Early this week, Lemont from DOJ called and asked Gretchen to block out two fifteen minute blanks bracketing a consultation on Friday. I have received similar requests on occasion in the past, but usually from foreign diplomats, highly secretive captains of industry, or members of the US intelligence community. I bill them for the dead time, of course.
Gretchen knew the implications, naturally, and made sure that the reception area was completely devoid of other clients when Lemont arrived. He was accompanied by another person – who, since they were wearing a light summer suit, was presumably a man – but it was hard to tell.
“Mr. Collins,” Gretchen told me via chat over the VPN as she typed from her desktop, “Mr. Lemont has arrived with an extra guest. He’s wearing a bag over his head.”
“Mr. X,” Lemont informed me as he and his companion seated themselves in my office and Gretchen closed the heavy oak doors behind her, “is the former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Strategic Working Group for Mexican Drug Cartel Weapons Interdiction.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. X,” I offered. “Lemont has been attending policy consultations with me for several months.”
“I have been briefed on the salient aspects of your relationship,” Mr. X slowly intoned.
“Ah, yes,” I continued, “perhaps you or Lemont could fill me in on the particulars of…”
“Operation Fast and Furious,” Lemont anxiously interrupted.
“Oh,” I exclaimed, “so that’s it. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to find Attorney General Holder to be in contempt of Congress on Wednesday. So – I assume that’s why you and your… associate are here?”
“That,” Lemont added, “and the President invoking executive privilege in that fight over the relevant documentation.”
“Quite understandable,” I agreed. “How can I help you?”
“Well,” Lemont sighed, “as you know, Fast and Furious was a secret operation in which ATF agents in the Phoenix, Arizona office oversaw the sale of high power automatic weapons by legitimate US gun shops to suspected corrupt arms dealers who where suspected of subsequently re-selling those weapons to members of Mexican drug cartels. During execution of Operation Fast and Furious, approximately seventeen hundred high powered rifles, machine guns, shot guns and large caliber pistols came into the possession of various cartels, courtesy of the US government. ATF lost track of nearly all of them, and to date, less than eight hundred weapons have been recovered. A grand total of one Mexican drug cartel executive criminal has been linked to Fast and Furious weapons, and less than a dozen corrupt US arms dealers arrested and prosecuted. Meanwhile, it was verified that over three hundred Mexican citizens have been killed by Fast and Furious guns. Since all of that came out, Congress, the media, public interest groups – you name it – everybody is demanding to know the answer to one burning question about the ATF!”
“Which is?” I inquired.
“’What were they thinking?’” Lemont yelled helplessly as he waved his arms around in excitement. “What the hell… what in God’s Name… what the [expletive] were they thinking?”
“Hmm,” I mused, “now that you mention it, that’s right. There’s been a huge brouhaha about the fact that one of the Fast and Furious guns was used by Mexicans to kill a US Border Patrol agent, an awful fracas about whether Attorney General Holder lied to Congress about Fast and Furious back in February of 2011, a nasty brawl concerning how the President can exert executive privilege over documents that never saw the light of day at the White House, and now, a full blown paranoid conspiracy theory contending that the Obama Administration planned the whole thing to fabricate a pretext to establish a national Draconian gun control policy – but not a peep from anyone, anywhere, about what ATF was thinking when it came up with the whole thing in the first place.”
“And exactly one week ago,” Lemont groaned, “guess who DOJ assigned the lovely job of finding out?”
“You?” I asked.
“None other,” Lemont confirmed. “And since Tuesday, I’ve been… discussing it with Mr. X here.”
“And what’s he told you?” I wondered.
“Oh, that. Okay, watch this,” Lemont sneered as he turned to our mysterious guest, “Mr. X, please explain why the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Strategic Working Group for Mexican Drug Cartel Weapons Interdiction decided that federal agents should not track the arms dealers’ vehicles over the Mexican border using airplanes.”
“According to the Lessons Learned analysis compiled by ATF contractors after Operation Wide Receiver,” Mr. X replied, “aircraft fuel resource depletion rendered the strategy infeasible.”
