Steam Power

The wind is roaring outside, pummeling the junction of the towers beneath which I dwell. The month that enters like a Lion has brought us a raw chill that is as cold as any of this winter. Thin drifts of snow linger in the places where the shadows lie.

It’s cold.

I turned the convector heater on and felt warm air blow up through the vents. Steam from the boiler in the bowels of Big Pink flooded up. Much better. With coffee, maybe this will be tolerable.

The radio troubles me, though. There is no soothing music. Instead there is a man with a thin Scottish voice describing the invention of the television in London. I thought it was an American who did it, by which of course, I meant an invention created here by someone from somewhere else.

The voice on the radio with the Scottish burr mingled with the bubbling of the coffee. The voice was that of John Logie Baird, though of course it was a recreation. The real Baird has been in his grave since 1946.

In life, he had been slight of stature and chronically short of cash. But he was a visionary. The ghostly narrative described the creation of a mechanical device of whirling discs that produced pictures.

A mechanical television. A vivid image of a steam-powered radio big as a locomotive came to me. I am uncomfortable with thinking this early, and do not trust the synapses in my brain as they fire at random. It is still too close to dreaming, and the colors of the night have not yet worn off. It was easier to rise to music, and allow thought to emerge with the chimes of the BBC.

The Scottish voice described scenes from a gray place in a gray decade, the 1920s, in a place near the Admiralty in London. I remember seeing them, the stately white buildings with the antennas draped across the roof, and imagined the tapping of manual Morse code to His majesty’s ships far flung across the imperial globe.

The mechanical television was hooked to a radio transmitter, and had quite a following. But Baird’s broadcast, and his potential competition to the BBC, was alleged to interfere with the Admiralty’s tapping to the Fleet. He was shut down.

The Russian immigrant to America who is credited with the invention of the electronic television was a fellow named Vladimir Zworykin. He arrived just ahead of Bolshevism in Pittsburgh in 1919, and invented the ”iconoscope,” or electronic camera, and the ”kinescope,” or picture tube.

In 1923 he unveiled and electronic and blurry picture of boats on a river outside his lab. The world has never quite been the same.

I poured the coffee and let the rich fumes help me deal with my own technical challenge. There were more notes in the e-mail queue than I remembered. The wind pressed hard against the door and window. I clicked through them and saw a note from a young man who is entering the secret world. I give him counsel when he asks for it, since I have walked around the block and returned mostly unscathed, or at least with a modest pension.

The note said his supervisor had asked him if he was willing to take the polygraph at the Central Intelligence Agency, so that he could be allowed to work on joint projects with them. “Is there a downside to it?” he asked. ”What is involved with that?”

I furrowed my brow. The CIA poly had a lot in common with steam-powered televisions. It was a technology that represented a way of looking at the world.

There are two- perhaps three- types of lie detector tests. The one required by the Department of Defense is unpleasant, but relatively straightforward. It asks if you are now, or have been, interested in overthrowing the Government of the United States. It asks if you are a saboteur, or a spy, or have given classified material to persons not eligible to receive it.

I have always passed that one, though I have problems with one of the questions. It goes along with the ambiguity of living in the real world and doing real work with real people. The Poly that they use at CIA is different, as is the one at the National Security Agency.

NSA may technically work for the Department of Defense, but the Fort has always considered itself a world apart. I will let them alone this morning. Their culture was not at issue.. The CIA does not work for anyone that I was able to tell when I worked on their campus.

That is not precisely true, and was a little more nuanced. They all worked for the President. And their qualifications were rigorously checked. They had to be. There had been a breach of security that promoted a drunk and a scoundrel named Aldrich Ames to a position where he was able to compromise virtually every clandestine asset the Agency had in place against the Soviet Union.

Many died.

In the aftermath of the disclosure, steps were taken to ensure that nothing like that every happened again. I typed back to my young friend that he should read the memoir ” Denial and Deception ” by Melissa Boyle Mahle (2002). She appears to be a forthright case officer, fluent in Arabic, and a veteran of postings in several hot spots in the Middle East.

She cheerfully admitted to have committed an indiscretion in her career, one of the heart. But those things happen when one is out there in the wide world, and she was a loyal officer.

But in the wake of the Aimes scandal, she said ”internal-security branch was unleashed to ensure there would never be a recurrence. Among other measures, polygraph testing of employees was instituted with a vengeance. Since Ames himself had managed to deceive polygraph examiners, more-aggressive techniques were introduced.”

If you have taken a polygraph, you know that you must answer falsely to questions with known answers. That helps the machine operator set the setting on the steam generator properly. But the new approach taken at CIA went a step further. People on the box were exposed to hostile interrogation, on the premise that they might be the next Aldrich Aimes: 

In my experience, even the most collegial polygraph is a stressful situation. The person being examined has so much at stake. But now, a belligerent tone accompanied the exam. Hundreds of officers flunked.

And flunking had consequences. Names were reported to the FBI for follow-up investigation, which could take years because of where the officers had been posted. How many Special Agents are available to travel to Gabon for follow up? To Timbuktu?

Those under investigation were advised not to leave the country, and their clearances were suspended. They could not work, and according to Mahle, they came to be known within the agency as “ghosts.”

I knew one of them. He had an office with no window and no computer. He had been responsible for the report that assessed the damage of the Aimes affair. The Agency never forgave him. During the years of his internal exile, his daughter had the best organized softball league schedules in Northern Virginia.

I advised my friend to avoid volunteering for the exam, and wait until the new intelligence reform bill to sort things out. The Poly had been one of the issues the legislation had been intended to fix. The wreckage caused by the exam had created a major backlog in recruiting, just when the Agency was directed to start hiring with a vengeance.

“Perhaps,” I wrote, “things will become more rational.”

I sent the message. It might be true. I just hope it will not require a polygraph to prove it.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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