VD at the Amen Corner

Short Hair Mike is a romantic, which is a refreshing quality in an Army Ranger. Pretty Jamie showed up a little before him at the Willow, and checked her phone for network time. “Is he late for the date?” I asked.

“According to my phone, he is.” She looked up as The Lovely Bea entered through the dark-wood framed glass doors to the bar.

“Hello, Lovely Bea,” I said, brushing both cheeks with an air kiss. “Are the boys taking you buys to dinner? That is so romantic.”

Short Hair Mike came up to the Amen Corner from the garage end of the restaurant holding a box with two floral arrangements, each in a little bud vase with plush animals clinging to the neck.

“It looks like that little lion is humping the flowers,” said Jim.

“You are so romantic,” I said. “Did you get Mary anything for Valentines Day?”

“Yes,” he said. “A six-pack of Budweiser.”

Mac smiled broadly. “So I have been thinking about it and you have the year of the first Dining In wrong.”

“I was moving pretty quickly that morning,” I responded. “It is a first rough draft, after all.”

Mac nodded, and pursed his lips. “Thinking about it, Rufus Taylor staged the first Naval Intelligence dining-in. I was at FIRST Fleet then, in San Diego. So that places it when he was DNI and that was much later.”

 

“So you think ’55 was not the right year?”

“No, definitely not. Ruf did not become DNI until the Kennedy Administration,” replied Mac. I was at the Naval Intelligence School over at Anacostia in the middle 50s. I was still a Lieutenant Commander at the time. I think I was, forever. I was just above the cut line for the biggest promotion the Navy ever had in ’46. It was great to make it, but then promotions stalled out. It seemed like forever.”

“You said it was a good turn-out. How many of us were there?”

“There certainly were not as many as we have today. That was before the Air Intelligence crowd was transferred out of the unrestricted line and into the Special Duty community. Promotions were horrible for them in the URL- they competed against the pilots and you know how that turns out.”

“That is what they are doing again, isn’t it?

“Maybe. There is a lot of uncertainty on that score. I am keeping my mouth shut on that one. I have no way of knowing now how many officers made up the community before the Vietnam conflict. Maybe three or four hundred, but it was a good show. Rufus held it at the Officer’s Club at the Gun Factory. I think it was fairly crowded. It was Ruf’s idea of building moral for the Intelligence Community, and over the next forty-four iterations did just that.”

“I was Mr. Vice in every grade from LCDR on. I think I was the only retired officer to have to do it, too. Tony finally gave me a certificate saying I didn’t have to do it again. Mr. Vice Emeritus, it said.”

“Ruf and I were together for the first time at Arlington Hall at the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office. We used to walk around the grounds there, and I urged him to transfer over to the 1630 Intelligence Community.”

“You told me he started as a Cryppie. So did Jerry Clark. He retired as a Captain, but he went all the way to SES-6 or whatever the highest grade is. He was Deputy Director of DIA for years under Pat Hughes.”

“I finally made Captain, but I had to do it as a civilian,” said one of the pretty ONI ladies.

“I did it as a civilian all the way,” said her blond pal with a smile.

“Rufus Taylor was a character,” said Mac. “He used to keep a bible in his desk drawer,” said Mac. “He used to work a biblical quotation into all his Naval Messages.”

“That wouldn’t be permitted these days,” I said. “Not PC. We might convey the idea that somehow one religion is better than another, even if we are in a war with some religious nut-cases.”

“Seems like the wars are ending anyway,” said Old Jim, draining his Bud. ”I assume we are declaring victory.” He waved as Liz-S for another beer. Liz was looking a little frantic with the Valentines Day crowd swarming the bar, and poor Katia had just got off an airplane and looked exhausted.

“Sometimes that what you have to do,” said Mac. “Rufus retired down to Southern Pines in North Carolina. When he passed, I assumed there would be a big religious ceremony. I was shocked to hear that his wife said they were un-churched, and there would be no obit, no ceremony, and the Duke University Medical School got Ruf’s body.”

“Un-churched?” I said. “I don’t think I have heard that word in years.”

“Yeah, I was sort of amazed that a man who quoted the Bible in his messages did not have any interest in it.”

“It is like the description in the on-line dating sites,” I said. “Spiritual, but not religious.”

“Well, certainly any situation under Heaven can be described in the Good Book.”

“I like the where the kids are tease a holy man, and he sets bears to tear them to ribbons.”

“There is something to be said for that,” said Mac. “When Ruf and I were assigned to AFSA at Arlington Hall he would send periodic messages with the biblical quotes in them. He was Y1 and I was Y1E. He was also the Executive Secretary of a DCI subcommittee on “Sanitization.” Morey Hellner was part of that thing, too,”

“So the community has been worried about covering sensitive sources and methods for a long time.”

