Bugs

Of course we have bugs here. They are everywhere, creepy-crawly things that hatch in the darkness. Some of them are necessary partners in the food chain, and some are just nuisances.

Like Congressman Randy Cunningham. He traded his hero-medals for the cockroach suit this week, blubbering on the television that he would seek redemption for the yacht and the Persian rugs and the fancy house and the Rolls Royce.

The Congressman was always an emotional guy, and it is probably more than the prospect of ten years in a bug-infested jail that had him crying for his lost life. But I cannot weep along with him. He will always have his Navy pension to fall back on, and they would have to call him back to active duty to take it away. Besides, San Diego is temperate most of the year, warm enough to sleep outside if he needs to. He will have enough left for a sleeping bag, even if he has to give the rugs back.

I feel bad for all the people that generally follow the rules, carefully keeping their receipts and evaluating each transaction to ensure that it is ethically correct. The pressure is always on from the insect community to take a little something, and of course expect a little something back. Doesn’t cost anything, right? Venality always comes with darkness, and it is so dark this time of the year.

The Government is expanding again, the vastness of it creating pockets of shadow where things can grow unobserved. The Department of Homeland Security is like that, twenty-odd organizations thrown into a blender, and the strange concoction that resulted has produced new offices and directors and full-time equivalent bureaucrats.

It did not make us any safer when the hurricanes hit, though everyone seems pleased that there have been no more major terror attacks. I heard some distinguished Citizens say that what we need to do is to recreate the old Federal Emergency Management Agency, just the way it was in the fifteen minutes that it was not a bug-laden scandal.

That would produce a pair of twin Agencies with overlapping responsibilities and dotted-line authorities. That is the way things work here; a problem answered with an Agency that goes on and on, to the end of time.

It is happening in dark corners where no one looks. I worked in a large Department one time and was astonished to find a whole portfolio of lettered administrations complete with Directors and earnest employees and annual budgets that swelled gently to keep pace with inflation. The Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry was one I liked, as was the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Support Administration. There were nice people in one of them, and those two were just some of the dozens of claimants on the budget.

Those agencies grew in plain sight, relying on the sheer vastness of the Federal structure to obscure their presence. The same thing is happening as the Intelligence Community re-invents itself. Secrecy is the watchword there, and so the sun rarely shines in the nooks and crannies.

The last time things were looked at properly was a generation ago, in the aftermath of the lost war in Asia . Now, the reorganization mandated after the terror attack is marching on. There is a new superstructure established to provide centralized management over a de-centralized process.

The Defense Department has creating new intelligence agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities. The White House is considering expanding the power of the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which was created three years ago to look for moles, spies and terrorist fellow-travelers.

CIFA was intended to coordinate the efforts of several other Defense offices that look for security problems. The Recommendations of a Presidential Commission would expand the mission to include actual investigation of suspected treason, terrorist sabotage and even economic espionage.

That will require more badges and guns, and some exceptions to the Privacy Act.

I strongly support the ruthless scourging of the cockroaches of terror, and think that the FBI should share information with the Pentagon, CIA, and other intelligence agencies, as long as there is a rational connection to foreign intelligence.

But we have been down this road before. I heard the story in parts, over a long year of standing watch at the Command Bunker in Korea . I was in charge of the watch team, and my senior NCO was a sleek Sergeant First Class who was waiting for his twenty years to retire. He was a Signals Specialist, and after a tour in Vietnam bugging the VC, he joined the hunt for domestic terrorists.

His name rhymed with “Bilko,” and that is how I thought of him, in the small hours of the night, with his dark hair, slicked back and a pencil-thin mustache. The Sarge had all the answers, even if I didn’t have the questions. One night he was in an expansive mood, reminiscing about the good old days when his unit operated in the States.

I said I didn’t think that the Defense Department was permitted to conduct surveillance of U.S. citizens. The Sarge laughed and stubbed out the fifteenth Marlboro of the shift in the ashtray between us on watch console.

“The Weathermen issued a statement that they were going to attack a West Cost military installation. Those morons. It opened the door for the Army, and in we went.”

I remembered the Weatherman, an irrational group of wobbly young Marxists who thought they could overthrow the U.S. Government. When it was quiet, and the Marxists in North Korea asleep, I heard about the war at home. The Army deployed against the war protesters, and there were spooks and earnest FBI agents huddled in vans, wearing headsets and deploying military jammers against kids with walkie-talkie radios.

The Sarge said he turned up the dial and put energy down the frequency used by a shaggy young man with a Motorola radio and got an arc of electricity that sparked his blue jeans and left his hair standing straight out.

It wasn’t clear to me if the kid was organizing a march or overthrowing the government, but they shut it all down when the war went away, and some of the activity was revealed in the Church and the Pike Commissions in Congress. I could tell that the Sarge missed the good old days, in civilian clothes with a broad portfolio for high jinks.

I don’t know what happened to him, after Korea . He only had a few years left to serve. But he had a taste for the life, and a current clearance. He is probably still in the system, somewhere.

I read in the paper that each of the military services has begun its own post-9/11 collection of domestic intelligence, primarily aimed at gathering data on potential terrorist threats to bases and other military facilities at home and abroad.

That is the same way the campaign was justified against the Weathermen, and then the coalition of the Weather Underground, and then against anyone who might be hanging around them.

I have the uncomfortable feeling that I have seen part of this movie before. I saw an article that said it was necessary not only to do threat analysis, but “also conduct activities to protect DoD and the nation against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, assassinations, and terrorist activities.”

That is a pretty broad portfolio, and of course it is necessary. But it still made me a little nervous, like the motion you sense in the kitchen just as the light clicks on. Something sensed from the corner of the eye, something disappearing behind the sink.

I did the calculation, and realized that the Sarge could have retired from the military and still be a government agent, serving out his second career.

He would have just the skill set for the new mission.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsoctra.com

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