I wrote the date and then I had to stop. Ten years, almost to the tick of the clock. I was not going to do this to you. I was going to write about the incredible victory under the lights at the Big House last night, but I cannot disrespect the people who died by trivializing the day with some stupid sporting event.
Damn.
The marriage had been on the rocks that summer, and I can’t at this distance say what part the growing dread and fear of that summer played in what came to pass. I have the note in my work journals from the time- there was a sense of dread; there were things that had happened that made something here seem inevitable.
I went down to the office of the Director of Plans on the intelligence Community Staff one day not long after I left the Pentagon to work at Langley, and plopped down on the chair across from Deborah’s desk. Her windows looked out of the Original Headquarters Building on the sixth floor over the trees.
It is a pretty campus, very pastoral.
“You know they are going to smack us, right?” She nodded. We all knew something was coming. I have the notes.
The marriage officially went on hiatus on the first of September. I was in terra incognita. For the first time in my life I had no place to live, and was bouncing from Bachelor Officers Quarters on a space-available basis, and it sucked. People with orders took priority, so I had to move every couple days, living out of the trunk of the Sebring convertible.
Fifty years old that year, and starting out again with zip-squat.
On the morning, ten years ago, I happened to be in the Walter Reed BOQ on Fort Leslie J. McNair. It was an old brick structure, built to the standard plan of the 1880s Army. It was a drafty structure with small rooms and doors that did not quite fit the frames anymore.
In keeping with the pre-airconditioned era in which it was built, each floor featured a broad veranda accessible from the central hallway. There was a splendid view of the Potomac to the east, and the vast low sandstone bulk of the Pentagon across the river.
I had attended the Armed Forces Industrial College in academic year 1997-98, the Best Year of Our Lives. That is what we called it, ironically, along with the companion motto: “It is only a lot of reading if you do it.”
I felt adrift and filled with dread about the future, and also a strange exhilaration that a Rubicon had been crossed, and maybe there was hope. And guilt, of course. I am the oldest kid in the family, and that comes with the turf.
The Community Management Staff does not rise early, but my habits die hard, and I was up at five on that Tuesday morning to shower and shrug on my tropical whites, shoulder-boards and ribbons with the identification badge of the Joint Chiefs of staff below.
I could have worn civvies; CMS was not much of a stickler for military precision, and living with the Agency we did, was more than accustomed to people not being exactly who they pretended to be. Plus, without the contents of my closet, a uniform has certain advantages.
I walked down to the car, to head for the office just like the assholes who were going to change our world. I put the top down; it was beautiful in the pre-dawn. The inky sky was illuminated by a elegant silvery moon, no clouds. The temperature was perfect.
I drove out Maine Avenue to catch the 14th Street Bridge and cross over into Virginia. Langley is best accessed by the George Washington Parkway, and the spaghetti of roads around the Pentagon is confusing enough as it is. I took the Pentagon exit, since I knew that way to the Parkway better than any other from the eight years I worked there. I drove up Boundary Channel Drive, past the River Entrance to the Building.
Lady Bird Johnson Park is to the east, across the little stream that is actually the boundary between the District and Virginia. I recall thinking that I might be able to use the Pentagon Officer’s Athletic Club to shower in the morning, if no rooms were available in the Q and I was reduced to living out of my car.
The great mass of the Pentagon was lit by moonlight, just starting to come awake with the business of Defense. I passed the wide swath of the North Parking asphalt, and then arced onto Route 27 to hook up to the Parkway.
All I recall from there, smoothly passing under the leafy limited-access road was the pleasant quality of the air against my skin. There was nothing remarkable about the exit onto Dolly Madison to approach the campus from the east. I did not like the wait at the light if you came from the west.
There is a reason for that. The dual left-hand turn lanes were where that asshole Mir Aimal Kasi murdered two Agency employees as they waited for the light to change in January, 1993. He shot three others, and got away clean before he fled back to Pakistan.
Mir Aimal Kasi. Photo FBI
He then took up residence in the FATA- the FATA – The Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. He made a living smuggling Russian electronics out of Afghanistan during the Russian War, but was ratted out by a member of the Pashtun clan who were sheltering him.
They rendered him back to Virginia for trial, and executed the son of a bitch in 2002.
The passage through the gate was uneventful, the black-clad guards, mostly recruited out of the Marine Embassy Guard detachments were crisp and professional.
