Shooting Rockets

The radio chirped on my desk at the Bus Station and told me that the storms would begin arriving just after lunch. The nice lady told me they would pound us until long after old bureaucrats would be in bed, or dozing in their armchairs.

My office window looks down on the covered courtyard, so it is no good for tactical weather forecasting. I resigned myself to getting trapped by the storms as I headed out to the Metro to some meetings at the Ronald Reagan World Trade Center .

Far below street-level, I did some amateur profiling of my fellow passengers since the Authorities won’t do it for me. I saw no random checks coming in. I stood on the platform and looked at the crowd for  backpacks and signs of recently-shaven hair or beards. Those can be indicators of terrorists, as can be the murmured prayer or the scent of flower-water. They say that the bombers often anoint themselves for Paradise before they head out to slaughter the innocent.

Maybe it is just to cover the scent of fear. I don’t know. I know that the truth is something the authorities can’t deal with, at least not publicly. But if they cannot acknowledge that the bombers are all young men of South Asian origin with backpacks, that doesn’t mean I can’t be aware on my own, and move away on the platform.

Seems a little crazy, this collective denial.

I managed to complete the meetings and the round trip on the subway without misadventure. Grabbing my briefcase in the office, I hoped to escape downtown at the peak of rush hour. The radio said the storms were bombing Loudoun County and headed toward the District. Then the announcer switched gears and told me the FBI was falling further behind on translating a mountain of wire-tapped terror-related phone calls.

We are so much better at predicting the weather than we are of other impending disasters.

Traffic was light. It appeared that others had been listening to the radio, too, and had got out of the city while the getting was good.

I raced across the bridges on a collision course with the storm. I hurtled into the parking lot and stripped out of my sodden suit and was in the pool at Big Pink as the black clouds rolled closer.

Dusk came early. I could feel the vibration of distant booming through my belly in the water long before I could hear it. The lifeguard would have thrown us out if the sound was audible. Then the wind began to roar,  surface air sucked up into massive thunderheads that signaled the collision of the Canadian frontal system with the fetid tropical air that clutched me so deeply and so intimately.

The trees began to dance. And then they began to shed their leaves and seeds, the debris flying up in the air and littering the rippling surface of the water. My glasses blew off the poolside table and onto the deck. The gust picked up the little plastic case that holds the pool passes of the residents and their guests and hurled it headlong across the deck.

The contents spilled manila alphabetic dividers and white cards willy-nilly into the pool. I splashed over to get them before they became saturated and sank to the bottom. They were heavy with moisture already, and some went down immediately, little white boats torpedoed amidships.

I did what I could, but realized that the roaring wind presaged something worse coming soon. I got out of the pool and retrieved my glasses from the deck, thankful that the fleeing throng of mothers and children had not crushed them in their haste to exit.

In the whirling blackness I wondered if we would lose power in the electrical storm that would come. I dashed back to my apartment and recklessly checked the e-mail, dripping on the rug. If the power surged from the heavens and the lap-top was plugged in, it could fry the motherboard and all my work would be lost.

But suppose there was a critical update, or a personal note?

I had to know.

There was one title that grabbed me immediately. I clicked on it and sat down on my towel. It was from a retired admiral I used to work for had posted something significant. He still has his hands on things, and I respect his judgment. He sniffs a power play in the making.

Most of you already know this, so bear with me. What was a rumor last month is now fact. Dr. Don Kerr has been named the new Director of the National Reconnaissance Office.  Things can change, but at the moment, he is not anticipated to have the same portfolio that his predecessors did. All of them were publicly known as Assistant Secretaries of the Air Force, since their real job was an official secret.

The very existence of the National Reconnaissance Office was classified until the mid-1990s. Stripping the new Director of his false front may the first step in de-conflicting the long-held secrets of an old war that is overlapping a new one.

Thunder boomed and the screen on the computer flickered. I read the rest of the note and saved it for later. Then I shut it down and unplugged the machine from the modem and from the wall and prepared to wait out the storm.

I won’t bore you with a re-play of Cold War history, or recount the dissolution of the Grand Alliance of Red and Blue that defeated Hitler. I will not describe Operation Paperclip, the secret program that scooped up the German scientists and deposited them at the arsenal in Alabama to tinker with rocket motors. The Soviets had their version of the same program.

Which brings to mind the caustic description of the Russians from an old college professor I had back in Ann Arbor . He had come from Poland , and he was still mad about the loss of his homeland. He viewed the Russians as people without culture. “Barnyard animals shooting rockets,” he would growl. “ German rockets .”

The race to put The Bomb on top of a rocket began shortly after the guns went silent in Europe . But like the secret Germans in Alabama , things were never quite what they seemed to be.

The race to mutually-assured destruction had three components. Only one was in plain sight. That was the National Aeronautic and Space Administration. It was a perfect cover for the other two rocket programs that had their origins with Dr. Werner von Braun and his band of scientists from the Third Reich. The development of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile was a military secret. Inextricably linked was the program to build and launch satellites that could take pictures of the Russian rockets in what we delicately called “denied areas.”

After Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2, the pressure to get cameras on orbit was intense. The organization that did it, partnering the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense, is what became the NRO. The matter was very sensitive. The organization did not officially exist. Lighting lit the parking lot and outlined the branches of the trees stripped of leaves.

The satellites on their celestial orbits don’t have to worry about the weather. They look down on us all from on high, serene. Regular as clockwork.

I turned on the television and opened the door to watch the rain cascading down off the battlements of the building. The choice of the new Director was curious. I knew where Dr. Kerr had been working. He had been Deputy Director for Science and Technology at Langley , but he was not from the space-launch community.  Prior to his time at CIA, he was the Assistant Director of the FBI, responsible for the FBI’s Laboratory Division. He had been in industry, and before that he was Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.  His doctorate is in plasma physics from Cornell.

He will assume his new position next Wednesday, the third of August.

The water began to pool on the walkway outside and I assumed the garage below me would flood. I resigned myself to fate, and poured a glass of wine to watch the rain. The thunderheads had moved overhead and were over the District. The rain did not abate.

The note from the Admiral had concluded that there were signs and portents in Dr. Kerr’s appointment. As part of the fallout from the establishment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the relationship between the Intelligence Community and the Defense Department is apparently being reconsidered.

Could it be that the DNI may be handing over day-to-day supervision of the intelligence agencies buried in the Defense Department? Was he delegating management authority to the minions of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Dr. Steve Cambone?

That be essentially be a demotion for the men who lead the agencies, who in the past, could have gone straight to the Director of Central Intelligence if something did not appear to be going their way.

That would include the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and of course, the NRO. I wondered what that might mean in the context of strategic direction and resource allocation.

After all, a satellite on orbit is not useful in sensing whether the young man standing next to me is bathed in flower water, or sweating under his pack-pack.

This might be the beginning of a play for power, or maybe I am just imagining things. It is hard to tell if the DNI is flexing his muscle, inserting his man into the heart of the space launch business. Don Kerr’s appointment could be a test of organizational strength, or a means to recalibrate ancient relationships.

Or it could be nothing at all. Outside, the storm cells continued to roll overhead. The thunder continued, though increasingly distant.

Like the sound of a battle far away.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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