“See?” Lemont complained. “For the last three and a half days, all I’ve been getting is gobbledygook like that!”
“It appears,” I surmised, “that Mr. X must be a GS-15.”
“Yes, yes, sure he is!” Lemont declared with obvious irritation. “Every single member of the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Strategic Working Group for Mexican Drug Cartel Weapons Interdiction is a GS-15!”
“And what sort of qualifications does Mr. X have?” I sought to establish.
“Um… well,” Lemont fumbled, “I think he went to college somewhere…”
“Peter Pryor Junior College,” Mr. X proudly volunteered. “I have an Associates Degree in Law Enforcement History.”
“And,” I presumed, “your first and only job was with the United States Civil Service, which you joined as a GS-9 immediately after graduation, between seventeen and twenty years ago.”
“That,” Mr. X proclaimed, “would be fifteen years ago – and as a GS-11.”
“I stand corrected. So tell me,” I pressed on, “what does ‘aircraft fuel resource depletion’ mean?”
“It means,” Mr. X confidently responded, “that there was depletion of fuel resources for aircraft.”
“See what I’m talking about?” Lemont demanded. “Ask him a question, you get gobbledygook for an answer. Ask for an explanation of the gobbledygook and you get a paraphrase of the gobbledygook.”
“Exactly how long,” I squinted at Lemont, “have you been in Washington?”
“Well,” he sheepishly confessed, “I’d really only been here about six weeks before they started me on these biweekly consultations with you. Before that, I was an Assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Tennessee.”
“That’s your problem, right there,” I concluded. “Allow me to translate. What Mr. X means is that the gun runners drove around the desert in circles for five hours until the surveillance aircraft ran out of gas and had to leave. Only then did the gun runners drive their vehicles full of weapons across the border to Mexico. Now, Mr. X, can you tell us why the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Strategic Working Group for Mexican Drug Cartel Weapons Interdiction did not recommend drones be used to replace conventional aircraft?”
“The Working Group determined, on the basis of subject matter expert deliverables,” Mr. X explained, “that studies conducted by the Government Accountability Office strongly suggested use of unmanned aerial vehicles was contraindicated by policy and fiscal factors.”
“Huh?” Lemont grunted.
“What Mr. X means,” I told him, “is that some contractor read a GAO report and then told the Working Group that using drones to track the vehicles full of illegal guns across the Mexican border would be too expensive and would create a lot of negative publicity because Americans associate drones with the air strikes blowing up villages they see on television.”
“Okay,” Lemont shrugged. “Now can he tell us how come the Working Group didn’t tell the agents in Phoenix to put radio frequency identification units in the weapons that they weren’t following into Mexico with surveillance aircraft?”
“Incidents of prior RFID usage for weapons tracking,” Mr. X piped up, “was subjected to statistical analysis which determined the strategy to be a nonviable option, with a high level of confidence, due to problematic operational parameters.”
“He means,” I told Lemont, “that one hundred percent of the RFID units ATF hid in illegal weapons sold to Mexican cartel gun runners during previous operations failed, either because the criminals found it, one or more parts malfunctioned, the battery ran out, or the ATF agents broke the unit during installation.”
“All right,” Lemont fumed, “so what’s the Working Group’s excuse for not using existing ground-based methods, like video cameras, for instance, to track Fast and Furious weapons?”
“A review of the terrestrial surveillance asset capability,” Mr. X responded, “by an interagency panel of specialists concluded that range, definition, visual information content and location limitations rendered their use cost-ineffective.”
“Meaning,” I elaborated, “the Working Group had a consultant read them a one page executive summary of a report prepared by the CIA which concluded we would have to put up – and maintain – a pricey high resolution video camera every two hundred feet, all the way along the entire US-Mexico border, in order to avoid having the gun runners simply drive around the places where we did have them installed and cross the border at places where we didn’t.”
“Okay, okay,” Lemont grumbled grudgingly, “I suppose we’re getting somewhere – now I know that, for one reason or another, the Working Group ruled out following the weapons into Mexico with manned aircraft, drones, ground-based cameras and embedded hidden RFID units. So how did the Working Group expect to track the weapons once they were in Mexico?”
