Something Cooking

It is the morning of the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, and my first without historian Shelby Foote to interpret it for me. He might have told me that if General Longstreet had pressed a little harder on the Union left on the second day, or if there had been a few more men with General Pickett on the third day, we might be celebrating two holidays in Virginia this weekend. The one from Britain , of course, and that of an independent South, free from Washington .

But it didn’t work out that way. Rolling through the lush Jersey greenery, windows up against the moist heat, I had to wonder what it was like to march north in a thick wool uniform. It was bad enough in the back of the Oldsmobile, since the air conditioner needed a charge. The roads from Jersey were filled with people trying to get a jump on the holiday. We are filled with the uncomfortable realization that the summer is here, and full, and thus almost gone.

Perhaps that is the curse of being a planner, or working program and budget issues in the bureaucracy. Life in The Program is always somewhere in the misty future where there is no joy or sadness, only the framework on which we will someday drape our lives.

The voices on the radio were almost indistinguishable in the back seat, and the traffic and weather were on the AM frequency. Static almost drowned them out, but I thought I heard that the humidity would be down over the holiday. That is good, but the price for losing the soggy moisture will be some massive thunderstorms, and perhaps damaging winds and hail. It could make the holiday drive a challenge.

I’m not going to do it, but I heard about the pilgrimage to the Beach yesterday from the back seat of the Olds. I now know the plan for pizza night on arrival, after the slog down I-95 in the great steel ribbon of cars, down to the Dismal Swamp cut-off and the bridge to the Outer Banks, and then south of Duck and Kitty Hawk to where the highway ends on the beach strand.

I heard about the easy shrimp-and-corn dinner, and Steak Night, and how the menus will be played out amid the smell of saltwater and the grill and sunscreen. It sounded great.

I’m not going to the beach this long weekend, since I have things to do here. But the woman with the magpie glitter in her eyes is, and she had a plan for it. She has a tendency to motion sickness, and that is why I deferred the front seat, preferring the quiet pain from my knees to her complaint of potential mal de mer. It was Steve Canyon ‘s car, so he had to drive and he got to take the brunt of her conversation.

Thankfully, no one got sick.

Pizza night is important, I found, since there will be too much work to get things set up. Paper plates will do just fine for the first night at the beach. There will be enough work in fitting out the beds and issuing towels.

The capital will be quiet with everyone gone. There will be tourists, of course, and they will marvel at the peace and tranquility downtown around the monuments. But I would rather take it easy, and hump some of the junk between the apartments. I am moving again, and the movers are coming next week.

They probably won’t be the same ones, but movers are going to be coming for a lot of the people this summer. I do not think I have ever seen so much motion in the ranks of the Intelligence Community. It might be happening across the rest of the Executive Branch as well, since I have seen a lot of vacancies. But it is particularly notable in the agencies targeted for change by the 9/11 intelligence reform bill.

I’m sure you have noted that the President likes to have sharp women around him. Condy Rice is probably the most famous, but Karen Hughes was the one who balanced the influence of clinical Karl Rove. She left the President’s immediate staff before the election to spend more time with her family, but apparently had enough of them. She is back in town to polish up America ‘s image overseas.

The Directorships of the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office are vacant. The Director of DIA is retiring at the end of the beach season. The President dropped the re-organization bomb this week, forced by the provisions of the law, and shaped by the recommendations of the Silberman-Robb panel on defeating the Weapons of Mass Destruction.

There is another strong woman in the middle of this, and she apparently had a major role in crafting the form of the President’s decision. Frances Fragos Townsend is the attractive blonde woman who had her picture taken in the Rose Garden on Thursday, after the President signed the Executive Order.

I know it is not correct to notice, but what the men wear in Washington is stultifying and barely worth comment. Dark suits of conservative cut are the standard, with maybe a daring flash of go-to-hell from a colorful cravat. But that is the extent of it. Frances wore a cream jacket with a Nehru collar with black piping, closed with golden knots of vaguely Chinese design. In the picture her smile radiates confidence, and her hands are demurely clasped before her.

I don’t buy the demur demeanor for a second. She has one of those bifurcated titles that enables her to put “Deputy Assistant to the President” on the resume, but her main job is to be Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism. She assumed the position just over a year ago, when the WMD Panel was doing the heavy lifting.

Frances reports both to the National Security and Homeland Security Advisors, which has always struck me as an odd arrangement. But Frances had the lead on crafting the President’s position, and she was thick with Ambassador Negroponte and his gray counselor Mike Hayden. She is coming from a place that has more to do with law enforcement than intelligence, and maybe that is why the flavor of all this tastes the way it does.

Frances came to the White House from the Coast Guard, where she had been Assistant Commandant for Intelligence. I had to program for the establishment of the office, so it has not been around that long. She had more than a decade at Justice before that, including the top intelligence policy job there. That would mean that she was around when Assistant Attorney General Jamie Gorelick wrote the memo reinforcing the wall between the cops and the spooks. But we have blessedly short memories in town, and I count myself lucky to have one of them.

The changes crafted by Frances are the biggest yet taken by the Administration and Congress to overhaul the Intelligence Community. The fact that she came from Justice meant that she could focus on the FBI, which had largely dodged the blame for the disaster. Frances got the President to accept nearly all of the seventy-odd recommendations made by the WMD Commission.

Ambassador Negroponte is emerging with a solid power base. He now has clear authority over the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI and DoD units that conduct operations overseas. With the decision this week, the Ambassador now has the authority to nominate the number three official in the Bureau in charge of counter-terror enforcement, and will have the capability to influence the operations of the powerful Barons of the Agency who run the FBI Field Offices.

After the leadership gets back from the beach, they will begin to fill the spaces with faces. Some of it has begun. There is an outsider now responsible for planning operations, sitting over the CIA’s Directorate for Operations. That is Scott Redd, who was executive director of the WMD Panel, and not a career intelligence guy. I don’t know if he will be able to get away for the long weekend. But I think he may know Al Calland, the three-star admiral who is currently the senior military official at CIA. All the flag officers know one another. The President announced that Calland will be the new Deputy Director of the Agency. He is a SEAL rather than an intelligence officer.

The shoes will start to drop on who the new directors of the agencies will be after the holiday. One thing appears certain. These will not be leaders who came up through the ranks and know their lines by heart. They will owe their loyalties up, rather than down, and their connections will be among and between the reformers.

Everyone is careful to point out that the Arttorney General, another new guy, will continue to have a strong role over the FBI. But they have to say that. It is interesting that one of the few recommendations not signed into Frances ‘s Executive Order is the creation of an office to ensure the privacy of the American People is protected. But I am sure that something so important could not be lost in the shuffle.

According to the New York Times, Frances stepped up to the podium in the West Wing briefing room and said “If there was any doubt about the DNI’s authority, and whether the President was going to empower the DNI, that shouldn’t remain today.”

I had some doubts as the authorization bills churned through Congress. But the President appears to be banking on Ambassador Negroponte. I am going to relax amid my boxes as best I can this weekend. I’ll think of the beach, of course, and smell the familiar barbeque smells from the grill at the back of Big Pink’s pool area. Most sensible people will be out of town.

But there is definitely an odor in the air. There is definitely something cooking.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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