(Mac and Elizabeth-with-an-S at Willow).

It is the start of deer season here this morning. I have heard no gunfire, though I have been listening, and am going to avoid going in the woods for the rest of the month.

In the spirit of the hunting season, and the astonishing developments back up North in the Beltway Hot House, I am going to talk about something completely different. To do that, I am going to consider myself freed from an agreement with Mac that I honored scrupulously while he was alive. The time seems right, what with Mr. Snowden’s continuing disclosures about just about everything. The pendulum has swung a great deal since the 9/11 attacks, and the worldwide fight with those shadowy people whose motivation we are not supposed to notice.

It was June of 2011. Mac’s health had been up and down, but he was having a good month and wanted to get out of his place at The Madison. Everyone at Willow loved him, Elizabeth-with-an-S and Big Jim, and the regulars on the civilian side of the bar: Old Jim, Jon-without, John With, Short Haired Mike and the rest.

But this was an interview, so we took stools a little down from the Amen Corner. I was intending to ask about the transition from Mac’s distinguished Navy career to his time on the Intelligence Community Staff, one of the first bodies set up to oversee the always fractious group of organizations that sometimes can be barely civil to one another.

Big Jim slid a glass of Happy Hour white in front of me, and a Virgin Mary in front of Mac, since his Quacks had told him to lay off the alcohol while he was on a new set of meds. He was not entirely happy about the development, but was philosophical about it. I got out my pen, and pulled a white paper napkin square in front of me.

“We agreed we are not going to talk about your second career, right?”

“Yes, there are some things that are still a little sensitive after all these years.”

“Like Azorian?”

Mac shook his head. “Nope, not going to go there. But I can talk about Bronson Tweedy. He was old school, and the strong right arm to Director Helms, and the major player in how things changed in the early 1970s.”

“Helms was Director for longer than most, wasn’t he?”

(DCI Richard Helms smokes while on the hot seat on Capitol Hill).

“Yes. Mid-sixties right up to 1973. The whole Vietnam thing. He was old school. He had been Naval Intelligence in New York City, working on the Eastern Sea Frontier plotting U-boats when a friend approached him to join the OSS’s Morale Operations Branch. They did the black propaganda. He was a Spook the rest of his life.”

“It is interesting that the Navy reservists in New York were in the middle of everything, isn’t it?”

Mac smiled. “They were their own Navy, that is for sure. They ran the Lucky Luciano connection with the Mob to keep the docks safe from Axis saboteurs.”

“In real life a lot of them were prosecutors and cops and stuff, right?”

“It was all mixed up together, and actually sort of a parallel universe.”

“They ran the scientific exploitation of the former Nazi scientists out on Long Island after the war.”

“Yes, the projects that came out of the Castle on Long Island were of extraordinary value to Arleigh Burke, the Chief of Naval Operations who was creating the Nuclear Navy.”

“But you went to work at F Street for the IC Staff?”

“Not at first, and that wasn’t the name. I think we were on the Original Headquarters Building at Langley. I was still on active duty in the fall of 1969. Bud Zumwalt was on a tear to get every admiral who had been senior to him to retire. I didn’t want to, but the CNO wanted my number to promote your pal Rex Rectanus, and that is just the way it was. There was no animosity between us; Rex was his guy and he was the one Bud wanted to have as his intelligence officer. Their relationship was deep after the years they spent together at NAVFOR-V.”

I took a sip of Happy Hour white and positioned another napkin in front of me. Mac was in his Virgin Mary phase, and Big Jim was serving them up with the equivalent of a full salad in the tall glass. “Yeah, I liked Rex. We had an interesting time in the campaign to recognize our only POW-MIA intel officer, CDR Jack Graff.”

Mac nodded. “That is similar to my little crusade to get Joe Rochefort his Distinguished Service Medal. He died before we could make it happen, but President Reagan finally gave his medal to his son and daughter. Sometimes justice comes late, and sometimes it doesn’t come at all.”

I glanced over the growing stack of napkins. “OK, so you go from being the Chief of Staff at DIA to being retired and working for the Director of Central Intelligence. That must have been pretty crazy with the Congress howling for Richard Nixon’s butt.”

Mac gave me one of his Cheshire Cat grins. “It was in October of 1969 that I was approached by Bronson Tweedy, who was Helm’s Deputy and very much like him. He was born in London to American parents. He went to school there, and lived with a family in Germany. He arrived to start his visit the day Adolf Hitler became chancellor. He was a Princeton guy, and knew all the right people. He had a degree in European history, and went into the advertising game at Benton and Bowles on Madison Avenue before the war. In 1942, he volunteered for naval intelligence and served in North Africa and Europe interrogating captured German U-boat crews.”

“Like the secret POW camp and debriefing operation down at Fort Hunt- Post Office Box 1142?”

“That is the one. It was very sensitive at the time, the very existence of the camp. It was a violation of the Geneva Accords on POWs, but we didn’t want the Germans to know that we had compromised the Enigma machines on the U-boats if they found out we had whole crews in captivity.”

“Naval Intelligence again,” I said in wonder. “You know, there are still things that people don’t want to talk about. I was working on a story about a counterfeit ring in France in the 1950s and touched a live wire. It might have had something to do with Luciano, but I don’t know and I was smart enough not to ask.”