“The Working Group formulated a multiplex strategy,” Mr. X told us, “based on an analysis conducted by information technology, law enforcement and fully qualified weapons manufacture professionals.”
“He means,” I explained, “that after reading a report prepared by a government-oriented engineering firm, the Working Group decided to let the gun runners take the weapons into Mexico and sell them to the cartels. Then, when the weapons were found at crime scenes, ATF would track them by running their serial numbers through the e-Trace system on the World Wide Web.”
“A Web site?” Lemont exploded. “The ATF let those homicidal maniacs in the Mexican cartels have high powered machine guns and use them to commit the most heinous crimes imaginable, after which, they hoped to collect weapons from the crime scenes and track them with a Web site?”
“It’s a secured Web site,” I noted.
“Oh, well, yes!” Lemont exulted sarcastically. “A secure Web site! I feel so much better now! Okay, and this secure Web site allows ATF agents to trace the guns to the perps?”
“It allows them,” I corrected, “to trace the guns to their original owners.”
“Their original owners?” Lemont’s chin dropped momentarily.
“That’s right,” I confirmed.
“Who are,” he asked, “probably almost always either American companies or private US citizens who are completely clueless about who owns the weapon now?”
“Correct,” I agreed.
“So,” Lemont incredulous pursued, “this e-Trace system doesn’t track the guns to the Mexican cartel members who committed crimes with them?”
“Of course not,” I replied. “How could it possibly do that?”
“Then how do they expect,” Lemont beseeched, “to catch Mexican cartel criminals with it?”
“If,” I posited, “the Mexican authorities were to apprehend someone with one of the weapons, then they could use e-Trace to identify it as one of the Fast and Furious guns.”
“Provided,” Lemont objected, “that the criminal didn’t remove the serial number, right?”
“True,” I allowed, “although that’s essentially hypothetical, anyway.”
“Why?” Lemont insisted.
“Mr. X?” I prompted.
“Investigation of prior cases having similar attributes,” Mr. X responded, “conducted by qualified advisors, concluded that involvement of subject population law enforcement entities posed substantial threats to overall mission objectives.”
“In other words,” I translated, “on the basis of advice provided by a panel of intellectual paladins, the Working Group decided that the Mexicans were too corrupt to be trusted, and therefore the Phoenix ATF office could not inform the Mexican authorities of what was going on with Fast and Furious.”
“This is totally insane!” Lemont protested. “The Working Group determined that the Phoenix ATF office should just let the gun runners buy the weapons here in the US, take them into Mexico, sell them to the cartel criminals and then sit back and watch the bloodletting without even telling the Mexicans what’s happening, all on the off chance that some ATF agent in Mexico is going to use this stupid e-Trace Web site to…”
“Actually,” I interrupted, “no ATF agents in Mexico were told about Fast and Furious, either, and…”
“What!” Lemont screamed, flushing bright red as he confronted Mr. X. “How could your precious Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Strategic Working Group for Mexican Drug Cartel Weapons Interdiction possibly justify this… this… demented moral outrage? Why, for Christ’s sake, didn’t you just recommend that ATF do nothing instead?”
“Budgetary considerations,” Mr. X confided, “based on appropriation history.”
“Meaning,” I told Lemont, “that if ATF did nothing, it would run a budget surplus at the end of the federal fiscal year and have to return that money to the Treasury. No bureaucrat in Washington could ever let that occur.”
“Why not?” Lemont indignantly demanded.
“Because then,” I explained, “Congress would appropriate less money for ATF in the next fiscal year.”
Lemont turned a most striking and memorable shade of purple. “Abet robbery, mayhem and murder in a foreign country so you can preserve your budget allocation? [Expletive]! That [expletive] does it!” He began to stalk out.
“Where are you going?” I called after him.
“To resign from the Department of Justice!” Lemont lividly proclaimed. “I’d rather work for Knoxville Legal Aid than be a party to this!” The door slammed loudly as he left.
With that, I turned to Mr. X. “Can you see well enough through those holes in that paper bag to find your own way out?”