Baked Hash and Eggs

(Baked eggs and Corned Beef comfort food. Photo Betty Crocker, bless her soul.)

I am still stunned by the news of the suicide of a pal at her own hands. I have been told there is nothing I could have done, and I can appreciate that; the act of suicide being so awful and profound and solitary.

I don’t know but still bad. I needed to get my mind off something that no one can alter in any manner. Crap.

Last year had so many deaths, and this one had been blessedly free of the interface with the Great Beyond, at least on the home front. Now here it is, back again, eternity looked at us with that big unblinking eye.

There was the usual welcome distraction at Willow after work on Friday. The gang was there: Tall Matt, who was making his first Prime Time appearance after three weeks on the lunch shift at the bar; the Lovey Aimee, sloe-eyed Elizabeth-with-an-S; Jon-no-H with the vivacious Ms Bea.

Jerry-with-a-Y was sitting next to Old Jim, who kept his headphones on and his silence. I craved noise, and got it. Aimee was caustic and got a couple shots in at Old Jim who could not hear to respond. Touché!

Jerry enjoyed the fish tacos off the bar menu, but my appetite was spoiled from a large salad for lunch and couldn’t bring myself to order food. When I got home, the silence at home was oppressive. I got my trunks on to head down to the pool but a sudden peal of thunder bludgeoned the side of the building. I stuck my head over the balcony and called down to Martin, this year’s Polish lifeguard who was sitting under the umbrella by the gate.

“You didn’t hear that, did you?” I shouted.

“Yes. Pool now closed.”

Damn. Not even a plunge in the cool waters. The swiftly moving storm eliminated the chance of working off the bad thoughts.

Now that I thought about it, I was hungry after all. Comfort food seemed like the answer that would keep the Black dog at bay for a while. I looked in my 1962 Betty Crocker’s New Good And Easy Cookbook, which slumps in the line next to “The Joy of Cooking 1964” (ex libris Bomber Pilot Dick) on top of the refrigerator.

I found what I was looking for almost immediately. It would take some time, but would fill the unit with good odors and make a Saturday breakfast worth waiting for.

I rooted around in the freezer and found a corned beef that I got at the Commissary when they were on special after last St. Patty’s Day. I ripped open the little package of seasoning and sprinkled it on the meet, fat side up, and added sea salt and crushed garlic cloves. The meat was still frozen, but it didn’t matter.

I prefer to make my own corned beef hash from a slow-cooked beef I double foil-pouched the corned beef and put the package in the cast iron skillet that lives in the over and turned the heat on to “185” and left the timer set at twelve hours. Then I drank vodka and watched the storm sweep over Arlington, the dark sky lighting with flashes of anger.

When I got up there was a delightful smell throughout the place. I ground the Dazbog coffee beans for the coffee and then put on an oven mitt and pulled the skillet out to let the meat cool as I dropped six large peeled Yukon Gold potatoes into some salted water.

I downloaded the NY Times app for the new iPad and started to go through the madness of the wider world. I was startled to see that a former shipmate had just been designated Chief of Naval Operations- a good guy, I thought, and not nearly of the temperament of many of the other Submarine officers I have known.

That would be the last peer I have on active duty, so that will be a sea change when he goes at the end of his watch.

(Foil-pouched corned beef. Photo Socotra.)

There were a depressing number of new emails in the queue and I decided not to deal with them. I unwrapped the corned beef and drained the liquid and sliced off the remaining fat. Then I got out the cutting board and sliced and diced about a pound of if like they do at the BBQ Country pit at the truck stop on Rt. 29 down in Opal.

I was going for a two-phase assault on my senses. First, the corned beef hash. It is simple, and you can’t fail with this recipe:

Vics’s Hash:

1 pound of corned beef, beef brisket or pastrami
6 large potatoes, peeled and diced
1 (12 ounce) can corned beef, cut into chunks
1 medium vidalia onion, chopped
1 cup beef broth
Texas Pete hot sauce to taste
Sea salt and crushed fresh pepper to taste

You can food process the ingredients on “coarse” or just chop it all up as fine as you desire. It keeps for a few days in the reefer or just cook it all. In a large deep skillet, over medium heat, combine the potatoes, corned beef, onion, and beef broth. Cover and simmer until potatoes are of mashing consistency, and the liquid is almost gone. Mix well, and serve.

The following is for a medium mess of hash and eggs, Nature’s Wonder Food

Vic’s Hash and Eggs

4 – Eggs
2 Tbls. – Butter
1 Tbls. – Garlic (not in the recipe but I add it to everything I cook)
4 Tbls. – Cream
Sea salt & Crushed freshly ground black pepper & Cayenne to taste.

In the cast-iron skillet I added the hash and garlic, making sure the garlic was mixed through the hash thoroughly. I pressed the hash down firmly into the pan and cooked over medium high heat for 5-10 minutes and nice and crispy on the bottom. I flipped it over and cooked the other side, and then transferred it to a shallow Pyrex-brand baking dish. I took a ladle and pressed cavities in the hash and dotted with the fresh creamery butter.

Then I cracked a brown egg into each hole and seasoned with salt & pepper & cayenne. As the piece de resistance I topped each egg with a tablespoon of the cream.

I slid the skillet into the pre-heated oven and baked it at 350 degrees for fifteen minutes. You may have to keep an eye on it so that you do not overcook the eggs. I served it hot, straight from the dish, and realized I had made way too much. I wished I had fresh sourdough toast.

It was delicious, but it didn’t alter a damn thing. I thought I should have driven over to Bill and Edith’s diner on Columbia Pike and at least the drive would have taken my mind off things.

Maybe a good long swim will help later this morning, though I expect it will just take time, like everything else.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

No Way Out

(Nats Stadium at dusk with rain coming in. Photo Socotra.)

I was at the desk, looking over some financials. There were many balls in the air; more than I knew possible.

The skies were ominous to the west; we were supposed to go to a Nationals game with Joe, since his hometown Cards were in town for a three-day engagement.

He had some fabulous tickets to the Diamond-level concourse, and entirely new way to witness a ball game and a unique sporting experience in which there is no particular reason to watch the field at all if you don’t care to.

Included with the cost of the ticket is an open bar (beer and wine only, real alcohol extra) and complementary buffet stations, with everything from traditional hot dogs to clams and pasta, salads and steamer round.

(Traditional Ball Park fare in the Diamond Suite: dogs and popcorn shrimp. Photo Socotra.)

(It is a new world: healthier fare at buffet station two. Photo Socotra.)

This is a long way from the bleacher seats at old Tiger Stadium in Detroit, and it sounded like fun.

I was thinking about that, and Annook’s periodic reporting through the day about the state of the construction project that had to be completed before she took off to go home. She sent pictures, and I have to say she pulled off something pretty amazing.

