(Naval Intelligence legend and Babe Magnet Admiral “Mac” Shower with The Lovely Bea at the Willow, 2011. Photo Socotra).

I spent a couple minutes yesterday bringing you up to speed on the scandals plaguing Naval Intelligence at the moment. There are two, events of which are unheard of, in my time in the business. One of the unpleasant stories appears connected directly to the usual sordid business that dogs the world of the government bureaucracy: corruption, bribery and sex in exchange for favors.

None of the above seems to have much connection to the men I know who have been dragged into it. The second of the affairs is more symptomatic of an old story that our pal Mac would have recognized immediately: steering government money to relatives without the benefit of oversight.

I heard from an old pal about who the malefactors in that nasty business actually were, and how they got there. This is a bipartisan mess. “Conspirator 2” is a former Marine Corps Intelligence Officer, and his little operation was part of a small office that used to be under “the positive control of the Director of Naval Intelligence,” but whose functions were transferred to the Office of the Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld’s efforts to seize control of the intelligence functions of his department and place them under the fingers of his Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD-I).

We didn’t think it was a good idea at the time, but we were told to shut up and follow orders. Common sense is just not very common in the Pentagon.

So, the real deal is that Naval Intelligence doesn’t have much to do with either scandal, though it is clearly being thrown under the bus to cover some Defense and Service derrieres. Mac Showers would have great advice on this sad affair, and he might have just told us the best way to respond would be to stay focused on the mission and keep moving.

I contend that an analysis of what has gone before can shed some light on all this today. The concentration on the 24 hour news cycle has lead us to be pretty good at tactical thinking, but extremely limited in strategic thought. Accordingly, I would just launch into what Mac told me about how this came to be, but things are complicated when you clamber up into the national attic and start rummaging around.

I think Mac’s recollections of the last time the intelligence community was off the reservation are particularly relevant. He was there when the IC had to be reined in by popular outrage and Congressional action.

We are there again, which is why this ancient history means something right now.

Think about it. The revelations from Mr. Snowden have been remarkable about the size and scope of when the intelligence folks have been up to since “The gloves came off” after 9/11. Think about what has happened since 9/11.

Extraordinary rendition. The black site prisons. Enhanced interrogation. Assassination by drone. Wholesale collection of the communications of the entire American people. Whatever was happening at the annex at Benghazi, which some have linked to a guns-to-rebels transfer of the former Qaddafy arsenal to the jihadis in Syria. Wiretapping journalists. Enemies lists.

Of course there is more. Some secrets have actually been kept.

It is bewildering, frankly. Some of these operations are things with which I agree. Some appear to be extra-Constitutional and are deeply disturbing. That is why I wish I could talk again to Mac, and am thankful he was kind enough to share his memories when he could.

Mac left the Navy- or at least the uniform he wore at DIA- before the Crown Jewels of the Central Intelligence Agency were revealed. The list of projects should make us feel right at home today.

The Jewels were a compendium of internal memos compiled in the mid-1970s after the legendary investigative reporter Sy Hersh published a front-page story about them in the New York Times. The things that Hersh described ranged from the bizarre to the frightening, and were clearly beyond anything in the legal charter for a “central intelligence agency.”

(Former DCI Jim Schlessinger)

The compilation of the Jewels was directed by Jim Schlessinger, an able technocrat who was working at the Office of Management and budget in 1970 when Dick Nixon asked him to do a report that would address the growing technological capabilities of the IC and their impact on the collection process.

The Report highlighted two “disturbing phenomena” within the IC: an “impressive rise in…size and cost” and the “apparent inability to achieve a commensurate improvement in the scope and overall quality of intelligence products.

Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.

Mac used to talk about the Schlessinger Report with reverence as the pivotal moment in his later career. Schlessinger later was Director of Central Intelligence. He was confirmed to that position in 1973, having been identified as one of the only bureaucrats independent of the Spooks who could try to bring them under control.

Having learned that Watergate burglars and CIA-alumni E. Howard Hunt and James McCord had been in contact with the Agency while carrying out illegal activities for President Nixon’s reelection campaign, Schlessinger ordered divisions within the CIA to report any activities they had engaged in since 1959 that might be outside the CIA’s authority.

Deputy Director William Colby then assembled a loose-leaf notebook of the memos that poured in. The package totaled 700 pages, and was considered to hold the agency’s darkest secrets. You can find the whole thing, suitably redacted in 2007, on-line at the National Archives. Only one of the Jewels is still redacted. My guess is that it is the account of MKULTRA, the LSD experiments the Agency conducted on unwitting citizens.

I have been trying to stay away from the other thread that poisons the period, but it is hard. Mac had some dark views on that, and the anniversary is bearing down on us, fifty years since the events in Dallas marked the beginning our new world. I don’t want to plow that old ground again, but the shoots of conspiracy are hardy ones, and the thicket of misdirection that has sprouted from that fertile field are still with us.

The latest, as you probably have heard, is “The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy,” by Larry Sabato. He says a lot about the mythic President, who wasn’t a myth when my parent’s generation elected him. There is a popular meme these days that he was a conservative, of sorts, though I only recall my parent’s misgivings about the smooth young Catholic Senator from Massachusetts.

The latest in the story about that Day in Dallas is Sabato’s use of
“cutting-edge audio technology” to debunk a key finding of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 that “an open microphone on a Dallas police officer’s motorcycle picked up the sound of a fourth shot, which suggests the involvement of a second shooter.” If that was true, of course the whole Warren Commission narrative falls apart.

I defy anyone to watch the restored Zapruder film and come to any conclusion except that the President was hit twice, once from behind and once from in front, but that is the only assassination I have ever seen in slow-motion, and I concede that I am no expert.

So, we have the newest revisionism of the story that will never be answered to anyone’s satisfaction, except for Kevin Costner’s rumination in the baseball picture “Bull Durham.”

“I believe Oswald acted alone.”

Maybe. But tomorrow we will go back to Willow, on a lazy afternoon with Mac’s champagne Jaguar parked out front, and a discussion about an intelligence community out of control, only seven years after that day in Dallas, when Mac said he used to see CIA legends like Cord Meyer, ex=husband of Mr. Kennedy’s paramour Mary still walking the halls.

This is going to have some eerie echoes. History doesn’t repeat itself, but as Mr. Twain used to say, it does rhyme.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303