Washington summers are legendary for their heat and humidity, and it’s often told that, before the advent of air conditioning, employees at the British Embassy received hardship pay, as if they were stationed in New Delhi or Rangoon. In days of yore, then, it is easy to comprehend why Washington ran down like a neglected grandfather clock every summer, starting with a obvious slowing right after Memorial Day and culminating with a state of complete coma in August.
Oddly enough, the vicissitudes of global warming have worked their way on DC’s climate, with very noticeable changes, at least according to long-time residents, who are not at all shy about mentioning it – not at all shy about expounding upon the subject at great length, if truth be told. According to them, Washington used to have regular Currier and Ives winters, complete with plenty of snow and frozen ponds to skate on, followed by summers of tropical bestiality where the heat could fry eggs on the sidewalk and the thick, oppressive humidity rendered sweating a ludicrous and completely useless defensive measure for one’s body to adopt. These days, the winters tend to bring mostly rain, with occasional ice storms of the type that previously plagued places like Georgia and North Carolina, while the summers have become much cooler and dryer. But still, nobody works too hard around here between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Actually, nobody in Washington works very hard between Halloween and Super Bowl Sunday, either. And the United States Civil Service, of course, hardly works at all, no matter what time of year it is.
A notable exception to the traditional period of DC sloth is summer study. It’s quite ironic, really, to watch civil servants, who pointedly arrive at their desks at 7:30 every weekday morning and do absolutely nothing all day long at the taxpayers’ considerable expense, driving their callow progeny like slaves through an array of arduous summer education programs. This tradition continues through college, and, it must be admitted, not just in Washington. It was just such a situation that brought Paisley, my nephew Jason’s latest girlfriend, to visit me at my office yesterday afternoon.
Regular readers of this Web log well know that, just like his parents, Jason is covered with tats and routinely sets off metal detectors with his impressive array of body piercings, and I was expecting Paisley to deliver a similar package. Let me report, with a certain satisfaction, that I was wrong. What I could see of her skin is completely devoid of artwork and her face, at least, is unadorned by even a pair of pierced ear rings. I’d say that she looks like an overgrown Girl Scout, but these days it’s possible to find Girl Scouts with tramp stamps and brass studs in their tongues. What she sees in that freak nephew of mine is a mystery to me – perhaps it’s just because Nature decrees that opposites attract.
Jason had suggested Paisley pay me a visit to get her started on her sophomore summer project, which is to prepare “a non-fiction article, not to exceed 10,000 words,” for a college course in her major, which is journalism. The subject was suggested by her professor, who had emailed everybody in the summer seminar with a series of single topic suggestions, awarding each topic to the first student who sent him a reply volunteering to adopt it for their paper.
“So,” I observed, as Paisley earnestly leaned forward in her chair, her laptop perched eagerly on her knees, “when your journalism professor noted that the CIA had released ‘the family jewels’ on Wednesday, you leapt at the prospect of writing about them?”
“Spies make good copy,” she opined, ”Everybody likes to read about them.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “they like to read about fictional ones, but what makes you so sure they want to hear about what real spies do?”
“Well,” Paisley chewed the thought over in her mind carefully, “aren’t the stories essentially similar?”
“That is,” I explained, “the unfortunate public misapprehension that makes writers of fictional spy stories rich.”
“Really?” The poor ingenue was genuinely taken aback, I think.
“Paisley, I hate to disappoint you, but real live spying is a nasty business. It’s extremely dangerous, devoid of romance, and involves far more fear and boredom than any kind of adventure.”
“Oh,” her face fell just a bit, “that’s not cool.” She shrugged good-naturedly. “But I accepted the assignment, so I’d might as well make the best of it.”
At that remark, I could not help thinking that this young woman might be a very positive influence on my nephew, who, I am sure, if confronted with a similar situation, would immediately start looking for ways to get out of it. “Very well, then,” I continued, “Why don’t you start out by telling me what you know about ‘the family jewels’ and their significance?”
Paisley glanced down at her laptop, then looked up at me. “They are a collection of documents that was ordered compiled by CIA Director James Schlesinger in 1973.”
“Why?”
Paisley glanced back down at the laptop. “Ah, the Watergate scandal?”
“Correct,” I encouraged, “and then what happened to them?”
“Another CIA Director named William Colby gave them to Congress.”
“But,” I clarified, “they remained secret.”
“For a very long time.” Paisley nodded, “An independent group called the National Security Archive… it’s um, a non-governmental research institute and library located at the George Washington University. They filed a request for the documents under the Freedom of Information Act in 1992, and it took until 2007 for the CIA to respond to it.”
“Why,” I inquired, “do you suppose that is?”
Paisley was frankly nonplussed. “I… I really can’t imagine why a US government agency would take sixteen years to respond to a request for information.”
“Do you know the Freedom of Information Act reporting requirements?” I asked.
“No,” she smiled sheepishly, “I haven’t gotten that far with my research yet.”
“Twenty days.”
“What!” So young a face had a hard time containing so much shock. “Then how in the hell,” she wondered out loud, “could the CIA take seventeen years without somebody doing something about it?”
