Good News, Bad News

It is a good news, bad news morning. I am up too early, a function of going to bed the same way.

But it is raining, and will rain all day, which means there will be time for napping. So there is an upside to this time of creativity, in that presently there will be a downtime of none.

So is the word this morning from Asia . For example, the virulence of the bird flu seems to be diminishing. That is very good news for the survivors, but it is very bad news for the rest of us. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more aggressively fatal a disease is, the less likely it is to spread. It kills the host too quickly.

If the bird flu is not now killing everyone who contracts it, the disease has gained the ability to spread further, and be in contact with more people. Thus, the chance of a global pandemic increases as the virulence diminishes . It’s evolution.

I sought hard for away to look for good news about the North Koreans. They appear to be making preparations to test The Bomb. That would be the precise corollary to the bird flu; as their virulence increases, the chance of a global incident does likewise.

I used to know precisely what the signs were of preparations for increased virulence. But suffice it to say that some analyst pouring over images would have detected equipment set-ups in particular patterns, unique to the function of nuclear tests. It would look similar to the retrospective detection of the Pakistanis and the Indians, which were surprises.

Surprise is only good at Birthday parties, they say, and missing the indications that the North Koreans are going to blow something up would be bad, and probably counted as another intelligence failure.

So a diplomat has been dispatched to the Far East to talk to the usual suspects in Tokyo , Seoul and Beijing to see if they might influence the course of events. Beijing would be the place that would have the most influence on the determined Northerners, but I think they will keep their own counsel.

They have been far too busy this week extracting an apology from the Japanese about crimes of the last century to worry overmuch about the prospective crimes of this one.

Enter Ambassador John Negroponte and his trusty deputy, Michael Hayden. They spend their first day on the job yesterday in what the Press called “makeshift offices near the White House.”

It summons up an image of a tent in Lafayette Park, but that is unlikely. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that means they are in the Old Executive Office Building , my favorite facility in town.

The old DCI suite is on the fourth floor of the OEOB, overlooking the alley that abuts the West Wing of the White House. Or maybe it is the third floor; the great sweeping staircases are disorienting. What I recall, whether it was daylight or dark, was that there is an office to the receptionists right hand, and a room with a long conference table to her left.

The only way I could tell where I was in those gleaming antique corridors was to examine the big brass doorknobs. The Departments of War, State and the Navy used to be contained all within the gilded bosom of this one building, and each had their own departmental crests embossed on the knobs. Cannons, eagles or anchors helped determine the landscape of who owned what.

The DCI used the office when he was stuck downtown for meetings, or needed a secure place away from the Situation Room in the White House. I cooled my heels in the waiting room there a few times.

The first was just after the fall of the Wall, in the first Clinton Administration. The Vice President had started an effort to re-invent government, and a panel of distinguished citizens who did not seem to know very much summoned a parade of witnesses to explain how things worked in the intelligence business, and what recommendations they might make to fix it.

Once I realized it was a joke, it was a rollicking session, but it seemed wise to keep a straight face at the time.

The waiting room is the central space in the suite, with a receptionist who does not normally have much to do, waiting behind the cipher lock. The rooms have the fifteen foot ceilings common to the building, with the original wild plaster filigree of the 1890s poking out of newer drywall. The net effect is to make the smaller offices carved out of the original floor plan oddly vertical in orientation.

Another time I waited there, having been summoned to appear before some Office of Management and Budget panel with my Deputy. I was supposed to defend a bold initiative in my program that had been inserted after we submitted it. I was a good team player, though, and was vigorous, if a bit vague, in my defense of it. My Deputy was better. He said nothing with the authority of years on the job.

So I think it is fitting, if that is where they are, that it was from this office in the OEOB that Ambassador Negroponte issued a one-page clarion call to the workforce. It was promptly leaked to the New York Times, which scooped the Washington Post.

“Facing a new order of threats to national security,” the Ambassador wrote, “we know we have to do our work differently and do it better, but the most critical element in intelligence reform resides in you, the people who will carry it out.”

It must have been a bee-hive of activity in the office, and the Times reported that there was only a skeletal staff. I liked the image of a bony receptionist behind the desk in the DCI Suite, gesturing with skeletal digits either to the Ambassador’s office on the right, or the General’s office on the left.

The new DNI said he wants to hear a lot of ideas, and that he is going to provide the right tools to make it all work.

The first thing he is going to have to do is get in the middle of the Fiscal 2007 Budget, which is the closest thing he can influence programmatically. In the meantime, he is going to have to cobble things together out of money that is already appropriated.

The way I used to keep it straight was to recite the years. “We are spending this year’s money; next year’s money is on the Hill and we can’t change it; the year after next is the first one I can change.”

Fiscal 2007 is not as far off as one would think, but it is eons away in terms of dealing with a nuclear explosion in Korea over the weekend .

Fifteen years ago, the Intelligence Community Staff had some nice offices just a couple blocks away, so it was convenient to meet with the White House Staff. They were hijacked up to CIA Headquarters in 1993, and nothing was ever quite the same after that, insulated as they were out on the country campus.

Downtown, there are plenty of places to get a decent lunch. Lunch is important in consensus-building.

It is comforting to know that the new Director is downtown for now. He first needs to find out where he is going to set up shop, for real. Then he needs to hire some folks to help him figure it out.

It is a good-news, bad-news kind of thing. At least we have someone on the job. But it also means that he is going to have to do it.

But first things first. Between the flue and the North Koreans, I hope he has time to figure it out.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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