What do you Know?

The news made me squirm, being uncomfortably close to home. Two Federal employees, one a retired Captain like me, were busted for leaking classified information. Leaks happen here all the time, but there are unofficial rules for doing it. That concerns me, but not like this. The information that was disclosed was not about policy or politics, and it did not compromise a sensitive source.

In fact, the intent of the leak was to save lives, even if it was in a selfish way. That is why it is uncomfortable. I have never knowingly given up classified information, but there is a circumstance in which I certainly would have. I’m glad I don’t know anything operational anymore.

Having knowledge of an operation in progress is a burden. The first time I recognized the chafing nature of it was a long time ago, when I was leaving the bunker in a land overseas where the Indications and Warning Center was located. I worked a shift job under the yards of concrete, mostly watching Bad Guys to the north. But there the local political situation was unsettled, and there was a human intelligence operation going on. The Center was a secure area, near the Ministry of Defense, and some operatives needed a place to plot.

Our side had a source, and the source’s information was viewed as essential. The Center was small, and the whispering was frantic. You couldn’t help but hear.

My shift was over. I walked up the stairs and out of the U.S.-only section of the building, past the military guard post where a young man in camouflage stood impassively. One of the Spooks raced after me. He grabbed me by the upper arm and looked at me earnestly. “You can’t tell anyone about this. Someone could get killed.”

I nodded. This was not like having a secret on an Aircraft Carrier. I might be heading for the Club, or back to the hooch where the Warrant Officers I lived with might be playing cards and drinking. Or maybe I would head out into the Ville, where the women were eager to spend some time with the Americans in exchange for fake drinks.

I told the Spook that his secrets were safe with me and went home. I said nothing. Not then, and not now. But I did pour three fingers of Bushmills Irish whiskey into a glass and think about it.

Over the years, the weight of it all wore grooves in my skin, as I suspect it does to all of us. It requires a parallel mental process, the ability to lock some things away in an alternate world. There were ways we acquired information. Some of them by technical means, others done by hand. Some exploited innovative properties of physics, others the basest of human emotions. They were almost always incredibly expensive. Disclosing how we knew things would eliminate sources and leave us vulnerable.

But that was the nature of things when the missiles of the Cold War bristled, and the submarines plowed their routes and crews huddled down in the silos or in the alert shacks near their bombers.

It was serious business, and we practiced how we might deal with things if the worst came. We were conducting a very strange alert one time, which involved mobilizing a select cadre who would re-locate to an undisclosed location to carry on the fight if the capital was lost.

Waiting around for transportation, which is most of life in the military, the Admiral who was leading us waxed philosophical. I had served with him before and respected him immensely. He asked us if we would actually show up if the alert was the real thing.

It was curious question, one I had not considered before. “You mean, if we knew that the missiles were likely to come and our families would be left behind?”

The Admiral nodded, the light reflecting off his glasses. We were professionals, after all. “I don’t know,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to make those sorts of decisions.”

In a way, we already had. I never came in the door after work and greeted the wife with a casual “There was a dispersal of ballistic missile submarines in the Barents Sea . Could be preparations for a no-notice nuclear strike. What’s for dinner?”

We completed the alert with the Admiral, the results of which were inconclusive and very expensive. I did not tell my wife where I was or what I had been up to. It was the last exercise of that kind. I resolved in my mind that if I knew the missiles were coming I would do my duty, but I would call home and tell the family to fill up the car with gas and get the hell out of town. That let me sleep.

After the wall came down and the Soviet Union withered away, the program was dismantled and the equipment was destroyed- literally blown up- so that we would never be able to play those sorts of games again.

It was a budget thing, of course. In the end, everything is. But now it is déjà vu, only instead of Soviet rockets it is Egyptian green-grocers in Baltimore , or Syrian students in New York .

That is how the two Federal officials got in trouble.

There is no clear criteria for what to tell the local officials when the national system vacuum-cleans up information. Secretary Ridge wrestled with the question, and he eventually settled on the stop-light system of warning, which immediately proved to have too few colors.

Condition Red meant the terrorists were on the way, and if we knew that, we should have already stopped them. There will never be a Condition Green again, because if there ever was a lovely day to put the top down on the car and enjoy the season, it was 9/11. Before nine AM.

So we wound up in the bewildering world of Orange and Yellow, and the poor local cops and fire departments and schools had to burn overtime hours when some bit of information turned up. When it was classified information from the Spook world, there was no one who was cleared to receive it, and hence no way to evaluate it.

I will rely on the media reports about the nature of the intelligence that the Homeland Security Department received regarding a credible threat to the New York subway, and the Baltimore harbor tunnel. The news reports the information came from prisons overseas, and I will leave it at that.

Regardless of the source, it was credible information because trains and tunnels have been bombed before. The Bureaus writhed in agony. If they warned the Governors, then there would be consequences and inconvenience for the citizens.

If they did nothing, and the worst happened, then there would be hell to pay. Eventually, the decision was made to inform the Governors and the Mayors, just in case.

But it took days for the decision to be made. The two Bureaucrats with the clearances saw the reports, and they did what they thought they had to do. The retired Coast Guard Captain called his son three days before Mayor Bloomberg and the FBI went public with the warning. He told him to stay off the trains.

It is unfortunate that his son is an idiot, or hysterical. Not understanding the importance of protecting his sources, he immediately sent an e-mail to dozens of friends, identifying his father as the source of the information.

The other Bureaucrat was another member of the new Coast Guard intelligence service, who informed an old pal that he ought not to travel by subway between the 7th and 10th of October.

He was promptly blown up by his dear pal in a mass e-mail, and his career is over.

The Department had to tell the Governor of Maryland yesterday about the Egyptian plot against the tunnels. Eight men, two of them with overdue visas, were going to blow up the downtown tunnel in Baltimore .

The Governor did what he had to do, and I-95 was snarled for miles with angry commuters who did not know why their days had been so seriously dislocated.

There was no bomb yesterday. It appears that an inmate with access to interrogators had discovered that one of the men was courting his sister, and ratted out the whole family.

I did not get a call warning me to stay out of Baltimore . It could be that my pals in the business evaluated the threat as bogus, even if they had to pass along the information to the Governor anyway, to cover the Department’s ass.

Or maybe it is because I just don’t have any old friends.

They say that is one of the consequences of having been in the business. I don’t know, and in a way, I’m glad.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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