(Annook’s masterpiece kitchen. Now we only have to figure out how to pay for it. Photo Annook.)

I was pleased with what Annook had accomplished, and she could go back to Alaska. I was basking in the sense that we were actually moving forward when I got the call from a friend about another friend.

It was shortly before I was going to wrap things up and head to Big Pink to change clothes. Apparently our friend had shot herself Monday, from what the Police could tell. She had been an officer of the court, and had a Glock. The Medical Examiner will have more on the details of it, since death by gunshot always needs to be checked out by the authorities.

So, I thought, going down on the elevator, our friend had been lying there for nearly three days, if the estimate of time-of-death was correct. I had no idea things were so bad. She must have felt there was no way out.

I stopped by Joe’s place to beg off on the game, since I was pretty shook up. He said that I could go upstairs and stew about it or go out. Crowd would take the mind off things. He had a point, though I was a little dubious. He mentioned the open bar, and I decided to get changed and go.

It turned out to be a great game, and the food was good and Kelly kept the white wine coming, though it was not nearly as good as Willow’s Happy Hour White.

St. Louis trailed 4-2 going into the eighth and forced extra innings against the Nationals’ top two relievers.

As it turned out, Reliever Fernando Salas Fernando gave up a three-run homer to Danny Espinosa in the bottom of the 10th to boost the Nats to a 7-4 sweep of the series against the Cards, who have now dropped six straight.

We were not there to see it, though. I had to ask Joe to get me out of there, since the crowd was closing in on me, and it didn’t seem like there was any way out.

(Cards stage a late rally as Vic gets agoraphobia. Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Fast and Furious

My pal The Lawyer had returned to San Diego fast, and he called me up, furious. I was at the desk, looking out on a day in the Ballston neighborhood that was exquisite in its simple beauty. The heat was gone, and the women seemed to dress up for it. I wanted to go out and wander in the sunshine.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?” I punched the button on the speakerphone, put the handset back on the cradle and leaned back in my ergonometric chair.

“Did you see the FBI is issuing new investigative guidelines for its agents that will make it easier for agents to search commercial or law enforcement databases, search people’s trash and conduct physical surveillance without any suspicion of wrongdoing?”

“Yeah, there was an article in the New York Times. The Bureau says they are just doing some fine-tuning of existing authorities under the Patriot Act. That is a good thing, right?” I leaned forward and clicked through an alert that popped up on my screen.

“Just saw that asshole Ayman al-Zawahiri has taken command of al Qaeda. He was the brain behind much of the terror campaign strategy. Apparently he has vowed to get even with us for bin Laden’s martyrdom.”

“SEAL Team 6 did the job right. And don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I am against terrorists, and want the Justice Department to keep arresting them, and the DoD and CIA to keep killing them overseas.”

“I want them to get al-Zawahiri, too. Light him up.”

“Yeah, but here are the consequences of what getting even with a handful of assholes has done. The FBI out here in San Diego already uses the Patriot Act to remove the firewall between national security and domestic criminal investigations. They think they have a license to cyber-snoop on citizens for the most petty of reasons.”

“I am against that. That is what got us in such trouble back when the Bureau ran COINTELPRO operations against domestic groups in the Vietnam era. They surveilled and infiltrated legal domestic political groups.”
“It was covert and illegal, and now they have the law on their side to do the same thing,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“As I recall, it was the domestic equivalent to what the Agency and parts of DoD was doing. I worked with an Army Security Agency guy in Korea who said they used military jamming gear against the walky-talkies of people organizing protest marches. Sergeant Volkso was a real piece of work.”

“The way COINTELPRO worked was that the Bureau was authorized to conduct PSYOPS against American citizens, forge letters, harass and bust people without warrant and without casue.”

“Mass busts in early May,” I said. “Wasn’t that how the song went?”

“Yeah. And they are at it again.

You remember that former Assistant Deputy SECNAV Wade Sanders is serving four years in federal prison in Texas because an ambitious Ass’t US Attorney in San Diego cyber-snooped the hard drive on his home computer?”

“I remember- wasn’t Wade the Swiftboat guy who came out against Bush in ’04? Wasn’t he a jerk?”

“Last I looked, being a jerk isn’t a crime in this country. What happened was that Wade was angling to get a nomination to run for Congress as a Democrat from San Diego.”

“That isn’t illegal either,” I said. “Idiotic, maybe, but not illegal.”

“That is my point. The Feds entered his house without just cause and confiscated his computers. He had some bad stuff on them- kiddie porn- and tracked his web history to see what websites he visited.”

“Anyone who has that sort of stuff ought to be horsewhipped. We used to find a lot of it on the hard drives of the terrorists. They are complete losers- but it was still illegal to look at it or keep it in the places we were doing forensic examination. We needed special law-enforcement permission to have analysts even look at the images to find the intelligence stuff on the computers.”

“All true, but beside the point. Imagine some starry-eyed federal prosecutor gets a hard-on about our politics and decides to check out everything you have on your computer to run a complete check on everything you do?”

“Crap. Just based on legal political speech?”

“Yes. And based completely on the whims of a Special Agent. The Fed that got Wade was so fired up that she put an image of a Swiftboat on the cover of her prosecution file and told others in her office that she was going to “Swiftboat” the bastard.”

“That was when Karl Rove prepared a hit list of US Attorneys- even Republican ones- who were not adequately politically motivated to undertake prosecutions to embarrass the political enemies of Bush and his cronies.”

“That is just like the Nixon Enemies List. Remember that?”

“Worse. It is not even just politically motivated. I can tell you from my own practice that the Office of Foreign Asset Control and the FBI used cyber-snooping to charge a retired high-ranking military officer and a pal of his with attempting to buy Cuban cigars from a website in Manila.”

“I have never heard of OFAC,” I said. “They got badges and guns, too? And worried about cigars?”

“The Website advertised a scheme by which the box of cigars would be unmarked, no hint they were from Cuba.”

“If they were coming from the PI, my guess is that the cigars were probably not Cuban.”

“Didn’t matter. OFAC sent the retired officer a letter claiming that he had violated the Cuban embargo and would be charged a substantial civil fine for that attempt.”

“Crap. I like a fine cigar once in a while, and I don’t think the government should be telling me where to buy them.”

“You see how the FBI is using the Patriot Act freedom at the local level? They are just fooling around trying to “get something” on important people, hoping it will accelerate their personal federal careers due to the political embarrassment the cyber-snooping generates for their patrons’ political enemies. And these new guidelines will make it all the easier for these local buffoons to simply snoop into private citizens lives just for the fun of it.”

