We struggled to find something a little up-and-offbeat this morning, and Mick Jagger’s 80th hit the mood and the message. The reality is something a bit different. Or at least a little more convoluted.

We all have ridden the shifting tides of our national interest. Most of us are now a generation out from those who were the first in the “All Volunteer” force. We are proud of our Country and the Services for which we served. There have been some strange elements of it surfacing of late that give some pause to some of what we were taught about all that.

The FBI of J. Edgar Hoover has some challenges to it. I won’t bother to list them, since they were routinely shuffled to the bucket of personal attacks that go along with many public figures. The other ones have included rumor and innuendo-based aspersions that have bounced around for years, though the folks at Langley managed to direct them elsewhere since the founding.

This is not an attempt to press any “conspiracy theory.” The use of the term in association with some of the remarkable events of the last couple years overshadows anything like what we knew as “The Truth.” Here is an example. By complete accident, I spent my last couple months on active duty working a special project for Secretary Tommy Thompson at HHS. It was an unlikely association possible only because of old Cold War plans to babysit a Cabinet member eligible to succeed to the Presidency in the event of a mass-destruction event. I happened to get the Secretaries of the Interior, Education and Health & Human Services. The first two figures were only vaguely interested in what their roles were, constitutionally, and wanted to get back to DC from that big underground place. Tommy recognized his history, though, and the amalgamated role his dozens of agencies and offices had in the case of something like the 1918 flu epidemic. What he wanted was simple, which was a unified reporting system similar to what DoD had through the Joint Staff in the Pentagon.

I was retiring and of no further use to the Navy, so had been shipped off to Langley to perform a minor role for the Community Management Staff. My letter was in and approved, so when I told the folks who actually run Langley that HHS was interested in a better source of intelligence. The mysterious one acre farm plots Osama bin Laden was growing things on was a case in point. Being a resource of limited duration, they sent me over to the Hubert Humphrey Building to work onsetting up something better for Secretary Thompson.

We completed a demonstration of how a small cell (a dozen or so) representatives from CDC, NIH and the myriad of organizations could operate as a fusion center for information at the executive level of HHS. Which was overshadowed by the outbreak of the SARS-1 epidemic in 2002. It had the potential to turn into something just like COVID, and I was told to start attending the SARS working group that met on the 4th floor of the HHS Building. I was my usual overbearing self, full of DoD energy, and in the course of one meeting drew the ire of the Chairman, Dr. Tony Fauci for advocating a quarantine to shut down SARS transmissions which had been rumored at Disneyworld in Florida. It was an impressive lecture directed at me for failing to understand the dramatic negative consequences of imposed quarantine.

I kept quiet in the last few meetings of the working group. At the last one, there was some anxiety displayed by members of the group about other issues in Public Health. One was the prohibition on research in materials with bio-hazard potential. I am not claiming dramatic insight into public health, but this was a small group that did and I was there. The question to Dr. Fauci as we rose to end the SARS working group was about how to remedy the shortfall. I will never forget Dr. Fauci’s response to a group- with the exception of me- who he could trust. His simple short answer was “We have got it covered.”

So, the idea that former Soviet labs in Ukraine or new ones like Wuhan were converted to other uses by cut-outs like EcoHealth came as no surprise in the Pandemic. It was a minor unraveling of one of the strands of “truth” we have become familiar with of late. With the revelations that at least some parts of the government we served- and the people who ran them- were nonchalant about matters of fact came older stories.

I had been working on some strands of how our Intelligence Community came to be with our mentor RADM Donald “Mac” Showers. Navy is the oldest member, having been founded to keep track of events and impact on places our ships and Marines could be told to visit or intervene. Another former Director of Naval Intelligence had come to the business through his father, who had been part of the management team for NRID-3 in New York. The World Wars had provided an obligation for New York’s Law Enforcement and Criminal elements to find a way to contribute to the war effort through the Naval Reserve Intelligence system. They brought the unconventional tools of fighting the Mob directly into the improvised war establishment.

Revelations about that were striking enough that books were published and Hollywood films made about how men like Lucky Luciano were able to use NYC evidence rooms as tools in drug importation. We had several discussions about that before Mac passed in 2012. There were more snippets that came after and for which I have no direct evidence of truthiness. But they were consistent with the idea that there was more to be learned on how two independent Cabinet positions- “War” and “Navy” were combined in a calculus that split off part of the War Department’s Army into an all-new Air Force in the period of change, 1945-47.

There is a dearth of detail on such an enormous change accomplished in such a small number of months. Part of the great post-war transformation of the National Defense Establishment included the founding of institutions like CIA and NSA. The latter fell fairly neatly into the new DoD. CIA scooped up the useful parts of Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS, which had their origins in the ambiguous world of NYC Cops and Robbers. It brought new and necessary capabilities to Washington.

It also brought some completely new thinking into how things work. There has been innuendo about the murder of JFK since the event in Dealy Plaza. I put no stock in anything, except that the combination of tall tales involving the Mob and Langley may have a thread of accuracy in them someplace. Hoover’s FBI had a personal-level capability, and the first meeting with Director Hoover and newly-arrived Government officials in Washington briefly opened the books on what the FBI already knew about them, and why “cooperation” was the best way to get ahead in DC.

This is NOT an attempt to tie all those old tales into some new version of “the truth.” That apparently perished a long time ago. But the curious stories coming out of Martha’s Vineyard do give one pause. Yesterday’s story about the former White House Chef Andre Rush was different. The former First Family were not present at the estate. Rush was said to have been paddle-boarding, slipped off and drowned. The Obama mansion where he was visiting was not occupied by the former President and his wife. Chef Andre Rush was not hired by the Obamas- he was a legacy employee first employed by the Clinton White House and happily retained by the Bushes and Obamas. His biceps were of some renown.

The recovery of Chef Rush’s body and initial investigation took a full 24 hours. Additional “truths” emerged that caused revision to the original story. The most powerful was in the form of video tape showing Chef Andre vigorously swimming without assistance, a goal of his impressive physical fitness program. So, there were revisions to the official story this morning that acknowledged his swimming ability.

There were other revisions as well. This is NOT endorsement of them. But the three that were most striking included an allegation that the former First Family was in fact still on Martha’s Vineyard when it happened. That Chef Rush was found with traumatic injuries to his head. And according to a member of the rescue team (who refused his name to be used) the body was wearing a diver’s weight belt.

Are any of those three new things true? We may not discover until they are safely “de-bunked.” Or become “Old News,” and hence irrelevant.

We are not going to publish as a Daily. We are not going to re-spin the allegations weaving the tale together, which include elements of the usual aspersions cast by those critical of the way our Government seems to have adapted to new standards of ethics and truth. We will see if any of this plays out. The new standard of “truth” includes an element of “plausible deniability,: which was an art with which we were familiar in our professional lives. Apparently it still is, which now makes it “old news” from which we “should move on.”

That is all the portents we have got this afternoon. We bet there will be more before Cocktail hour!

– Vic