, and weapons installations from the Swiss border to Luxembourg the Gibraltar of the North! in a fortress impervious to attack, with state-of-the-art living conditions for garrisoned troops, air conditioning, mess halls and underground railways. Sample the regional cuisine of Alsace and the French countryside. Visit Paris and the wineries- and contemplate the folly of war.

Bataan Death March!
Pay tribute to the courage of those who fought America’s first battle in the Pacific War! Fly into exotic Metro Manila and sample the largest English-speaking nation of Asia! Tour the haunting ruins of the fortress at Corregidor and trace the path of the vicious Death March imposed on American POWs! Special day trips to Grande Island in Subic Bay, Cubi Point Air Station and the American Cemeteries at Manila and Clark Air Base!

Washington DC Spy Tours!
Break the Japanese diplomatic and naval codes with the On the Roof Gang! Visit the National Cryptologic Museum and see the 1st surviving mechanical computer that opened the German U-Boat codes! See the Nebraska Avenue Complex where the Navy beat Japan, and Arlington Hall Station where the Army cracked the Purple Codes! See Hospital Hill and the birthplace of the Office of Strategic Services!

Cold War Espionage!
Tour the bewildering world of mirrors as it existing at the height of the Cold War in the capital of the Free world! Visit dead drops and practice your espionage tradecraft in the woods of suburban Maryland and Virginia where Walker, Aimes, Pollard and Ana Montez…see the U2 and SR-71 spy planes that overflew the Soviet Union and Cuba at the Smithsonian and Udvar-Hazy museums and see where the imagery that identified Soviet ballistic missile in Cuba- and brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust- and sit at the table at the Occidental where the quiet agreement was reached to pull the missiles out. It is all happening in the World of Spooks and Spies! Special bonus: find the unmarked graves of the deadly Nazi saboteurs who were landed by U-Boat to poison American reservoirs and dynamite our factories! Six were executed and buried where no one- but you- will find them!

The Cockpit of Action!
Civil War as it really was in the most fought over counties in America! A two day Orientation to the key battlefields of Northern Virginia! See first and second Manassas where modern mass war began. See the site of the largest cavalry battle in American history at Brandy Station. Enjoy some country living and wine tasting in the rolling hills of Madison County and see the site of he desperate struggles at The Wilderness, the bloody crossroads of Chancellorsville, and the slaughter at Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, where stoic Union troopers wrote their names on tags so their bodies could be identified- the origin of the Dog Tag! Optional side trips include the persevered ramparts in DC of Fort Stevens, Monocracy Creek, Antietam and Gettysburg!

Stones of the District!
The first monuments authorized by the new American Congress are still there! Before the new capital city could be built, the District had to be surveyed. Follow the steps of Major Andrew Ellicott took in 1792 with freedman Benjamin Banneker to place the 40 sandstone markers, one each mile, that denote the boundaries of the Federal City. Through swamp and forest, hill and dale, this unique tour will show you the back of the house and the unique culture of the nation’s capital! Special day trip!

The above tours are hosted and narrated by Mr. JR Reddig, Military Historian and Ships and Shores Travel Group Tours Advisor.

Contact Ships and Shores Travel for further information on how you can be part of these unique tour opportunities.

Melissa Cutter
Ships and Shores Travel, LLC
703-828-7615
mcutter@shipsandshorestravel.com
melissa.cutter@cruiseplanners.com

www.shipsandshorestravel.com

4100 Nebraska Avenue

I was on a roll yesterday and actually read a book to try to get ready to tour guide the Australian delegation down to Nebraska Avenue. Between that, and the interesting relationship between the Nebraska Avenue Complex and Arlington Hall Station just across Route 50 from Big Pink I was so saturated with World War II spookery that I could not get my arms around the whole matter of 4100 Nebraska Avenue.