“Screw them. We ought to do something about it. The way the pendulum swings, we are going to wind up right back where we were in 1971, when Schlesinger tried to fire cowboy in the CIA, and our pal Admiral Mac was hired to help clean it all up.”

“You better believe it. Already happening- you should see what the ATF just did to arm the Cartels in Mexico.”
“That is the gang that can’t shoot straight,” I said. “I remember the fun and games in Waco.”

“Get’s worse. I’ll tell you about it sometime. It was called “Operation Fast and Furious. I gotta go- have to be in Court in a half hour about cigars.”

“Have one for me,” I said as the red light on the phone went out. I thought that a fine cigar might be just the thing to smoke and watch the people outside. I would have to be very careful about where I got it, though and I certainly wasn’t going to look or them on-line.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Hallucinations

(Abraham Zapruder 8MM Camera And Film, 1963. Photo Bell & Howell.)

“I’m here to make sure you don’t screw Richard Nixon.”
– James Schlesinger’s first words upon becoming DCI in 1973

I mentioned yesterday that I looked at a film clip and got agitated. You can see it for yourself: it is not hard to find. Google up the search term “Zapruder Film” and you can find it in a nano-second.

I watched it and was profoundly disturbed. I remember as a kid seeing the still photos that Life Magazine published; the Warren Commission considered it the best evidence of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and clear evidence that the deranged lone gunman- the iconic deranged lone gunman- took out the most powerful man in the world.

You don’t have to look far down the list of Google hits before more hallucinogenic items pop up. You can go, frame by frame, through the short film, and discover analysis that says the whole thing is fake, just like the landings on the moon.

It was all done on a Hollywood sound set, according to some commentary that seems rational, enough, but is tinged with rhetoric that is really eerie.

The Zapruder film was finally shown in 1975- by Geraldo Rivera, natch- and caused a public outcry. The film had been sequestered for twelve years. Since Geraldo is a showman, first and foremost, his characterization only stoked the controversy over conspiracy that had been swirling about the murder since the very beginning.
The film appeared to support the contention that the President might have been hit by a second gunman, firing from a position in front of the motorcade. You can make up your own mind on that; everyone else has.

The Congress responded by established the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to re-open the investigation. They poured over everything and issued the final report in 1979, with the findings that JFK was likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The conclusion was based in large part on a Dictabelt audio recoding that had some major problems, but suggested an additional shot had been fired.

They were very nice about the conclusion, though, and specifically exonerated the governments of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Anti-Castro groups or The Mob.

It is sort of weird conclusion, since everything stems from the fact that if Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone, then someone got away with murder- the most high-profile murder in history.

The Committee also helpfully sealed the bulk of its evidence for fifty years.

My pal Mac always maintained that, single gunman or not, Lyndon Baines Johnson was the man who had the most to gain and profited directly from the crime. You can certainly make a case for the boys from the Suite 8F group that met at the Lamar Hotel in Houston did pretty well after LBJ took over.

I don’t have an opinion on the matter, though like everyone I share a grim fascination with the period when everything began to go wrong.

The war that John Kennedy had enthusiastically supported in SE Asia was going badly; the War on Poverty quickly evolved into the mass arson of America’s major inner cities; Doctor King and JFK’s brother quickly joined the ranks of the Martyrs, and it seemed that all through it the Agencies that were designed to protect us had been up to some very shaky antics.

If you ha a suspicious mind- and we Boomers all did- it was pretty apparent that Something’s Happening Here, though what it was…well, it wasn’t exactly clear.

People like Timothy Leary were as helpful as the Select Committee. He revealed something interesting about the martyred President that was not reported at the time.

JFK (and later his brother) lived in a marvelous home in Mclean known as “Hickory Hill.” Some nice people- and some not so nice- lived in the quiet bucolic neighborhood.

A couple named Cord and Mary Meyer lived nearby. Cord had been a combat Marine in the big one, and became radicalized by his experience. Mary was a leftie by way of Vassar College, and both were active in Fellow Traveler groups in the early fifties.

Along the way, Allen Dulles made contact with Cord the year I was born- 1951- and signed him up for a project that was extremely sensitive in the Office of Policy Coordination, the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Directorate for Operations. Cord was to report to Frank Wisner and participate in “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”

CIA HQ is just up Dolly Madison Highway from the neighborhood where the Meyers and the Kennedys lived.
After one of their children was killed by a speeding car on the road near their house, at Langley Commons, the tensions in the marriage caused it to unravel.

Cord moved out, Mary stayed in the house. She became friends with Jackie Kennedy and often walked with her. When they left to move into the White House, Bobby Kennedy moved in with Joan and the kids to Hickory Hill.

In October 1961, Mary began visiting the Kennedy’s at the White House, and some sources reported that she began an affair with the President. The rumors certainly seem credible these days; Like Marilyn Monroe, apparently she was keeping a diary, and the top Counter-Intelligence officer at The Agency, James Jesus Angleton, reportedly began bugging her bedroom.

There is nothing new about JFK being a man with a high libido, bad back or not, nor of government agencies like J Edgar Hoover’s FBI collecting dirt to blackmail politicians. But interestingly, Mary’s progressive politics caused her to reach out to Dr. Timothy Leary in 1962 when he was director of research projects at Harvard.

Leary claimed later that he had supplied LSD to Mary, who in turn told him she used it with Kennedy before amorous encounters.

A White House assistant named Meyer Feldman later claimed in an interview that the President had substantive conversations with Mary, beyond the purely personal, and he had a high regard for her progressive opinions.

In his 1983 biography, Dr. Leary claimed that Mary phoned him the day after the assassination in Dallas, to say that “They couldn’t control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much… They’ll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m scared. I’m afraid.”

(Mary Meyers crime scene, 1964. Photo Washington Post.)

On 12th October, 1964, Mary was murdered as she walked along the C&O Canal towpath in Georgetown. Witnesses heard two gunshots, which police said were point-blank shots in the back of her head and to her chest.

An African-American man was detained shortly there after, and although there was no powderburns on his hands, nor the murder weapon, they had their man.

The public defender claimed the man was innocent, and feeble minded to boot. Mary’s private life, her marriage to a senor intelligence official and the rest was suppressed. The diary, if there was one, never showed up.

The accused was acquitted. The case remains unsolved, unlike the assassination in Dallas, which was the act of a deranged lone gunman.

No less a figure than Ben Bradlee of Washington Post fame knew Mary well, and was connected by marriage. He remarked that a strange thing happened after the murder. During the trial he had gone to Mary’s house to look for the diary, which she had told friends about, and when they got to the house they found James Jesus Angleton inside looking for the same thing.

