Editor’s Note: I am in an undisclosed location on Virginia’s historic and lovely Northern Neck. I am working off the iPad and phone, and neither gives me much flexibility. I will have some observations about the trip, which will eventually follow the Historyland Highway, originally cut through the brush by the legendary planter King Carter when the Neck was the center of a whole Colony, and the idea of America was pretty much unthinkable.

In fact, there is a lot that is unthinkable, even if you just go back a decade. When you compare and contrast what we thought were big issues then, and what we apparently consider to be not that big a deal today, it makes me wonder.

See what you think.

Vic



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Stupid Plastic Shoes:
A Tale of Intrigue, Influence and Politics
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Vic Socotra

By February 2002, I had spent the five months since the attacks of September 11th 2001 (9/11) trying to figure out how the U.S. was going to orchestrate a message to the Muslim street, one of hope and justice, accompanied by a legitimate and palpable effort to mitigate the conditions that breed young men who see suicide bombing as a viable life choice. I had talked to spin-doctors and bureaucrats, political appointees, State Department cookie-pushers from the fruit juice circuit, assorted spooks and Hollywood producers. I was still looking when the structure which was growing to do that was blown up by bureaucratic shenanigans. Crass bureaucratic turf wars conducted by ruthless bureaucrats masquerading as high principle. This article describes what I was doing when that happened.

February 2002

I watched the Olympic opening ceremony from Salt Lake. I was a little unsettled by it, the whiff of jingoism. I’m not sure that the references to the 9/11 thing were entirely appropriate; but when the Olympians brought out the World Trade Center flag a tear ran down my cheek. I am more susceptible to that these days.

The low-grade fever I have had may have had something to do with it. The artistic skating show, the little boy “finding the flame within” was hackneyed in phrase but wonderfully skated. And the march-on of the athletes, with our French buddies holding tri-couleur flags and little stars n’ stripes made me realize why the Frogs then held a special place in my heart.

Then I crashed. The mild fever was from an infection on my right foot, the great toe swollen and radiating little angry stripes of scarlet up the arch, threatening to go further with each squeeze of the infernal shoe. I had been forced out of comfortable brown knock-arounds and back into my black stupid plastic shoes because I had been in dress blue uniform all week, the severe navy blue festooned with colorful bits of ribbon and bright shiny badges and gold stripes and stars. The shoes were the practical answer to the requirement for a highly polished look to accompany the dress uniform, an industrial solution to produce a perpetual shine. The problem was that plastic is not a material that provides comfort, nor ventilation nor flexibility. It does have a nifty fake shine, though, and if you are a busy executive or just lazy they are swell. But they sure as hell are inflexible.

I used to wear them all the time when we had to wear our dress blue uniforms from October to May. But the Navy changed the rules and we are now allowed to wear khakis all year, with comfortable brown shoes that don’t take a shine very well, but no one seems to mind. The stupid plastic shoes and my dress uniform all came together again in a thoroughly Washington kind of experience.

My Experience with Information Operations

There was a Hollywood consortium in town, pitching a couple ideas for a theatrical-length documentary on global terrorism that could dove-tail nicely with the wartime strategic information campaign. I had been attempting to guide those outsiders through the Byzantine inter-agency coordination process.

That wasn’t exactly my core business area, but I am not exactly sure what was. “Information Operations” was the name of the portfolio I took on for the Intelligence Community. Before 9/11, I thought that assignment was about computer warfare, establishing policy and de-conflicting efforts between the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense. Then we went to war in Afghanistan 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. Then there was the back half of the problem. That is, trying to establish measures of effectiveness to figure out whether what we said was effective. It is a strange business.

Remember Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw-Haw? The troops listened because the music was good, not because they were going to throw their weapons down. 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 Intelligence Community to the specialized types at Defense and 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 9/11 attack in advance, and they all left the Trade Center with time to spare because it was a Mossad plot. They accepted it without even blinking. How do you deal with that?

So I wandered the gray area of the spectrum. There was a lot swirling around. The newly established Office of Homeland Defense was supposed to be fully up and running by mid-February, but the emphasis on securing the Olympics took everyone’s attention. On the Community Staff, the organization is structured around a wiring diagram that resembles a heaping plate of pasta. There is the Information Operations Task Force in DoD; that was where it started. Then came the newly established Office of Strategic Influence. Nobody who worked there was quite sure what it is, but at least they were 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 24x7x365. We cannot cede the ground. We need to produce content.

To enlist support I escorted the Hollywood guys as 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 in my stupid plastic shoes.