The ground rules for the Delegation, back when we were in the concept phase, was to get a van, equip it with beverages, and go for a spin around some of the Intelligence Community sites. The original OSS-CIA complex on Hospital Hill by Foggy Bottom; show where the Soviet intercept officer used to park in front of Main State to copy the transmissions of the bug microphone in the conference room. Show them where the disgruntled Pakistani Mir Amar Kazi gunned down CIA officers arriving for work. The site of the original National Photographic interpretation Center over the car dealership where the Soviet Missiles were identified in Cuba and the sprawling campuses where the ODNI and the NCTC hang out- that sort of thing.

It would have been fun, but the bus didn’t happen and I had to plan an alternative on the fly that relied on Metro. That is why I picked Nebraska Ave, since that had a couple sites so close that it was un-escapable. The house at 4100 Nebraska Avenue had it all.

That brought Arlington Hall Station back in to the picture, since it was Soviet codes that were broken there that caused Soviet double Agent and First Secretary of the British Embassy to leave the country. I didn’t have time to get into the Cambridge Five yesterday. The penetration of the British and American Governments is an interesting story, but I am not going to get far down that road, or avenue as the case may be.

The Five, composed of the four certain ones (Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald McLean and Anthony Blunt and perhaps many more) had a connection to the well-built house on the corner lot that we would walk right by on the way to the NAC. All four men were active Soviet Agents during WWII, though not in Washington. Philby was posted to DC after the war, where he was the liaison officer to the FBI and the newly-established CIA. In that capacity he was a visitor to Arlington Hall Station, where he was briefed on an exceptional penetration of the usually excellent tradecraft of the KGB.

The program was called VENONA, and I have mentioned it before. Suspicious of Uncle Joe Stalin and the possibility that he might seek a separate peace with the Nazis, the Signals Intelligence Service (Later the Armed Forces Security Agency and then NSA) at Arlington Hall began to work the encrypted message traffic sent by the Soviet Diplomatic and intelligence services. This message traffic was encrypted by means of a normally secure one-time-use key code. The messages were copied and stored at the Hall, and the body of traffic was worked for nearly forty years due to one significant vulnverability.

Due to a serious blunder on the part of the Soviets, some of this traffic was vulnerable to cryptanalysis. The Soviet company that manufactured the one-time pads produced around 35,000 pages of duplicate key numbers, as a result of pressures brought about by the German rapid advance on Moscow during World War II.

Hundreds of Soviet Agents were unmasked- including the Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs and the Cambridge Five. The existence of VENONA was still a deep, deep secret, and its existence was not permitted to be used at the trials.

(Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby).

Anyway, that is where the house at 4100 Nebraska comes in. Philby and his family arrived in Washington in September of 1949. In September 1949, the Philbys arrived in DC. Ostensibly, his posting was as First Secretary, but he actually was the MI-6 station chief and responsible urgent and top-secret communications between the United States and London, as well as “more aggressive Anglo-American intelligence operations,” like the ones that attempted to land agents in denied areas like Albania. The operations always seemed to fail, which led the Americans and Brits to conclude that the Communists were too effective to continue.

However, a more serious threat to Philby’s position had come to light through the VENONA decryption program. Donald McLean had been assigned to the Embassy until shortly before Philby was posted there. This was no small deal. Donald Maclean had been Secretary of the Combined Policy Committee on atomic energy matters. He was Moscow’s main source of information about US/UK/Canada atomic energy policy development, and reported on its development and progress, particularly the amount of plutonium (used in the Fat Man bombs) available to the United States. Maclean’s reports to his NKVD handler on the relatively small amount may have emboldened the Soviets to arm Kim Il Song’s North Korea, and to blockade Berlin.

The VENONA intercepts indicated someone in the Embassy was passing secrets to the Soviets. The intercepted messages revealed that the British Embassy source (identified as “Homer”) travelled to New York City to meet his Soviet contact twice a week. Philby had been briefed on the situation shortly before reaching Washington in 1949; it was clear to him that the agent was Maclean whose wife, Melinda, lived in New York.

The investigation into the British Embassy leak was an ongoing affair. Guy Burgess arrived in October of 1950 as a hard-drinking and flamboyant gay man, who Philby invited to live in the basement of the house at 4100.

(Donald McLean (left) and Guy Burgess).