It is not that things are strange in Washington today, but things were really weird here in the 1960s. That is one of the reasons that Dick Nixon felt he really had to clean house.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Nixon Administration

(Then-AEC Chairman Schlesinger with Pat and Dick Nixon, 1970)

“Covering this upcoming election is like covering a competition between two Soviet refrigerator companies, cold-war relics offering products that never change.”
–       David Brooks, NY Times token Hamiltonian pundit, today.

(Loyal readers, there have been recent and unsettling allegations out there in the world-wide web. We have striven mightily here at The Daily Socotra to maintain an evenhanded and objective account of the sometimes (oh, hell, mostly) bewildering events here in the nation’s capital. In specific reference to irresponsible commentary, this informative and innovative column is truly written by a retired white male former Spook, not a proud young Lesbian in Damascus, Syria. For sure. )

It turned cold here- cold enough to wear long jammies and long sleeved shirt to bed. I assume we will bounce back up into the swelter here shortly, but it was magnificent yesterday. The International Executive of the Ornamental Concrete Workers had their annual golf outing yesterday, taking advantage of the splendid weather, and they were all back and very drunk on the patio until the wee hours, just like old times.

Their laughter was a comfort: a steady roll of summer sound that conveyed tradition, even as things change. There are a lot of new faces by the pool, younger, by in large, and old fixtures like Uncle Bill have decamped for the greener, if more uncertain, pastures of retirement in the Golden West.

It was a welcome change from the dyspepsia I felt when I reviewed the film clip. The moment had come with a chance search looking for something else; the account of the Schlesinger Report on how screwed up and out-of-control the Intelligence Community was, and his specific recommendations about how to fix it.

Jim Schlesinger was a career academic and economist when he joined the Nixon administration in 1969 as Assistant Director of the Bureau of the Budget- the outfit that I knew in later years as the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB.

Schlesinger specialized in analysis of defense matters, but was known to be a loyal Republican operative who could be trusted to come to the right conclusions that supported the Administration agenda. He was tapped in 1970 to chair a group charted to conduct “A Review of the Intelligence Community.”

I have to bore you with that, since the delivery of the report to President Nixon (by then the effort had become known as the Schlesinger Report) which supported an Administration initiative to reign in the CIA, which along with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, were off the reservation and out of control.

Nixon and Kissinger wanted them back in the box, and the fractious tribe of assorted agencies, some in Defense, like DIA and NSA, some unacknowledged (the NRO was “covered” for years afterward) and some completely independent- like the Central Intelligence Agency.

The objective of the survey was to re-establish firm Presidential control, which was covered by the requirement to “identify and alleviate factors of ineffectiveness within the intelligence community, which included recommendations to reform the “organization, planning and operations of the community.”

Schlesinger delivered the report in March of 1971, and the wheels began to grind in the White House to turn the recommendations into action.

That ultimately resulted in the phone call from CIA Director Dick Helm’s deputy, Bronson Tweedy, to my pal Mac in late 1972.

Mac was Deputy Director at DIA at the time, and the politics of the Navy indicated that his time on active duty was coming to an end.

The Schlesinger Report was the first attempt to reform the community. We know now the astonishing things the Christians in Action had been up to through the 1960s. In addition to the wild-west activities of the Directorate for Operations, the Agency had a significant paramilitary force on the ground in SE Asia.

My pal Steve Canyon was one of them, and I have tried to get him to talk about his days walking around North Vietnam, and maybe he will get to it one of these days.

The growing technological capabilities of the IC- notably space-based Imagery and Signals intelligence- had significant impact on the entire tasking-collection-processing and dissemination model for how the community operated.

Schlesinger 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 you have heard any of this before (or since). I participated in several subsequent efforts and have read reams of results of Blue Ribbon Panels on the fiercely independent and compulsively secretive tribes.

Schlesinger recommended created a Director of National Intelligence, strengthening the role of the Director of Central Intelligence as the Pater Familia of the tribes, and establishing a central staff to assign priorities and manage the books on the secret world.

Mac told me that Dick Helms had no interest whatsoever in doing any of that. He told Bronson Tweedy to get something going that would conform to the intent of the Report and keep it the hell away from him.

Mac retired from the Navy (and DIA) on the 31st of December, and reported the first working day of 1973 to the Central Intelligence Agency to join what would become the Intelligence Community Staff.

That could close out this chapter of an account of the career of a great Naval Officer, but of course his second career was just beginning. We have agreed not to discuss anything specific about what he did as part of the oversight structure of the IC in the later 1970s and early 1980s, since some of it remains sensitive to this day. He has given a classified oral history, but God only knows when that will be available.

Of late, the Spooks have been reclassifying things that were previously released.
My Pal the Lawyer was surprised at the hostility the Administration had for the CIA, and the way it was returned.

Dick Helms refused to use his power to block the parts of the Watergate investigation that were starting to illuminate the dirty tricks of an Administration that considered itself to be in a domestic war as serious as the shooting war in SE Asia.

President Nixon fired Helms, and installed a new Director.

James Schlesinger.

He was only at Langley for six months, but he made enough progress in paying back the CIA that they had to install a surveillance camera ear his official portrait to ensure that the employees did not deface it. You have to realize what was at stake, and why no one trusted anyone.

But we will have to get to that tomorrow.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

McCambell

(Bath Iron Works’s fourth FLIGHT IIA Arleigh Burke Class AEGIS Destroyer USS McCamble proudly bears the name of Captain David S. McCampbell, the Navy’s all-time leading ace with 34 aerial victories during World War II. Photo US Navy.)

The South China Sea might be the pivot on which the new century is going to turn. I have a pal who is deeply concerned about what is going on there. I have been a little distracted of late, personal matters on the one hand, and professional ones on the other, attempting to compile my napkin-notes from Willow on the extraordinary career of my great friend Admiral Mac.

I have been threatening to get down to Mac’s account of the tension between Dick Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and the Central Intelligence Agency, and how Mac wound up working there on the Intelligence Community Staff, but that, as you know, required a detour through the coup that overthrew Prince Siahanouk in Cambodia, and installed a more user-friendly Lon Nol government.

My pal the Lawyer has some strong opinions about that, and he wrote a thinly-fictionalized account of his time negotiating with the anti-communist rebels and the assorted Spooks across the border from his post at Ha Tien, RVN. It was what happened after that really upset him- Lon Nol was completely dependent on US aid at the end, and with the withdrawal of American forces from the region, the government ran out of ammunition.

During one of the Khmer Rouge final assaults on the capital of Phnom Penh, Lon Nol sprinkled a circular line of consecrated sand in order to defend the city. The first priority of the KR after conquering Cambodia- and renaming everything to their liking- was to execute all its leaders and high officials. Then, they would continue to murder anyone with an education.

Lon Nol escaped that fate sine he fled the country on April Fool’s day, 1975, to die a decade later of natural causes in Fullerton, CA.