Mac smiled again, thinly. “After the war, Bronson briefly returned to advertising before being recruited by the then-new CIA. He served in Switzerland, and DC just as the Agency was finding its sea-legs. He was CoS in Vienna and twice in London. Then he founded the Africa Division, which was a result of Eisenhower’s dislike for Patrice Lumumba.”

(Patrice Lamumba of Congo on one of his better days).

“Did he have anything to do with the coup and Lumumba’s death?” I underlined “Lumumba” to look up later. “I remember the revelations about the rubber gloves and lethal toothpaste they were going to slip into the President’s bathroom. It was as cool as the deadly cigars they were going o try to get Castro to smoke.”

“I assume it was. Lumumba did have a brilliant smile, from what I recall. He died right before John Kennedy was inaugurated, and Bronson was in Leopoldville around that time. But we never talked about the things that later came to be known as the Crown Jewels. After that, Bronson was tapped to head the Eastern European Division. When Dick Helms was confirmed as Director in 1966, Bronson moved up to be Deputy.”

“There was something going on in those years,” I said. “I mean, someone got away with killing the President of the United States. The Warren Commission had so many glaring errors.”

“I have told you what I think about that,” he said, looking around to see if anyone was listening. “I think LBJ had something to do with it. Maybe a lot. That was something else we did not talk about at the time.”

“I imagine so. What a crazy period in our history.”

“Oh yes it was. The Nixon Administration was scrambling to cover up all the strange things that had been happening since Ike Eisenhower embraced covert action and the CIA became essentially the President’s secret army. Bronson gave me a call that October as the axe was falling on all the Admirals senior to Bud Zumwalt. He asked me to come down to a men’s club on M Street and talk about a proposition he had for me.”

“Bronson Tweedy. That is a perfect name for a spy. How did you know him?”

“Bronson chaired the National Security Council IC Working Group, among other things Director Helms didn’t want to do. General Bennett, my boss at DIA, was the DIA rep, and of course I was supporting him. So we moved in the same circles. He was looking for help.”

“Well, Helms was never comfortable with being the pater familia of the various components of what was becoming known as the Intelligence Community. He loved being Director of the CIA and the rest of the portfolio just didn’t interest him. The idea of the DCI running the whole show was not new.”

“But that made being Director of CIA just a management job, not an operational one.”

Mac smiled and ate one of the colossal olives off the toothpick in his Virgin Mary. “Yes. DCI McCone had established the National Intelligence Programs Evaluation Staff to review Community programs for cost-effectiveness back when Jack Kennedy was still alive. The Vietnam War derailed that, but the function was clear. I was in charge of the resources at DIA, first as Chief of Plans, and then as the Chief of Staff. So I had the background Bronson was looking for when DCI Helms set up the National Intelligence Resources Board to review all community programs and budgets, and to referee community disputes.”

“Ouch. I remember going to those from both sides of the table. Always painful. But you said it was the Schlessinger Report that kicked off the tumult of the 1970s.”

“Yes. OMB was concentrating on things like the technical capabilities at NSA, and what they had been doing during the Vietnam conflict. And it recommended several reforms to improve oversight of the Community, and the IC Staff was a mechanism to do that.”

“Did you work on the 6th Floor at the Original Headquarters Building at Langley? That is where I worked on the Community Management Staff after they changed the name. Again.”

Mac looked contemplative. “Could have been. That seems right. But we wound up on F Street, at the old Selective Service building. That is where I spent most of my time, close to the White House.”

“This all seems to be a case of déjà vu,” I said, waving at Big Jim for more wine. “We keep re-organizing and nothing changes.”

“One thing has changed,” said Mac. “The Congress was engaged, and it was on a hunt for something to get Dick Nixon on.”

“The Church and the Pike Commissions, right? I knew Jim Bush who wound up as the Budget Director on what became the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.”

“There was much more to it than that. The Administration was maneuvering like crazy to get ahead of Congress. Let’s see,” he said, looking down at his age spotted hands and extended his index finger, and then one more for each of the Blue Ribbon panels. “Schlessinger. Then the Senate and House committees, which turned into permanent oversight bodies. Then the Rockefeller Commission, and the Murphy Commission.” He had all five fingers of his left hand extended. “Every time one would report out, something else spectacular would be disclosed and it was back to the drawing board.”

“But didn’t they all recommend the same thing? A stronger central control of the Community with better oversight and more efficiency?”

“Yes, and more coordination,” he said with a laugh. “Which I think I recall reading in the 9/11 Commission Report, too.”

“But you were doing all this when the New York Times and the Washington Post were leading the Watergate charge against Dick Nixon, and the Plumbers and all that.”

Mac smiled. “Yes, that is one of the reasons we tried to establish a legal basis for necessary things that had to be done. One of the things we did was establish the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act judicial process so there was a legal framework for what we were doing in terms of…” he looked around again. “Wiretaps. Don’t write that down.”

I put down my pen. “Mac, you know we agreed not to talk publicly about that period. I won’t mention that until you are gone.”

“I certainly hope that will be a good long while,” he said.

I gathered the pile of napkins together and tucked them into the pocket of my suit-coat to transcribe later. “Me too, Admiral.”

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com