Mind you, Philby knew what was going on at the Naval Security Group just a block up the street at the NAC, and hence Burgess did as well. It is a curious coincidence of proximity, though of course there are no coincidences in this life.

Meanwhile, Guy’s life was unraveling, and he raised the hackles of everyone he encountered. Philby’s second wife Aileen resented him and disliked his presence in the stately house. The local Yanks were offended by his superior airs and contempt for every aspect of American society. J. Edgar Hoover complained that Burgess used British Embassy automobiles to avoid arrest when he cruised Washington in pursuit of homosexual liaisons. His personal disintegration was disrupting life in the Philby household.

The morning after a particularly drunken party, a guest returning to collect his car heard voices upstairs and found “Kim and Guy in the bedroom drinking champagne.” They had already been down to the Embassy, but being too drunk to work had come back to the house at 4100 Nebraska Avenue.

Burgess was a problem for Philby, but concluded that Burgess could not be left unsupervised. The situation was tense. Maclean had been identified as the prime suspect in the Embassy leak and was under surveillance by MI-5. Philby decided that Burgess should return to London to warn him that it was time to flee.

Burgess had a solution to a quick exit from the States: he managed to get nailed speeding (at 80 mph) three times in just one hour, poured a plate of prawns into his jacket pocket and left them there for a week. He was casual in the handling of classified documents at the Embassy, and since arriving in Washington he had been almost continuously intoxicated.

Burgess was recalled from the United States due to “bad behaviour” and upon reaching London, warned Maclean. They disappeared from the UK in the early summer of 1951, around the time I was born. They eventually surfaced at a Moscow press conference five years later.

The British embassy was in a secret uproar as news spread that not one but two senior Foreign Office officials were probably Soviet spies. Philby broke the embarrassing news to the FBI, and told his colleagues at the Embassy that he was going home for “a stiff drink,” which is exactly what I would have done in his position. Instead of opening the bar at 4100 Nebraska Avenue, though, he headed for the potting shed, collected a trowel and walked back to the basement where Burgess had been living. He retrieved from behind a loose brick the Russian camera, tripod, and film given to him by his Soviet handlers, sealed them in waterproof containers, and placed them in the trunk of his car. Then he climbed in, started the engine and drove north.

Philby had traveled the road to Great Falls many times, and used to drink at the Old Angler’s Inn along the way. The road had little traffic in those days and was heavily wooded on each side. On a deserted stretch he parked, removed the parked, extracted the containers and trowel, and headed into the trees. He emerged after a few minutes, casually doing up his fly for the benefit of any passersby who might question what he was up to.

The camera may still be out there, a silent monument to the Soviet spies of Washington, who once lived at 4100 Nebraska Avenue.

As it turned out, a logistics snafu caused the tour to be cancelled. Too bad. I had really hoped to tell you the story. So, I climbed out of my presentable clothes, got back into my damp swim suit and returned to the pool, located conveniently near Arlington Hall.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

Nebraska Avenue

(The Mount Vernon Seminary for Girls in the late 1930s before it became the Naval Security Station. Image from Bill Lockert, CTTCM, USN, Ret.).

Man, that was a hell of storm that swept across the region yesterday. It was what was left of Tropical Depression Bill, the second named storm of the year that came off the Gulf and swept to the northeast.

I was sitting out on the patio, watching the sheets of rain in the gathering dusk, punctuated by flashes of lighting- one of which hit the building and almost caused me to leap out of my Adirondack chair.

I couldn’t get back to what I was doing, which was to do some research on the Nebraska Avenue Complex (NAC), a facility I intend to use as a prop for a talk to the Australians this afternoon. I prefer having a cocktail and watching the majesty and power of Mother Nature in action.

I had some interaction with the facility over the years. In Mac Shower’s WWII day, it had been Station NEGAT, the Washington DC hub of Naval cryptology, the art of breaking Japanese Naval codes. It had been Mount Vernon Seminary, a non-sectarian private girl’s school founded in 1917 to educate the daughters of Washington’s diplomatic Corps, and appropriated by the Navy in 1942 to support the war effort “for the duration.”

