Rain, Rain

I threw open the door to the patio and stepped out. I could smell earth, rich and musty. The rain had been coming down all night, and the division between dry and wet under the overhang of the deck over my patio was indeterminate, uncertain. I looked out past the pool and the black gleam of the parking lot and the lights of the high-rise buildings at Ballston, a mile away.

It is Earth Day. I regret that I have nothing planned in honor of the day, except work. But there is honor in labor, and perhaps the reflected glory of our work should go to the planet.

It is going to rain through the day, and into the night, and across Saturday and into the end of the weekend. 

Metro, I thought. Umbrella.

I walked out of one of the Government buildings not far from here yesterday. The rain and just started, the flank of the big mass of clouds slowly edging over Arlington , and then settling in, getting comfortable.

The policy of this particular building is that cell phones must be turned off when inside. That is actually a bit progressive, since some buildings insist that they not be carried at all. Some of them have little lockable cubbies outside the vault doors where you must place them. Others just have a pile of phones in front of the guard.

Some places will confiscate them. There is nothing more embarrassing than to be in a secure location, seated around one of the formal conference tables, and have the phone you cannot have there go off.

The bewildering code of the agencies must be learned, since there is no commonality between them. I think they all work for the same person, but until now there has been no consensus as to who that might be.

The CIA would tell you that they work for the President, and that everyone else works for the Director of Central Intelligence. If you asked the people whose departments are in the Department of Defense- some of them placed there a half century ago only as a cover story- the answer is a bit more murky.

All this was intended to be fixed by the establishment of the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Once and for all someone is going to have the last word.

The first building I was in this morning has a rule about cell phones. They are not permitted at all. There were also rules about note-taking at the meeting, which were more severe than the “non-attribution” basis by which senior people are permitted to say something close to what they think.

Not being able to take notes on something important is a key factor in how things work in Washington. After the meeting, the attendants all rush back to their desks, or to lunch, and when the memos are written to justify attendance, all of us describe the elephant that we touched in the dark.

The gray figure at the rostrum of the conference facility of the undisclosed agency was in a position to speak authoritatively on his topic, which was the urgency of reform. He had just retired from a job in the defense industry, the last job he would hold, he noted. He seemed to be looking forward to working less, or at least spending more time doing what he wants to do.

He is not remembered for his time with industry, though of course he consulted and served on blue-ribbon panels. What he was known for was a career in government that was of great and confidential renown.

He said that the spooks needed to take more risks, and accept blow-back when things don’t work out the way they figured.

Human Intelligence needs to be fixed, he said, and CIA is not the outfit to lead it. They do spying just fine at Langley, and they need to do more of it. But Human Intelligence covers a lot of ground that is not even vaguely classified and the discipline as a whole should not be cloaked in an impenetrable veil of security and classification. We need to  have a means to share with the cops, after all, and they don’t even have clearances for the most part. We need to get on with it.

The Official said we need an enterprise architecture that integrates the capabilities of the intelligence tribes, and maybe we should squash one or two of them together. We ought to have a common information technology architecture, so we can share.

The new Director should run the intelligence community as the Chief Executive Officer. Industry works on a quarterly bottom line; so should the agencies. They should be held accountable for progress toward achieving the DNI’s guidance, with metrics for accomplishment like a corporate bottom line.

The embarrassing squabble between the Agencies over authorities must be stopped immediately. Security must be reformed, so that all the buildings have the same policy about investigations and cell phones. And the endless leaks of information must be stopped. Immediately.

He spoke to that, too, right up front, about the leaks. He said he was angry that information these days had a shelf-life of about a day and a half, from being highly classified information in the President’s Daily Brief to the Washington Post. It is something about “getting credit” for some success, or counting coup on a bureaucratic rival to ensure that someone else takes the blame for failure.

The means to get some of the intelligence is expensive. Very expensive in some cases, either in treasure or human life. In the “getting credit” process, the disclosure of sensitive sources and methods was destroying our ability to stay ahead of an agile and ruthless foe.

I have known this official for twenty years, beginning when he was still a rising star. I heard things at the end of his career that he began to say, long ago. He was at his brusque best at the podium as he produced a list of the painfully obvious truths. He intended this lecture, this back-grounder on the President’s agenda for the new DNI, to be his swan-song. A last act, and also a useful cook-book for the new DNI.

He talked about meeting he went to attended by some old-timer who kept the ULTRA secret. They are very old now, the survivors all in their eighties. They held the secret that Allied intelligence was reading Hitler’s coded messages all of their lives. Past the end of the war, when they could have gotten credit for their achievement, and then past the declassification of the information. Some of them still could not talk about what they did with comfort.

They believed what the man on the podium believes. Credit for what we do comes in victory, and rewards will come in Heaven.

He has a matter-of-fact way of speaking, and the slides that accompanied his remarks were dense with text. He discussed each of the key judgments of the recent Presidential Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction. He talked about governance, and reorganization. Information sharing and security reform. New sources and methods to collect intelligence, and better training for the analysts to understand what it meant.

It was hardly controversial. It was the plain and unvarnished truth. He got to the end, checking his watch. There was time for a question or two, and the first one was from a bearded man who might have thought of himself as an iconoclast in this gray business. He advanced the proposition that leaks and the desire for credit were human nature.

The Official looked a little distracted. He had delivered the wisdom gained painfully over a half-century of service. He had other things to accomplish in his day.

He re-phrased the question. I thought I could see what he was thinking. Maybe people here on earth who violate the rules should be punished. He didn’t say it, but I could see from his look that he considered that there should be more punishment on Earth .

The official looked down from the podium at the bearded man with a look of mild contempt.

“It may be human nature,” he said, “but it is not professional.”

I’d have to check my notes on that to see if I have it right. But of course, under the rules in the building where I sat, they don’t exist.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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