I got off the Metro at Farragut West, and popped out on the street. The Square was nowhere to be seen- did I normally get off at McPherson Square? Disoriented, I made a furtive start to what I thought was the North, then stopped. The Army-Navy Club should be to the east, I thought, and taking a guess on the direction and started off that way.

It is a great club, very old school. It was founded by a group of officers who worked at the Department of War, State and the Navy, the vast Victorian pile that towers over the White House a couple blocks away.

I need to start thinking about what I am going to give up this bold young year, though I thought I would take in the annual reception at the Club on the First before I did anything rash.

It is quite spectacular: the doormen opened the inner and outer doors with alacrity, the nice young ladies signed me in with no charge for the event, and there was another table with materials advertising a membership drive.

I got some magnetic stickers with the Club logo for the cars, a thumb drive with advertising information about the place, and pressed on to the formal dinging room.

A large poster-board outlined what was what:

It was going to be a challenge. There were open bars at either end of the vast room, and between them a long table with ice sculpture and groaning with seafood, raw and cooked.

I saw some pals there, and we formed a posse to roam through the place, nibbling as we went from the seafood to the lamb and tenderloin, then up the stairs to the salmon and Mediterranean stations, and the dessert stands, and eventually to the Eagle Grill in the basement, where the fajitas and wings and Steamer round of beef adjoined the Haagen-Dazs ice cream assembly station.

Did I mention the drinks were free?

As I move to restructure my life this year, I had been inclined to shed things like the Army-Navy Club, but found my mind drifting off to the days when I actually worked down here, and the Club seemed to make an enormous amount of sense, just as it had when those officers started the institution 130 years ago.

It seems surreal that I used to have business at the White House….

(Old Executive Office Building- formerly, the Department of War, State and the Navy. The whole Executive Branch in one box!)

“I had been in dress blue uniform all week, festooned with colorful bits of ribbon and bright shiny badges and gold stripes and stars. I had a thoroughly Washington kind of experience, guiding outsiders through the Byzantine Inter-Agency coordination process. My Hollywood consortium was in town, pitching a couple ideas for a theatrical-length documentary on global terrorism that would dove-tail with our wartime strategic influence campaign.

This isn’t exactly my core business area, but I am not exactly sure what that is anymore. “Information Operations” was the name of the portfolio I took on. Before last September I thought that was about computer warfare, and establishing policy and de-conflicting efforts across the intelligence community.

Then we went to war and the topic of computers never came up. Instead, we were dropping leaflets and flying airplanes that broadcast radio programming. The content of the programming appeared to be what was important, that, and the back half of the problem. That is, trying to figure out whether what we said was effective. Or not. It is a strange business. Remember Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw-Haw? The troops listened because the music was good. And the Wehrmacht listened to our stuff because they liked Benny Goodman, not because they were going to overthrow Hitler.

It’s like politics. They say that half the money spent on campaigns is wasted. The problem is that you can’t tell which half.

Nor could I tell exactly what was legal and what wasn’t. I talked to lawyers of all stripes, from the Intel types to Defense to State. I tried to figure out where the clandestine component of influence stopped and where public diplomacy began. Where Public Affairs fit in, and where the Spin Doctors live. It was dizzying. And we didn’t seem to be doing very well. The venom poured out of the Arab media, notably the Al Jazeera cable network in Qatar. Cairo appeared to accept the premise that all Jews were notified about the attack in advance, and they all left the Trade Center with time to spare because it was a Mossad plot. Accepted it without even blinking. How do you deal with that?

So I wandered the gray area of the spectrum. There is a lot swirling around. The newly established Office of Homeland Security was supposed to be fully up and running by yesterday, but the emphasis on securing the Olympics took everyone’s attention. Here, the organization is structured around a wiring diagram that resembles a heaping plate of pasta. There is the Information Operations Task Force- that was where I started. And then the newly established Office of Strategic Influence.