Why Coordination is So Hard

I started each day in the antiseptic towers at the campus in Langley, trying to cover phone messages and e-mail. I then drove frantically down along the Potomac on the George Washington Parkway, never failing to marvel at the first glimpse of the capital, the spires of Georgetown, and 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 didn’t work at the Pentagon any longer, so I had lost the most valuable piece of plastic in town—a “U” pass that lets the bearer drive into South Parking at the Pentagon 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 Central Intelligence Agency shuttle bus that leaves once an hour, but starting late in the morning and ending in early afternoon so that employees can’t use it for commuting, but that is a 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 had been appending clauses in all manner of legislation naming public buildings in town after famous members of the GOP on the assumption that they would lose their majority and they had to leave as much of a legacy as they could while they could. 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. It is a magnificent building! The 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 the U.S. can 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 the media 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 had spent the last five months wandering around the capital trying to find the center of gravity of the government’s effort to coordinate a message to the Islamic street, and to fractious allies, many of whom had just walked into the Olympic Stadium. 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 to establish to my satisfaction 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, shining like little girl Mary Jane patent leathers, began to gouge a hole in my toe. I couldn’t miss the meetings, so I just winced and walked a little faster between the Metro and the buildings. There was enough adrenaline so that I shrugged it off.

Then, I walked back to the Metro and from the Metro back to Pentagon City and from the car in the lot at Langley back to the Northeast entrance and down the long corridor and up the elevator and down the hall for a few hours of phone calls and e-mails. I also changed my shoes. I had an old pair from my days in the Fleet that shined not at all. They were scuffed and soft on the top. I thought it might be the answer to the growing pain on my right foot. It wasn’t. My right foot was swollen like a sausage.

So that was that week. With the exception of my foot, I felt good. We had made significant inroads with several key people and even got a commitment from the about-to-be-established Office of Strategic Influence to be helpful in directing some production efforts to the Public Diplomacy people over at State. Now I could go back to my day job. I think this was a week where we actually made a difference. I spent the weekend not wearing shoes, plastic or otherwise. The guys in Afghanistan were digging in for an extended stay.

What Came Next

Sir Isaac Newton postulated that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That is certainly true in this little company town. The next week brought the dog-end of February. The weather continued sunny and bright and the temperature rose to a tantalizing level. It had been a mild winter, dry, and the daffodils were poking their heads up. The season appeared to ready to change.

Professionally and personally there was a lot of stuff swirling around in the Washington spin-cycle. A mere mortal might be daunted by all this. But I am just dim enough to keep getting up in the morning and going to the office. Deflecting my attention from the list of critical issues this week, however, was the donnybrook going on. It was Public Affairs versus Psychological Operations, no holds barred, winner take all. We ran the 96-hour news cycle full bore on this one.

The story broke on Monday, with the revelation that the Department of Defense had established an Office of Strategic Influence. It started like this in a copyrighted article from the New York Times:

Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad
By James Dao and Eric Washington
Feb. 18, 2002

The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said….

The idea of the Pentagon managing information for the U.S. Government was an interesting concept. After all, wouldn’t you assign a mission requiring guile, subtlety, agility and perfect knowledge to an organization having those attributes as core values?

Of course. The organization was the U.S. Army! They were the only ones who maintained a psychological operations (PSYOPS) capability, resident in the 4th Psychological Operations Group (4th POG). They were a tactical organization, not a strategic organization. But there wasn’t a strategic organization any longer, and hadn’t been since they shut down the Office of War Information in 1945.

Naturally, exposure to the light made the Office of Strategic Influence implode. It was a classic piece of Information Operations, conducted in the usual Washington way. Nothing high-tech. Just a phone call, a quick briefing to one of the usual suspects on “deep background,” fuel the fires of righteous journalistic suspicion of the great machine of national defense. It was a natural, an excellent story line set in motion by part of the machine itself.

So that little media event ran along, hissing and buzzing. In a way it was a good thing, since having mapped the players and the issues I was way out of my box, out of my lane, and far too exposed. The ensuing swirl provided me the top-cover to climb back in and pull the flaps closed. There are plenty of other little skirmishes going on around town in which to engage, and I am still engaged on strange fronts in odd places. There are multiple little wars that came along with the big one.

What Else Can I Do to Be Useful?

I have been trying to help Health and Human Services, which never had a classified idea in it’s fuzzy head, learn how to deal with the fact that First Responders are going to have to have sensitive information and the means to communicate it and protect it. Interesting problem. Then, late in the week I was earnestly talking to a very nice lady from the Office of Homeland Security about how we might go about establishing a fusion intelligence agency to bring together Justice Department criminal information with the Intelligence Community’s all-source intelligence methodology. The goal would be to address domestic terrorism issues and scoop up bad guys before they got into their Ryder trucks or boarded their airplanes.

The problem is this: the culture of Justice is about building cases, not about producing actionable intelligence. Watch the television show “Law and Order” to see why they hang onto information like rabid dogs. The Intelligence Community is about sharing information, within reason, and getting to the best guess about the future. The two views are inconsistent and the collision of these philosophies won’t be rationalized until after the next bit of awfulness.

Conclusion

Having had multiple experiences already, from Beirut to Nairobi to the USS Cole, I think we really should have had quite enough experience to move on and do something to fix the problem. But oh well, that is the kind of world we are living in. We had a flurry of excitement after 9-11, similar to the bombing in Kenya, more robust, but now devolved to the same weird status quo—some furious planning, lots of meetings, but otherwise, business as usual. Until the next time, anyway.

We all ought to be fired. Go figure. At least the swelling is down on my foot. My career advice is don’t get a job that features a lot of walking and a requirement for very shiny shoes.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303