The Roberts Court

I am uncertain about when to report to the office, this first day of the Roberts Court . They confirmed him yesterday, with all the beleaguered Senate Republicans supporting, and half the Democrats.

I heard Senate Minority Leader Reid talking about it yesterday, while I was parked at a light on Route 7 in historic Falls Church . I tried an alternate route to the Tysons Corner office, where I had an early meeting. Nothing works at 8:30 in Washington , and it doesn’t matter which way you try to go.

There is more to look at in the city proper, and so it was more entertaining than sitting on the Interstate a few blocks away. Senator Reid seems to think the second nomination to the Court is the money shot, since it was assumed that the replacement for the old

Chief Justice would be a solid conservative. The key is the relief for Justice O’Connor, who had a predilection for inventing precedent if her heart told her it was the right thing to do.

The timing could not be better for the Democrats. The President is on the ropes, The House Majority Leader is suspended in indignant disgrace, and the economy still has the willies over the price of oil.

The interviewer asked how Senator Reid felt, with the stars apparently aligning to put pressure on the President to forward a moderate candidate.

The Senator had the good grace to deflect the notion that bad news for the nation was good news for him. I heard he had a heart event recently, so maybe the notion of personal mortality is on his mind.

I am not so willing to just shrug about the Roberts nomination. He is just fifty years old, after all, and he is likely to be the last Chief Justice I will see in my lifetime. He could serve thirty years on the bench without breaking a sweat, and with the advances in health care, it is possible that he could be the last to serve in the position: an eterna-judge on an eterna-court.

I find the notion disquieting. I bump into mortality the same way you do, turning a corner. Bob Denver and Don Adams made the transition in the last week. Bob was Gilligan, and Maynard G. Krebs before that on the Dobie Gillis Show. Don was Maxwell Smart, the secret agent in the slim-fitting tuxedo and the shoe-phone.

We all were pretty enamored of the secret agent thing back then, and I’m sure it contributed to my inclination to join the secret world. It seemed romantic at the time, and nothing could have prepared me for the reality of it.

Maxwell Smart was a parody of the master-spy, but James Bond cast a long shadow.

The problem with spies is that they are just people, and people can let you down. People are prone to excess, and to error. After the abuses of the 1970s, the government made a conscious decision to get away from the cowboys-and-indians style of intelligence collection. Things were interesting then. All the spooks in town used call-girls and booze-soaked lunches to gain useful information. In that environment it was easy to lose you way.

Machines were safer, and what with the ability to place things on low-earth orbit, it seemed logical to put our faith in cameras and radio receivers.

They were expensive things then, and they are expensive now. The new Director of National Intelligence is concerned about that. John Negroponte has directed a major review of the national security constellation that whizzes through the heavens, and there are a lot of nervous people in town.

The very existence of the National Reconnaissance Office used to be secret, and it is still a little startling to see the name emblazoned on the gate in front of the blue building. NRO is the metal-bending arm of the intelligence community, and are responsible for developing and launching spacecraft.

There was a curt announcement from the Public Affairs office there last week, and I marveled at that, too, since there was a time when they did not acknowledge that their affairs were any business of the public.

The short announcement sent a shockwave through the military-industrial complex. The Boeing Company had won the contract to build the next generation of reconnaissance satellites long ago. The program was known as the Future Imagery Architecture, and it has been in trouble for as long as I have known about it.

The NRO ordered Boeing to stop work on a significant part of the project, and shift the lead to Lockheed Martin, Boeing’s chief competitor.

There is about fifteen billion dollars at stake in the program, if one is to believe the numbers in the paper. I don’t know how much it will cost for Lock-Mart to bring the project to operational capability, or whether they can do it in time to ensure that there is continuity of coverage.

Congress is in an uproar about the satellites anyway. Some members are calling for steep cuts. Jane Harman, the ranking minority member on the House intelligence committee has Boeing in her home district, and is concerned about jobs. Over in the Senate, John D. Rockefeller is calling for the elimination of another orbital program worth ten billion dollars. It may have survived, but the public will never know. The Budget is still classified.

The word around the water cooler is that the commercial imagery companies are close to flying their own satellites with 1-meter resolution. I looked on Google and got a picture of the roof of Big Pink the other day. I could not discern what I was doing inside, something for which I was grateful. It is quite remarkable what you can call up on the web for free. Imagine what you could get if you were willing to pay for it?

The question is whether the government has the luxury to continue to fly their own when it could just buy the pictures it needs more cheaply.

Some say that a picture of someone’s roof isn’t what we need any more. We need someone to walk into the house. So there is pressure to shift money from the satellites to the spies again.

Some countries never stopped doing it on the ground, and there are hundreds of spooks working Washington from a dozen services. The paper this morning says that Lawrence Franklin copped a plea to rat out his co-defendents. I don’t know if I ever met him, but the name is familiar. He was a Defense Department analyst who was busted for allegedly passing classified military information to the Israelis.

They couldn’t afford to build their own satellites, so they had to keep doing business the traditional way. It is messy, but apparently effective. I don’t know if we have the institutional will to reinvigorate a muscular clandestine service, up to the task of taking on the Bad Guys on their home ground.

They tend to wind up in court, eventually. That is why we fired all the cowboys. The advantage of satellites is that they burn up safely on re-entry.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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