(The Director and Deputy Director of a major suburban combat support agency who have elected to retire this fall.)
“I have been to this movie before,” I declared firmly and put down my glass of happy hour white a little harder than normal for emphasis. “We completely screwed ourselves.”
“What are you raving about now?” growled old Jim.
“They just shit-canned the Director of the Agency where I used to work, and they got the Deputy Director, too. It is just like the end of the Cold War and the chaos of downsizing and re-organization to do more with less.”
Jim has been around the block in DC and he knows how things work. “Normally you do less with less.” He took a sip of Budweiser and said:
“Who’d they piss off?”
“I think it was everyone at the Agency, their boss at OSD, Mike, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA and Congress in about that order.”
“Shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then.”
“Well, it was still dramatic. I had to turn off my cell phone there were so many calls. There were rumors that it was a done deal late last year. He was trying to take DIA in a direction the rest of the Department didn’t want to go.”
“Where on earth was that?” asked Jon-without. He was drinking a bottle of imported beer, part of his strategy of trying to mix it up a little.
“The General wanted to take advantage of the budget pressures and the demand for a more adaptive agency to bring change and find efficiencies.” I said. “How is that for some buzz words.”
“DIA is a bloated bureaucracy with overstaffed analytical elements still focusing on requirements that have been overtaken by applications in technology,” said an anonymous fellow down the bar.
I looked in his direction and the man turned his gaze from our little group at the apex of the Amen Corner to the basket of Willow’s excellent fish and chips in front of him. There was a trench coat still wet from the pelting rain outside slung over the back of the stool.
“Are you from Langley,” I asked. The man shrugged.
“Close enough,” he said.
“The Deputy was one of you guys,” I said. “The Director of National Intelligence seemed to want one of his guys there, or maybe it was that the General did not want a career insider from the Agency as his Deputy.”
“I may have said too much,” the man said. I studied his profile as he took a bit of fish from the basket and dipped it in Tracy O’Grady’s home-made tartar sauce. “But trust me, no one in town thought we needed another clandestine service. The one at Langley should be enough, right?”
“I know he got the job because he proposed radical change to the way the national intelligence agencies supported forces in the field,” I said. “I used to go to the weekly VTCs at the Pentagon with the General when he was the top intel dog at the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Then we lost the contract and my Pentagon access badge got suspended. They duck-marched me out to South Parking and that ended my time in the Five-sided Adult Care Facility.”
“Must have been a sentimental moment,” said Jon-without.
“I will never forget it,” I said. “But I have to say that leaving the place was oddly liberating.”
“The General is probably feeling the same way,” growled Jim.
“They are letting him stay long enough to have the time-in-grade he needs to retire as a three star,” I said. “So it is not exactly like getting terminated with extreme predjudice.”
“Sure it is,” said the gray man down the bar. “Part of the agenda was to provide the SecDef with his own spies. That goes back to Rumsfeld’s time when he didn’t think Defense was getting adequate support from Langley.”
“Uncle Don did not trust anything that wasn’t under his control. In the meantime, the General was Stan McChrystal’s spook in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then he wrote that paper that said we needed to provide more intel guys on the ground at the battalion and brigade level, and less irrelevance from the national agencies. They rewarded him with command at the Agency.”
“I remember the line,” I said. “It was the Pottery Barn Rule. If you say something is broken you are rewarded with the opportunity to fix it.”
“Yeah. I remember hearing about when he arrived at the Agency and announced that if people were reluctant to embrace his agenda he would move them or fire them. I think he transferred like a hundred senior executives in the first two months he was there. Now the wars he was supposed to fix are over. I don’t know where that leaves you when they are taking the resources away.”
“Sounds like the stun-gun approach to management,” said Jon-without as Chanteuse Mary walked in, damp but not wilted.
“What are you reprobates talking about?” She asked, hopping on the stool next to Jim.
“Nothing important. Bureaucratic politics.”
“Is there anything else in this town?” she said with a smile.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But now the fun begins with who is next in the seat. I have heard a rumor….”
Brett the bartender alertly filled up my glass again before I could get to the part about how the DCSInt at Army was a strong candidate, and if she didn’t want the job, who would be in line after that to be elevated to take on the Agency. And what agenda might come with whoever it was.
The Gray Man down the bar threw a couple twenties on the bar- didn’t want a paper trail, I assume- and shrugged on his trench coat. He gave a crooked smile. “You kids have fun tonight,” he said, and walked off toward the rear entrance to the parking garage.
“What was all that about?” asked Jim, waving at Boomer to get another beer and a glass of the white for Mary.
“Faces and spaces,” I said. “More crumbling bricks and brittle sticks.”
“Clever,” said Jon-without. “I think maybe I will switch to vodka.”
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303