“It’s simple,” I explained, “the Justice Department does nothing whatsoever to enforce the Freedom of Information Act. The requesting party can complain to DOJ about federal government agency infractions of the FIOA until they are blue in the face and DOJ won’t do a damn thing. And if DOJ won’t do anything, then why should the Inspectors General of the agencies, or anybody else who works for the US Government, for that matter?”
“So how do people who request documents under the FIOA ever get anything,” she implored, obviously mystified, “if employees of the federal government routinely disobey the law and the Department of Justice won’t do anything about it?”
“Well generally,” I elaborated, “they don’t. It’s only if there’s a public clamor and sufficient press coverage about the outrages committed by our federal government that any kind of action, FIOA or otherwise, ever gets taken.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m serious as a heart attack, Paisley. There are tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats disobeying federal laws, executive orders, regulations and the Constitution itself, and it’s not like they all work for the CIA or any of the other dozens of intelligence and espionage organizations in the government. There are vast hordes federal bureaucrats at the EPA, the GSA, USDA, HUD, the VA, DoD, Interior, Commerce, and even the Justice Department who are breaking federal laws, ignoring executive orders, disregarding federal regulations and defecating all over the United States Constitution every single day of the week, fifty-two weeks a year.”
Seeing so much youthful idealism evaporate in a few seconds was a sight I will not soon forget. “That’s…” ever the striving young journalist, Paisley searched for the right phrase, “That’s patently obscene!”
“That’s the way Washington works,” I dryly replied, “with patently obscene disregard for the law – all the while demanding that everyone else obey it to the letter.”
Paisley shook her head in disgust. “You know what, Mr. Collins? That kind of attitude on the part of people who are paid, with our tax money, to serve the public makes my blood boil!”
“Excellent,” I told her frankly, “Now, if you want to be an investigative journalist, make sure you can keep it boiling for twenty or thirty years.”
Paisley looked down at her laptop. “I’m thinking that maybe I should become a sports reporter instead.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it Miss,” I interjected, “but sports reporting is a man’s world. Why not fashion and entertainment?”
Paisley considered my suggestion briefly. “I don’t know, Mr. Collins. Given what you just told me, covering junkie movie actors, celebrity murderers and super model perverts in Hollywood only sounds a little less disgusting than covering what you say is a bunch of parasites, crooks and slime balls here in Washington.”
“No need to worry about it too much right now,” I advised, “since, after all, you’re only a sophomore in college at the moment.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, “I suppose I can put that decision off to second semester of my junior year, at least.”
“So, okay, then, moving on,” I prodded, “enough shock and awe at how long it took the CIA to publicly admit its misdeeds – what do you know about those misdeeds themselves?”
“Oh yeah, those,” she mused, consulting her laptop, “The CIA suppressed a letter from somebody named James W. McCord, Jr.”
“And who was he?”
“Ah, I don’t know, Mr. Collins.”
“He was the leader of the Watergate burglary team. Before that, he was CIA Chief of Security.”
“You’re teasing me! You made that up!”
“No way, Paisley. A former Chief of CIA Security assembled, funded and ran the criminal gang that broke into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex.”
Paisley duly entered that information on her laptop, then further consulted her notes, “The CIA director refused to hand the letter over to the FBI, even though the FBI was investigating who broke into the Democratic National Committee offices and why. Then there’s this thing where the CIA supplied Washington DC area police with equipment and intelligence to combat anti-war protesters and then spied on the protesters’ activities in the United States.”
“Which is significant for what reason?”
Paisley drew a blank on that. After a moment I prompted her – “Because it was, and supposedly still is, illegal for the CIA to operate inside the United States.”
“What about the prisoners at Gitmo?”
“Gitmo,” I pointed out, “is not in the United States.”
“It’s not?”
“Guantanamo is part of Cuba. It was captured by the Marines. They just never gave it back.”
“Was that like, during the Bay of Pigs invasion or something?”
“Absolutely not,” I proclaimed, “there were no US troops involved in the Bay of Pigs. Gitmo was captured during the Spanish American War.”
“Omigod,” Paisley muttered as she typed on her laptop. “So the CIA operating at Gitmo is some kind of technicality, then?”
“Exactly,” I concurred.
“Then I’ve got all these assassination plots – hiring the Mafia to kill Castro…”
“Yeah, but the Mob not only couldn’t shoot straight, they couldn’t get poison into Fidel’s food. Then Giancana, the guy who took over after Al Capone, got suspicious of this guy who was on a TV program called ‘Laugh In’…”
“A TV program called ‘Laugh In?’ What in the world was that?”
“It’s where great phrases like ‘you bet your bippy’ and ‘sock it to me’ came from…”
“Huh?”
“It’s where Goldie Hawn got her start.”
“Who?”