“Oh my, yes. I have told you that we issued Secret-level and even unclassified reports based on extremely sensitive JN-25 Japanese Naval Code decrypts. We just didn’t attribute the information to where it came from.”

“I heard a very senior retired officer get real excited about that when he read the account of it in your book. He seems to think it is an approach whose time has come again.”

“Nothing new under the sun,” said Mac.

Jim looked on impassively, sandwiched between the ONI Ladies and Mac and I as he presided at the apex of The Amen Corner. “I have not understood anything you guys have said in the last ten minutes.”

“That is OK,” I said. “We don’t understand it either. For example, are we still 1630s? I know there is a retired designator- I forget what it is.”

“What the hell is a designator?” growled Jim.

“It is a way to categorize the officer corps,” said mac, taking a sip of his second Bells Lager. “The digits all mean something,” said Mac. “the ‘one’ refers to unrestricted or restricted line. The second and third digits described the specialties within the restricted line- cryppies were 161x, intelligence weenies were 163x and so on.”

“Then, with the establishment of the Corps of Information Dominance, we became 1830s.”

“Actually, you became an 1833,” said the blond ONI lady. “The last digit indicates your status. ‘Zero’ means regular, active, and ‘One’ means Warrant, ‘Two’ means temporary regular officer who had permanent enlisted status. The ‘Three’ means ‘Regular office on the retired list.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I always wondered about that. But do we know if they reclassified us as 1833s or are we still 1633s?”

“You would have to ask someone at BuPers in Millington,” said Mac. “I don’t really care. I don’t think they are going to call any of us back.”

“You are all crazy,” said Jim.

“Probably,” said Mac with a smile, taking a sip of lager. “Rufus held a position under that diesel submarine officer Fritz Harlfinger. Rufus was know as the Director of Intelligence- Op-922, but not the Director of Naval Intelligence. Harlfinger kept the DNI car and anything else good he saw laying around the fifth deck of the Pentagon.”

“It must have been liberating to have an intelligence officer as the Director of Naval Intelligence.”

“Yes, Ruf took over from “Rebel” Lowrence, a submarine ace from the Pacific War. And wait- of course. The first Dining In was in 1964, the year after Rufus took over. That makes sense. I don’t know where you came up with 1955.”

rly and I had not had my coffee,” I said a little defensively. “And the Dining In was the night before.”

“Rufus was relieved by Mike Rindskopf, who just died last fall.”

“I wrote an obit for him. He was a hell of a guy- submariner though. It seemed like there wasn’t any place in Admiral Hymen Rickover’s all-nuclear Navy for the old pig-boat guys, heroes or not.”

“True. Mike was followed by “Lucky” Fluckey, the Congressional Medal of Honor winner.”

“I wrote one for him, too,” I said. “The Galloping Ghost of the China Coast. Amazing stories about his exploits. His crew sank a train on the island of Honshu late in the war- first land raid on the Home Islands.”

“Yep,” Mac nodded. “Then, Frank Murphy, a Captain sitting in and then that pompous fellow Fritz Harlfinger. If it had not been for Bud Zumwalt’s special relationship with Rex Rectanus, I don’t know what would have happened.”

 

“One thing is pretty certain,” I said. “The business of the technical collection of intelligence from earth orbit, and the assessment of validity in sources and methods really take ssomeone who does that for a living.”

“Precisely why Bud picked Rex and his DNI.” Mac took sip of beer. “And it was intelligence officers from there on, until now.”

“Do you think that the consolidation of the community is a good thing? They say that the Radio Wars that were raging since World War Two are over, and the Operators are happy with that.”

“They just don’t understand it. The last time an Operator thought he knew everything was Richmond Kelly Turner, and he withheld the intelligence that might have prevented the disaster at Pearl Harbor.”

“Arg,” I said. “I am not going to open up that particular can of worms again. Do you think it could happen again?”

Mac shook his head. “It did happen again, remember?”

“I wonder what Ruf Taylor would have said about that.”

“He might have quoted King 2:23,” said Mac.

“I am not so good on my old Testament,” I said, draining the last of this particular glass of happy hour white, a modest Pinot Grigio. “How does that one go?”

“As I recall, Elisha was going up to Bethel, and as he was going along some children came out of the town and mocked his bald head.”

“That doesn’t seem charitable.”

“It wasn’t. Elisha cursed them in the name of the Lord, and then two-she bears came out of the woods and tore up 42 kids.”

“Really? That seems like sort of an over-reaction.”

“Sometimes extraordinary action is required. You can look it up. I think Ruf could have written a good message around that. But did I mention Walter Lionel Pforzheimer?”

“Who?”

“The grand old man of the library at CIA.”

“No, I don’t think so.” I grabbed another napkin, signaled Liz-S for reinforcements and waited for the Admiral to tell me the story.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com