I got a decent parking place, a perk of arriving early, and badged in and took the elevator up to the office suite on the sixth floor. I forget whether I had to unlock the vault; normally I did, being one of the first ones in.
That would have been about the time that assholes Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari passed through security at Portland International Jetport in Maine to connect to Los Angeles-bound American Airlines Flight 11 at Logan in Beantown.
I did not have a window, but did have my own office, so I did not see how pretty the light was coming up on the trees outside as Marty and Rock arrived in their shared office across the passageway to continue the agonizing process of coordinating a DCI directive through the fractious and uncooperative members of the Community.
Seventeen other assholes cleared security checks at Logan Airport, Newark International Airport, and Washington Dulles Airport as we got ready for a day of bureaucratic process. Even though the assholes aroused suspicion at security screening, none were prevented from boarding their flights.
We were talking about some nuance in one of the paragraphs in our document in our morning huddle that started at 0830 sharp. Steph came down the hall, announcing to all within earshot that an airplane had hit the Trade Center a few minutes before.
“Jesus,” I said. “It has happened before. A B-25 bomber flew into the Empire State Building during the war.”
Marty and Rock looked dubious, and the conversation about the objections that Fort Meade had to our document was suspended. News of the second crash was in real time, what with attention glued to CNN in the offices that had televisions.
“That’s it,” I said and shut my notebook. “We are under attack. You guys get out of here and get home.” They were both retired officers, contractors now, and they left with alacrity, to spend the next several hours in their cars in the mess of the entire Federal Government attempting to flee.
I went back to my office to wait for whatever was going to happen next, numb. The Boss stuck her head in the office minutes later to tell me that since I was wearing a uniform, there was a plan for these sorts of things and we were going to execute it.
That was about the time my pal Eileen was sitting in her car on 27 waiting to get through the jam to Memorial Bridge and get to her job in the attic of the capital when American Flight 77 flashed downslope from the direction of the Navy Annex on the hill, over her car then the heliport and into the Pentagon.
When the images came on the CNN the camera angle made it plain that the aircraft had gone into the area where my old office had been moved in the big re-construction project. Flames rose from the sandstone below the roof. I tried to call my old number but all circuits were busy.
We were moving at that point, to a secure location on the campus, and I found myself with the Director and at a desk with a phone and nothing else.
“Get me the Director of NSA,” said George, and turned back to watch the CNN coverage as the unimaginable happened. His face went gray, gray as the plume of dust that was billowing from the disintegrating tower.
I had no phone book. I do not know how I got through to Fort Meade, but I did. “There is another airplane out there,” someone said. “They say it is coming here.”
I later heard everyone in town thought the same thing, from the White House to the Department of Agriculture.
You know the rest of it, and by then I was just another person watching television like you. Once the realization came that everything was grounded, except Air Force One, they realized that phones without phone lists were no good, they let us go back to our offices.
The Real Plan was going into effect, the one no one talked about, and the Grownups were disappearing. I shuffled paper at my desk until sometime after a lunch that did not happen. I dialed cell numbers randomly to see if any of my co-workers at the Pentagon had survived. I finally got a call through to Kristina.
She said she had seen the fireball out the window, but the office was intact, and everyone had got out safely. I was bathed with relief and the sour scent of adrenaline.
The Boss told us to get home. “There will be plenty to do tomorrow. Rest up, if you can,” she said. I did not have one, and I did not know if it would be possible to get back across the river to Fort McNair.
As it turned out, it was a piece of cake. There was no traffic on the Parkway, and I saw people roller-blading on the bike path. It was a beautiful day. I had a big bottle of Popov Industrial Strength vodka back in the room, and I was able to knock back enough of it out on the stately veranda, watching the soldiers swarm around on post, and as darkness came on, the bright orange of the Pentagon burning across the Potomac.
In my relief that my old office had survived, I discovered that the Navy Command Center had been at ground zero, and Vince and Dan and the other five kids who worked the intel watch were still in the building.
Damn.
The Boss was right. There was plenty of work to be done, and it is not done yet. We were just getting started on it the next year when we finally executed Mir Aimal Kasi on November 14, 2002.
It is a measure of the amount of work left to be done that when his body was repatriated to Pakistan, his funeral was attended by the entire civil hierarchy of Balochistand, the local Pakistani Army Corps Commander and the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States, the Hon. Ashraf Jajangir Qazi.
Osama lived there without fear for years, too, after we blew his capture at Tora Bora. With friends like the Pakis, who needs enemies?
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com