I don’t know if the genocide would have been prevented, had Sihanouk remained in power and the domino not been tipped, but the staggering number of those murdered or worked to death- 1.7 million out of a total population of only 8- certainly makes one wonder if there might not have been a better policy option.

That Henry Kissinger is back as a senior statesman making recommendations on how to treat the rising China makes one wonder, too.

I got a note from Switzerland over the weekend from a colleague who told me to watch what was happening between the Vietnamese and China’s PLA-N.

It is a complicated business, armed diplomacy, and there is a lot of ominous activity.

I have to say- and this is sort of weird- that I have a certain admiration for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. They were a tough and successful adversary, and it was their intervention in Kampuchea that toppled the monster Pol Pot.

I had a chance to tag along on a Bill Richardson CoDel to Hanoi in 1995, I was impressed with the people we met at the Foreign Ministry. Things were clearly changing in the SRV, and if the US did not re-engage with the Vietnamese, it was clear we were going to be left behind to other strategic business partners.

Bill’s report to President Clinton was one of several recommendations to normalize relations with the SRV, and I like to think a pivotal one. An Embassy was opened and full diplomatic relations restored later that year, and have expanded steadily in the years after. In 2003, USS Vandegrift (FFG 48) arrived in Ho Chi Minh City to conduct a port visit, the first since the big pull-out, and last year the Curtis Wilbur (DDG 54) called at Da Nang.

(Vietnamese Officers observe the arrival of USS Curtis Wilbur. Photo USN)

That is the port from which Vietnamese navy sortied this week to conduct live-fire drills in an area forty clicks off the central Vietnamese coast.

A long-standing dispute about Chinese and Vietnamese claims to the Spratly and Paracel island chains are at the core of the dispute.

The Spratlys are a group of more than 750 assorted reefs, keys, atolls and islets claimed by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Malaysia. They are strewn across more than 425,000 square kilometers of open sea. About 45 islands large enough to stay mostly above sea level are occupied by relatively small numbers of military forces.  The Chinese have been increasing assertive about their claims, and tensions have spiked in the last few weeks.

(South China Sea territorial claims. Map National Georgraphic annotated by Wikipedia.)

The force lay-down is that China currently occupies all the Paracels after a shoot-out with South Vietnamese soldiers left eighteen dead in 1974. In the Spratlys, more than 70 Vietnamese were killed in a brief battle with the PRC in 1988.

The live-fire exercise is inside the area Vietnam claims as its 200 nautical mile economic zone, which naturally overlaps the claims of the Chinese (and others). Hanoi has accused Chinese surveillance vessels of twice cutting exploration cables of an oil survey ship inside the area.

Beijing, in turn, has warned Vietnam to halt all naval activity in the region. Most observers think there is a showdown coming, and it may have consequences for the Americans, too. While the two communist nations  started to square off, the North Koreans got into the mix.

Chronically cash-strapped, Pyongyang apparently decided to sell medium range rockets to the other paranoid dictatorship in the region- the former SLORC junta in Myanmar (formerly Burma.) Some of the usual suspect here in Washington had to trumpet a diplomatic success, and the Post and Times got the story this morning.

The Office of Naval Intelligence and the counter-proliferation crowd identified M/V Light, a Belize-flagged-North-Korean-owned merchant that had popped up on the “bad actors” list for association with previous illegal arms shipments. Suspecting the ship was laden with missile components, PacFlt was directed to task 7th Fleet assets to shadow the ship.

The George Washington Carrier Strike Group just had a marvelous port visit in Singapore, a great town for liberty, and home of the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel. In my days as a 7th Fleet sailor, the wonders of Bugis- Boogie- Street were legendary, though construction and increased public decency have cleaned the area west of Victoria to Queens street since. Pity.

McCambell got the call, and she sped off from the Strike Group on independent steaming. On May 26, in the waters due south of Shanghai, she caught up with the cargo ship and broadcast on bridge-to-bridge frequency a request to board under under authority State had squeezed out of the government of Belize. The Korean skipper refused four times.

The White House reportedly was reluctant to forcibly board the ship in international waters fearing a firefight that might have consequences back on the Peninsula.

What followed was a maritime version of OJ’s slow-speed chase while Washington tried to figure out what to do.

State admits to be mystified at what the Burmese are up to . concede they are mystified about Myanmar’s motives. What might be SCUD-C missiles aboard the M/V Light have a range of about 350 miles, meaning they could hit parts of India, China, Thailand or Laos.
It is unclear who or what the Burmese would want to shoot at.

In the end, diplomacy paid off. M/V Light went dead in the water, then reversed course to head north in the South China sea en route home. That was not the only time she went DIW- apparently there were engineering casualties as well.

You cannot say that the South China Sea is not going to be an interesting place in the years to come. Who knows? We might very well be back in Cam Ranh Bay and swimming at China Beach again.

And I just wish McCambell had been around when the North Koreans moved the Pueblo.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Hash

My pal The Good Doctor probably smiled this morning with the news that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, architect of the East Africa Embassy bombings, was shot dead at a checkpoint in Mogadishu.

It was local gendarmerie who settled his hash. Apparently the mastermind got lost, and this had nothing whatsoever with the CIA or JTF-Horn of Africa. The sorry asshole was just lost, as the words to the great Hymn goes, and now he was found.

See, the Doctor was getting a cup of coffee in the basement cafeteria of the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, when the truck bomb Fazul had dispatched detonated, killing a dozen Americans (including recently-revealed CIA officers Mike Shah and Mary Huckaby Hardy) and two hundred local Kenyan nationals. Many of them were Muslim, and most were students at a nearby school.

The Doctor was unhurt, though stunned, and his description of being pulled through the debris was intensely moving when I saw him, months afterward.

So, it has been a good season for the forces of Good, and a bad time to be an asshole.

Still, the randomness with which Mr. Mohammed passed from this vale of tears made me look at the list of things to do. I was able to scratch off a couple- “turn 60,” and “send Quarterly to lay-out people.”

Then there is the matter of Raven and Big Mama’s taxes- a lingering and looming issue- and “Last Will.” I decided to move that one up a couple notches, based on the news from Mog. You never can tell when you are going to run into a random checkpoint, you know?

Anyway, I was trying to list the amount of crap that needs to be disposed of, and in the process of so doing, realized that all my crap is exactly like Raven and Big Mama’s crap- mostly crap. The key would be to point out what actually has value, but I suppose that is all subjective.

The stuff that gets lost. Like the Japanese Naval sword that Raven’s boss Ed Anderson gave me when I was a kid. Would anyone know that LT Anderson had it presented to him by a defeated officer in the ruins of Okinawa? How do you tag this stuff so that the mute objects tell their story?