“Oh, never mind – Giancana was after this guy Dan Rowan – the full title of the TV show was “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In,’ you see, and Giancana thought his wife was cheating on him with this Rowan guy. So he had the CIA bug Rowan’s hotel room. But the CIA operative was caught in the act…”
“Mr. Collins,” Paisley declared, obviously miffed, “you’ve got to be kidding – the CIA running errands for a Mafioso like cheap divorce lawyers! CIA agents can’t possibly be such idiotic clowns!”
“Paisley, I can only wish I could make up stuff like that. Believe it or not, it’s true. Ripley phone home – the CIA is populated by a bunch of fools who make Maxwell Smart look like a genius.”
“Who’s Ripley? And who’s Maxwell Smart?”
“Never mind,” I sighed, “what else you got?”
“Let’s see… sending operatives to Chile to kill the president, somebody named Salvador Allende… and, ah, who was Patrice Lumumba?”
“Big-time Commie African,” I replied, “Involved in the Belgian Congo after the Belgians left. After the CIA killed him, the Soviets named a university after him.”
“Okay,” she murmured, typing diligently, “and then there’s all these mistakes they made spying on the Soviet Union and Communist China.” She looked up at me, puzzled. “How could they be wrong about so many things, so many times?”
“To explain that,” I averred, “you will have to spend some time this summer looking over the declassified files of the Soviet KBG. In them, you will find that most of the ‘live assets’ the CIA thought they had inside Russia were in fact KGB double agents. So, the CIA was pretty much restricted to high-altitude surveillance and monitoring Soviet and Chinese media.”
“You mean, the CIA was so bad at spying on our two major enemies during the Cold War that all they had to go on was high-altitude pictures, radio broadcasts and newspapers?”
“Yep,” I agreed, “strange as that sounds. Of course, in the early years, the pictures were just taken from airplanes like the U-2 and high-altitude balloons.”
“Balloons? We spied on the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists with balloons?”
“Yeah. It were no satellites then, you know.”
“There weren’t?”
“Oh, no, not until 1957, when the Russians launched the first one.”
“Wait a minute, Mr. Collins! Are you telling me that the Russians launched the first satellite?”
“Afraid so. It was called sputnik – S-P-U-T-N-I-K. You should probably Google that. I’m sure Wikipedia has an entry or two about it.”
“What’s ‘sputnik’ mean, anyway?” Paisley asked as she typed on her laptop.
“It’s Russian for ‘satellite.’”
“Makes sense,” she conceded, “Okay, so other than that, all the CIA could do was listen to the radio and read newspapers?”
“Essentially. There were huge sections of Soviet and Chinese specialists at the CIA, recording radio broadcasts, reading every available newspaper and magazine. For example, they’d try to figure out what was going on by examining the May Day celebration pictures in Red Square. By determining which Soviet leader was standing next to Stalin or Khrushchev and so forth, and who was standing next to those people, they would try to work out the internal power structure…”
“Mr. Collins,” she pouted, “that is so ridiculous, it’s totally beyond me. How did we manage to survive and defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War when the CIA couldn’t do anything better than that?”
“Good question,” I allowed, “and my theory is that we didn’t so much win the Cold War as hold out while the Soviets lost it.”
“How?”
“In the end, their economic and political implementations of Marxism were lamer than the CIA’s spying.”
Paisley considered my comment for a moment. “So you’re saying that Marxism might be a good idea?”
“Oh, Marxism a very good idea, Paisley. The problem is, the human race isn’t good enough for Marxism. But I digress. What else you got?”
“There’s this MK-ULTRA stuff. The CIA was giving people LSD without telling them what was going on, then watching what happened. The CIA hired prostitutes to lure people to a ‘safe house’ and slip them LSD in their drinks. They even gave a government germ warfare expert some of it without his knowledge. I haven’t got his name here…”
“Frank Olson,” I provided, “Do you have the rest of the story? He ‘fell out a hotel window’ about a week or so later.”
“Mr. Collins, I just don’t get that business at all. I mean sure, the CIA might have been all excited and stuff about the anti-war protesters. Maybe they assassinated some people when they shouldn’t have. I guess they could have had better judgement and should have obeyed the law on the Watergate break-in. And it’s a shame they were such losers when they tried to spy on the Russians and the Chinese. But where did the CIA get the idea that it’s okay to slip unsuspecting people LSD? What in the world could they hope to find out by doing that?”
“Well,” I philosophized, stretching back in my chair to contemplate the ceiling briefly, “I don’t think they actually wanted to know anything.”
“So what were they doing?” Paisley demanded impatiently.
“Just having a bit of fun,” I retorted, rising from behind my desk.
“Fun?” Paisley was white as a sheet. “Mr. Collins, before I talked to you about this summer journalism assignment, I was proud to be an American. I thought Washington was the capital city of the greatest nation on earth. Now I feel like I’ve walked out over my grandma’s cess pool and sunk into it up to my neck.”
“Oh, you’ll get used to that,” I advised, motioning toward the door, “care to join me for lunch?”
“I… Thank you, but I think I’ve lost my appetite,” she whispered demurely.
“In that case, Paisley, I bet you a hundred bucks that if you pursue a career as an investigative journalist in Washington, you will have a figure like Kate Moss.”