That duration lasted right through the Cold War, to 1995 when the Cryppie commands were consolidated at NSA in Fort Meade, and the NAC subsequently appeared to be slipping into the sleepy hallow of the post-war defense reductions. That changed abruptly changed with the terror attacks on 9/11.

The first acts of the Office of Homeland Security, then in the White House, was to set up a watch floor at the complex, and with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, DHS moved in with all its size 12 DDD shoes and became a cabinet-level institution. I worked there for a while, establishing a watch position to conduct liaison with State, local and tribal governments.

It was a tight fit on the campus.

The only place to eat on the Station was a Subway sandwich shop, and the bright lights of Tenleytown were a brisk twenty- minute walk away up the Avenue. Jarrod Fogel lost 245 pounds eating at Subway- and I understand why.

They are building the glittering DHS new Headquarters across I-295 on the grounds of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane and will be committing themselves there shortly. I don’t know what will happen to the NAC, but the real estate is too valuable to lie fallow for long.

In early 1943, for example, over 1,100 men and women were working at the Station on the complex problems associated with code-breaking. By the end of WWII, there were over 5,000 persons on the job, serving the early mechanical computing engines called “bombes.”

It is worth a digression to talk about the first Computers. The Brits had fielded their first, manufactured by the British Tabulating Machine concern, based on the Polish exploitation of the early German Enigma code machines, in 1940 at the famed Bletchley Park campus.

The Germans continually updated their Enigmas, introducing a four-rotor model to add to the early production models that had only three. In addition, they changed all their code-books resulting in a blackout at Bletchley that lasted from February to October of 1942.

That was the darkest part of the U-boat war, and resources were tight in Britain. Long reluctant to share with the Cousins on the other side of the Atlantic, the imperative of the time led to a visit to the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, OH, by the legendary Alan Turing. The US-Bombe was built by the National Cash Registers (NCR) in Dayton Initially the Navy stated a requirement for a fully electronic machine, but designer Joe Desch estimated that it would need over 70,000 vacuum tubes to run.

Toward the end of 1942, Desch proposed a less sophisticated design similar to that of the Brits, but faster and more reliable. The Navy jumped on the proposal and the first prototypes were operational in mid-1943. After working out some initial bugs, the NCR-built bombe proved to be “reliable, fast and effective.” By the end of 1943, 120 machines were operational, most at Nebraska Avenue attacking the German U-Boat message traffic. For the remainder of the war, the USN took the lead on breaking the codes, sharing the highly sensitive decryptions with the US 10th Fleet sub-hunters and the Royal Navy.

After the war, all US Bombe were destroyed, except for one unit that is now on display at the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade.

But of course there is much more to the story than machines. Part of the total war effort was the integration of women into the Navy. Many were accepted into uniform as “Women Accepted for Emergency Volunteer Service,” or WAVES.

My parents met on a blind date set up by a couple with whom they remained close friends the rest of their lives. Three of them are gone now, but the last time we were together was a dinner I hosted at Bobby Van’s Grill on New York Avenue in 2008. As it turned out, Babs (not her real name) had worked in Washington during the War, and had been a WAVE Lieutenant. Having been in the Navy and a Spook myself, I was fascinated and asked her some questions:

“Where did you work?”

“Oh, a place by Ward Circle.”

“Not Nebraska Avenue?”

“Well, yes.”

“Did you work on the bombes?”

Her face went white and she refused to speak further. I felt bad about making her uncomfortable, and told her to relax. All that material had been declassified years before. “Heck, I can even take you up to Fort Meade and show you the only remaining one.”

She shook her head emphatically. “No. They told us that if we ever spoke about what we did, they would come after us and throw us in jail for the rest of our lives. I am not taking any chances at this late date.”

We changed the subject to how single women got by in a town that was bulging at the seams from the influx of war workers. That is the way it is in Washington. If you are not sure they are going to come after you, it is better to change the subject or just keep your mouth shut. That is part of the story about what happened literally across the street- 4100 Nebraska Avenue- from the main entrance to the NAC.

It was a house rented by a guy named Kim Philby. But we will have to get to that tomorrow. I have a tour to give.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

Twitter: @jayare303