I don’t know the answer to tagging, though apparently the rest of the known world is moving on with it.

I mean, the very nature of cognition itself is changing. I have often bemoaned the fact that the evolution of the cell phone- which in and of itself has revolutionized human sexuality (as Rep. Weiner’s Weenergate has demonstrated) but has also rendered us unable to remember phone numbers (why would we have to?)

The Google search engine has eliminated my need to remember virtually anything, and Steve Jobs has just unveiled The Cloud, which will replace the hard drive on our Mac with all our data stored on multiple server farms, humming away in some evolved mass consciousness that will, I suspect, replace what we think of as our individuality.

Or something. Anyway, on the way to trying to think about that I stumbled on something that is possibly directly associated with looming future. Now that I am officially old, I have granted myself the privilege of letting things go. As an intelligence officer, I suffered from the inability to let anything pass without categorizing it and filing it.

It was a version of Obsessive-Compulsive behavior, I know, but useful professionally and handy for things like Trivial Pursuit. On retirement from The Profession, I discovered that I could let some things go without injury. One was the daily newspaper, which was a wrenching change and quite liberating. I can sample enough of the news in the e-distillation. Saves time. It is green, mostly.

Another is television. The downside is that I have absolutely no idea what is happening in popular culture. I mean, I literally did not know who Justin Beiber was, or why.

Another thing is Twitter, the technological shorthand communications universe that enabled the Arab Spring. I have an account, I was savvy enough for that, but don’t know how it is supposed to work.

Apparently no one else does, either. Rep. Weiner apparently opened up all his little pictures to world by failing to use the “#” key, or something.

I asked Elisabeth-with-an-S about it at Willow the other afternoon, since she is young enough to understand this stuff.

“Vic,” she said, tucking a lock of hair over her ear. “It is a way to add additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post.”

“I have a Flickr account,” I said defensively. “I upload pictures to it but I don’t know how to tag them.”

“It is simple,” she said, polishing a tulip glass. “You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with the pound sign.” Then she did something curious: she put down the glass and crossed  the index and middle fingers of both hands across one another. “Symbol: #hashtag,” she said. “The hashtag Mafia.”

“You mean people are telling each other that they live on Twitter?”

“The great thing about hashtags is that anyone can join the Mafia by using air hashtags.”

“Great,” I said with a sigh. “Now there is a whole new thing I have to forget.”

“Just don’t do it the way Weiner did.”

“It’s all in the cloud anyway,” I said, and all Elisabeth could do was make the “#” sign and smile.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

RACCOONS and Cake

(The Lovely Aimee and Annook’s Revenge. Photo Socotra of Socotra.)

I had lost one cuff link and the black tie by the time I got to Willow. I have no idea about either. I do not think I wrecked the Hubrismobile- I assume it is in the garage and there were no public safety personnel in the unit when I got up- but the tie and the cufflink were mysteries.

I probably need to back up a little. I was pretty much done with the whole birthday thing by the time I got to the office. I didn’t mind that the boys didn’t remember, sincerely, and this round number had me a little weirded out

Kristi at the office said “It’s the new forty” and having heard that couple times during the morning I decided that maybe that’s right and maybe that’s wrong, but I gotta tell you, I would gladly turn 60 a lot more often if it was like this every time.

My Co-conspirator was off working at an alternate location, so the office was fairly quiet and I actually got some stuff done. All other things being equal, and being a creature of habit, I would have finished things up and then gone to Willow. The fact that the William Oliver Baker Award Dinner was that night was a game changer.

Black tie at the Ritz-Carlton out in Tysons presented several challenges, the first being to organize the formal garb and the second the actual navigation thing to Fairfax at rush hour. I-66 was closed to anything but HOV traffic, so it would be a pain in the butt arcing through the construction.

Cocktails were to start at six and go on for a couple hours- that was a recipe for either great fun or great danger, and I thought about that as I sat in traffic, first on 50 Westbound and then later in the snaggle that is today’s Tysons Corner.

If you have not been out there lately, it appears that the entire content of the stimulus bill has been poured in concrete make-work construction. The Metro extension with new overpasses and stations has transformed the landscape, and between the cranes and Jersey barriers, it is terra incognita.

I was about a half hour late, and the fifth floor reception room was jammed with active duty people in mess dress, striking women in high fashion, and battalions of penguins dressed like me.

Did I mention it was an open bar? I think I commented on that to lovely Ellen, who is the Chair of the professional association that confers the William O. Baker award on the most worthy member of the Intelligence Community for the annual cycle.

This year the honoree was Mike McConnell, for whom I worked twice, and the man who taught our rag-tag little band of young Turks how to do critical thinking about Soviet submarine operations and the prospect of sudden nuclear holocaust. Previous winners of the award included Bob Gates, Jim Clapper, Joan Dempsey, Bill Studeman and Charlie Allen, among others, and except for the retiring SECDEF, everyone was there.

I talked to a couple staff directors of the House Intel Committee four former Directors of Naval Intelligence, three former Directors of DIA, two Directors of National Intelligence and I do not know when the tie disappeared and the cuff-link failed.

(Jake, Bill, Rich and Tom. A walking history of Naval Intelligence. Photo Socotra.)

It was a glittering affair, and with so many old pals, rivals and erstwhile enemies in the room, it was a full-on regular hoot.  Jake had a table and a great time was being had by all.

I think. But I am getting head of myself. While the sun was declining, there were things happening in The Little Village By the Bay. I saw some of it in spurts that appeared on my smart phone:

“Annook was bagging countless drawers of countless items. The stone floor was being laid in the laundry room. The painters were finishing in the kitchen. The carpenters said they would board up the newly found Raccoon apartment under the eve outside the roof.

Young Carpenter came and told Annook she needed to go outside. Annook hated it when people told her she had to go outside because it usually meant there was something else to add to the chore list. Annook went out the front door.

“Apparently you still have a baby up in the eve. See his little head? I heard him crying.”

“Damn. Well, Mama is gone, and I assumed the plumber guy had come on Wednesday evening and gotten her and the babies into the live trap. Can you call him?”

(The Raccoon habitat. Photo Annook.)

Young Carpenter told her he would. Annook left to go to the dry cleaner with aging curtains and stop by the Good Will with more bags and boxes. Annook head over to Independence Village to get Raven and Big Mama to head down the road for a field trip and lunch.

Raven was doing very well this day. He was talking in full sentences. He looked like he was having a great day. Annook got her mother on the phone with Son #1 who was celebrating his 60th birthday. After Big Mama gave her back the phone, Annook put the phone next to Raven’s ear and told him to say happy birthday. When Raven heard his son’s voice he went bananas. He had a full conversation with the birthday boy.