Nobody that works there is quite sure what it is, but at least they are talking to the other offices in town that seem to have a dog in the fight. In my mind, I wanted to harness the mighty engine of our entertainment industry to tell the story- actually, any story- that could be used to rebut the anti-American default value of the Islamic media. The global broadcast world is a voracious beast, gobbling material 7X24X365. We cannot cede the ground. We need to produce content. To enlist support we trudged through the Old Executive Office Building next to the West Wing, the State Department at Foggy Bottom, and the Pentagon.

And trudged was the operative word. I started each day in the antiseptic towers at the campus at Langley, trying to cover phone messages and e-mail, then driving frantically down along the Potomac on the George Washington Parkway, never failing to marvel at the first glimpse of the Imperial City as the spires of Georgetown appear, and then the white monolith of the Kennedy Center and the Key Bridge’s graceful arches.

You know that the most important issue in Washington isn’t the War, be it on terrorism or Poverty or the other Party. It’s parking. I don’t work at the Pentagon anymore, so I have lost the most valuable piece of plastic in town: a “U” pass that let’s me drive into South Parking and park the car close to the Metro for free. There is no way to get from Langley to town except by personal vehicle. (Oh, I could digress for a minute about the K-15 route on the Metrobus, or the Agency Shuttle that leaves once an hour, starting late and ending early so that employees can’t use it for commuting, but THAT is an entirely different story!)

So, by personal vehicle I drove to Pentagon City Mall, parking my car in the structure for an hourly rate and got to the Metro via the Victoria’s Secret entrance and the Food Court. Then the yellow line to Metro Center, transferring to the Blue Line to Farragut North and a five-block walk down to the amazing gray Victorian edifice formerly known as the State, War and the Navy Building. Now it is just known as the Old Executive Office Building, or OEOB. There was a time when those three cabinet departments were located adjacent to the White House and they all actually fit there. The whole executive branch in one place. Imagine!

Actually, the OEOB has yet another name, the Eisenhower Office Building, which was forced on the old gray lady by the Republican House of Representatives. They have been appending clauses in all manner of legislation naming public buildings in town after famous members of the GOP on the assumption that they will lose the majority this Fall and they have to leave as much of a legacy as they can while they can. I imagine this has been going on in Imperial cities since Roman times, but it makes it harder to navigate when the maps keep changing names.

Anyhow, the walk is pleasant enough when it is not raining and your black winter trench coat is not flapping wildly in the breeze. It was chilly but nice on Monday and Tuesday. We met in the Cordell Hull Room, where the then-Secretary of State received the Japanese delegation on the 7th of December of 1941. God, it is a magnificent building! Our Information and Influence people have taken over the Indian Treaty Room as an operations center, the massive walls and ceilings and gilt filigree looking down on bright earnest young people trying to figure out how we convince the Islamic World that we are not coming for them, or rather, not ALL of them, just some. Hard task.

Possibly impossible. But that was what we were trying to do. Today’s concern, or one of them, was worrying about Guantanamo, and how the media coverage was going, whether they had picked up on the fact that the detainees- not prisoners- were living exactly as well as the guards. Tomorrow it might be Tribunals, or something altogether new on the media cycle.

I have spent the last five months wandering around the capital trying to find the center of gravity of our government’s effort to coordinate our message to the Islamic street, and to our fractious allies, many of whom walked into the Olympic Stadium last night. We have to convince them we aren’t crazy, or overly unilateral, or trigger-happy. I have finally identified the right people on the National Security Council Staff at the White House, the State Department, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

I met some great people along the way. And I managed to connect the dots well enough that some of those great people are now talking to one another. But in the course of walking from the Metro to Foggy Bottom, Farragut North to OEOB, Pentagon City to Pentagon, my stupid plastic dress shoes, the ones that shine like little girl Mary Jane patent leather, began to gouge a hole in my toe. I couldn’t miss the meetings, so I just winced and walked a little faster between Metro and buildings.”

I had a last Bloody Mary in the main dining room, under the formal murals of Neptune and Zeus, before walking back to the metro. I looked at the rich wood and the formal portraits of the warriors who had gone before.

I decided the Army-Navy Club won’t be the first thing I cut out. It is just two blocks from the OEOB, though I confess it seems much further than that now.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303