When Annook got back to the house she got the full raccoon report. The live trap had been put behind the bushes. No one at the house was aware that mama raccoon was trapped back there. The babies were calling to their mama. The carpenters had called someone from wildlife as well as the plumber. The wildlife guy got there two minutes before the plumber.

As soon as they opened the trap 5-baby raccoons scrambled to be with mom. Annook didn’t quite get who took the raccoons – but the whole family left the property and the raccoon apartment was vacated. Annook didn’t quite get why the plumber who set the trap had left and not checked out the results since Wednesday evening.

“Five baby raccoons? Wow.”

“Yeah, it was something.”

Annook was glad this happened when someone was at the house.

Big Mama and Annook and family had put in place surprises to occur long distance. Annook is really hoping that the surprises are received before midnight. As of this writing the surprises were only witnessed by the supporting cast of merry makers.”

It was that last part that had me mystified. I looked over at John- he has an H in it, just like WASP John at Willow. “The speeches haven’t even started. I need to stop at Willow. I promised.”

“Then let’s get out of here. I want to get to Ramparts. Speaker Boehner might be there and I want to give him a piece of my mind.”

Navy John did not have a car, for reasons that were never clear to me, so we stole away before the oratory commenced, but not before we managed to talk to the last two Honorees and their lively wives.

(The McConnells and the Clappers. Photo Socotra.)

The vast parking structure was void of activity and we beat the rush. I do not believe I wrecked the car, though will have to check later this morning, and we arrived at Willow in splendid fashion with the top down. I think.

Anyway, the evening dinner rush had subsided and Kate and Tracy were holding court at one of the tables outside. We stopped to chat, and then walked into the bar. Old Jim was there, and Elisabeth with an S, and Big Jim, Jon-no-H, and Aimee.

Something was up.

“What do you think, Birthday Boy?” said Aimee, gesturing up.

“Well I’ll be God-damned,” I said. Annook had done me, but good.

Old Jim finished his long-neck Bud and slammed it down on the bar. “Bout freaking time you got here,” he said. “And you probably are.”

And damned if Annook didn’t get one of Kate’s signature cakes, too. And that, my friends, was just the icing.

(Navy John, Vic and Jon. Photo Elisabeth-with-an-S.)

Copyright 2011 Annook and Vic Socotra

Philip and Me

(Villa of Mon Repose Palace, Corfu, Greece. Photo Wikipedia.)

The Duke of Edinburough and I don’t have a great deal in common. He is tall guy, for a Greek, and looks more Scandinavian, though some might say German, if that didn’t have so much negative baggage over the ninety years the Prince Consort has been on the planet.
Didn’t seem fair- I mean, come on, the guy turned ninety today and had war service in two theaters. So what if he wondered if British students who studied in China might come back “with slitty eyes?”

Some Republican was beating the crap out of him this morning on the BBC for that. I wish Raven could say something stupid, and he is maybe will make 89 this year, so Philip is way ahead. From what I could gather, being a ‘Republican’ (in Brit terms) refers to those who favor the abolition of the Monarchy through either peaceful or more pro-active means.

The things I do share with the Prince Consort include an inappropriate attitude and a birthday, precisely 30 years apart. He is ninety, and I am sixty, both divisible by 3, 5 and 10.

Coincidence? I think not.

Philip was born at the Villa Mon Repos palace on the island of Corfu, and baptized at St George’s Church at the Palaio Frourio (Old Fortress) in Haddokkos a few days after his birth. I am not sure I ever was- there is no paperwork to support it, and neither Raven nor Big Mama could testify with any reliability anymore.

Actually, there are other things I share with the Prince Consort. We both served in the Navies of our nations, and both renounced our original names to take up others. And like Philip, I have “no Greek blood and do not speak Greek”.

To confirm all of this, I dug out the long-form birth certificate this morning to ensure I was actually a US citizen. I intended to start celebrating at midnight, but was long asleep as the suffocating humidity and heat dissipated in the violence of the clouds. I got a modest dip in the pool after getting back from a minor but gratifying event with my Flight Surgeon, Co-Conspirator, and Old Jim at Willow.

There was some controversy with the Polish Lifeguard- he was of the opinion that he had heard thunder and was within his right to close the pool.

I contended that I had heard nothing and was entitled to whatever minutes remained before nine, or the outbreak of an unambiguous peal of noise from the dense clouds that were enveloping Big Pink.

In the end I got five minutes in the cool water, and then the heaven gave us an entirely biguous horizontal bolt of orange lightning with an accompanying roar, and I quit the water and the pool deck.

I went down fairly early last night, so I missed midnight, when the great chasm was crossed. I thought I had been born at Detroit General in the morning. Don’t know why I thought that, but it was a convenient imaginared fact.

(Mt. Carmel Mercy Hospital, 901 Outer Drive, Detroit, MI, circa 1951. Photo MCMH.)

Looking at the photstat of the original long-form birth certificate, I discovered that I was indeed a U.S. Citizen, but not born in the morning, but rather at 6:19 PM, so I am not sixty yet.

Raven had delivered the woman who was not a Mama, either large or small (yet) to the tender mercies of the ER of Mount Carmel Mercy Hospital on Outer Drive, the closest place to the house at 14897 Sussex.

Google Maps tells me it is six minutes to the hospital, via the black 1948 Ford sedan that I still remember, and what’s more, the house is actually still there. Or was. The place next door on the street view is  vacant and partially gutted. The place my parents brought me home to is a tidy brick place that still has windows, though it is tagged with red spray paint on the living room glass that says:

“Fen
SLOB
Killa.”

I have no idea what that phrase means, sixty years after I first saw the place, and Detroit being what it is these days, it may be gone or transformed to ruins or ashes in the months since the street image was acquired by the Google car camera.

Raven was of the impression that these events could take several hours, and men of that era were not expected to look interested or concerned at the agony of birth. He went down to the cafeteria to get a slice of apple pie with a slice of American cheese on top and a cup of java, and was astonished when a Carmelite Nun bustled into the cafeteria to fetch him to see his first born son.

I don’t recall any of that, naturally. The first real memory I retain is of the house on Kentucky Street and eating dirt with an associate in the back yard.

Memory is a funny thing. You could ask Philip, but he would probably say something incorrect, and I can’t remember what the question was.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicocotra.com

Creative Differences

(Jill St. John, Leonid Brezhnev and Dick Nixon.)

I was sitting and talking to Old Jim at the end of the Willow Bar. It was fiercely and oppressively hot outside, and people in Arlington were acting out. Pedestrians were walking out in the crosswalks against the light, motorists were honking wildly and I saw more people flipping each other off than I had since the Pueblo Crew convinced the North Koreans that the middle finger was the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign.

Mac had left me with a lot of work, but we had arrived at the point in his career where some of the characters being to overlap.

I raised a glass to Jim after graceful Elisabeth-with-an-S topped me up. Aimee was resigned to having to service the sweating customers out on the patio.

My San Diego Attorney was in town from the Left Coast on matters pertaining to litigation and history, and he told me he wanted to talk about the “creative differences” between Doctor Kissinger and the CIA, since that runs directly into the Schlesinger Commission which was the reason Mac was be hired at the CIA after his Navy career was done.

“Henry the K looms over my younger years like the Matterhorn,” I said. “I can’t believe he is still around, pontificating in his new book “On China, and where this is all going to go in the post-American Century.”

“Fuck him,” said Jim.

(Henry and Jill. Photo Corbis.)

“True. But I have to say that his continued vitality is impressive. Think back to his reputation when he was in the Nixon White House. Did you ever run into him?”

“Saw him a few times. Nothing personal. I thought he was a pompous jerk.”
Old Jim had been a part-time speechwriter on staff for a while, which was odd for a radical like Jim. But there was a lot of strange stuff going on then- “Remember Dr. Hunter S. Thompson talking NFL issues with candidate Nixon in the back of his limo on the campaign trail?” I said. “And National Security Advisor Henry-the-K with the rep of a swinger.”

“During the peace talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, the Good Doctor was escorting the lovely Jill St. John, the bombshell who stole the show in the Bond film “Diamonds are Forever.”

(Jill St. John in “Diamonds are Forever.”)

I looked up to see The Lawyer coming in the front door, blinking from the heat and brilliance of the sun. I waved and he came over to take a stool next to me.

“Happy Hour White is always good here,” I said. “Welcome to Washington.”

The Lawyer frowned. “Too goddamned hot,” he aid. “I prefer San Diego. I did my time here as a staffer on the Hill and I don’t regret leaving.” The Lawyer is a Princeton man, a speaker of French, and a combat vet from the unpleasantness in SE Asia. He has the bright Mediterranean look of his youth gone only slightly to seed. He has an acid wit and the unflinching eye of an old Spook.

Jim took a deep pull on his long-neck Bud and told The Lawyer we had been talking about Kissinger and Nixon.

The Lawyer looked thoughtful. “Apparently Tricky Dick was not happy about Henry-the-K’s public profile. Hard to believe Ms St John was also dating Sidney Korshak at the same time.”

“Funny how the mob keeps showing up in this history.”

“Isn’t it?” said Jim. “Those fucks.”

“Korshak was an attorney, like me,” said The Lawyer. “Only he was the most powerful one in the world. Sidney was the Chicago Mob’s guy in Hollywood, The Fixer.” The Lawyer looked into his tulip glass and took a decisive sip. “He suggested Jill for the Bond movie, and made it happen. He was the kinda guy who could make creative differences an gambling debts go away, deliver the right actor to the right studio at the right time and make union problems disappear. He was one of the most powerful people you never heard of.”

“She was apparently grateful to the old guy. Very grateful.“

“Anyway, I was thinking about all that ancient history because I had to dig into the Schlesinger Commission to understand why Mac went to work for Bronson Tweedy and DCI Dick Helms in 1972.”

“One has to give it to St John, who was able to simultaneously enthrall both one of the country’s most powerful public officials and its most furtive power broker,” said Jim.

“You can be positively lyrical, Jim” said Aimee, walking by with a tray of empty glasses.

“You said the other day that there was a lot of tension between Langley and the White House, and that there was “surprise” about the Cambodian coup.”

“That is what the history book said about the origin of the Schlesinger Commission to overhaul the intelligence community.”

“That is bullshit,” said The Lawyer. “I was there and I know.” He grimaced. “Nice acting on Kissinger’s part!” said Jim.

“It is clear to me now that the Cambodian coup was engendered slowly, and underwritten by the Special Operations Groupies who had local indigenous troops working SOG projects.” said The Lawyer. “I have been looking at this for a long time.”

He looked pensively in the direction of Elisabeth, who was polishing a glass and peering at it against the light from the front window. “The alphabet soup of militias we had links to- the Khmer Kampuchea Krom, the Khmer Serei being the anti-communist ones, though the Khemer Rouge wound up with some of the money. All of them at one time or another were sent into Cambodia to unsettle Prince Sihanouk or aid Lon Nol. They all were billed as anti-monarchist groups, some commie and some not, but they were in fact funded by CIA black budget money, as Henry the K well knew. The President had directed him to explore two potential CIA actions in Cambodia. They were either going to support covert paramilitary ops against North Vietnamese Regular Forces in the sanctuary areas, or take direct action action against the arms traffic running from the port up the Freedom Highway to the borer. You know the US actually built the road? It was a weird time.”

The Lawyer had been the Naval Intelligence Liaison Officer at Ha Tien, and he could see Cambodia from the front porch of his Hooch. He has some strong opinions about what went on there.

“Lon Nol had long contacts with US Army SPEC FORCES SOG types during the war, and lived in one of the SOG camps in Vietnam for two weeks closely before the Cambodian coup. SOG sent 100 well-armed indigenous KKK/Khmer Serei troops to Phnom Penh to guard Lon Nol as the coup actually went down.”

I frowned and took a sip of Happy Hour White. “There is a lot of stuff no one knew about this. Was it part of Tricky Dick’s Secret Plan to end the war?”

“Dr. Kissinger had a plan. He was trying to stop the flow of arms that was going from the port at Sihanoukville up to the NVA sanctuaries on the Vietnamese border. I know this from SOG guys who were involved. It was actually a perfect set up for “plausible deniability.” The CIA had no station in Cambodia, and only had one retired French sea captain in Phnom Penh as an agent. They Agency guys constantly grilled us for information, giving nothing in return.”

“Bastards.”

“Not all of them. I’m still in touch with the CIA province chief for Kien Giang province where Ha Tien is. We ought to get him to come to Willow and have a drink with him some time.”

“Sounds good,” I said, thinking it was getting on toward time to be in Big Pink’s swimming pool.

“Anyway, I look back on the “surprise” of the Cambodian coup d’etat as one of the best kept secrets and clandestine victories for the US during the Vietnam War. It was so good, nobody can authoritatively pin that on the CIA or the US to this day.”

The Lawyer smiled grimly. He has been active in efforts to try to mitigate the residue of the horror of Pol Pot’s rule with the Khmer Rouge, and got himself crosswise with American policy initiatives in the region.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “in the Kissinger-Nixon tapes that were recorded in April of 1970, Nixon says to Kissinger about Cambodia: “If this fails Henry, it’s your ass!”

“Henry is still around and publishing books on what we ought to do about China.”

“Yeah. Isn’t he the piece of work? Creative differences with Dick Nixon aside, he is still working.”

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com