An Army Intelligence Warrant Officer, Chapter IV
At Fort Meade I became a primary staff officer, S-2 for the intel battalion covering the Eastern U.S. Easy assignment. I quickly became known as CINC-WS. Commander-in Chief Weird Shit. Anything that wouldn’t fit in someone else’s bucket was handed to me. For example, Reagan was shot, the would-be assassin, John Hinckley, was incarcerated at Fort Meade. He attempted suicide and left several documents in his cell. One was in Japanese, one in Russian, one in French.
They wound up immediately in my custody, and I parceled them out. The Japanese went across the road to the NSA, and a Russian-language interrogator at another unit got the Russian one. Both were one-pagers. What could the French be? Does 19 pages of obscure medical text sound about right? I kept that for myself. Up all night with three dictionaries and the document.
Then I got a call from someone in a subordinate unit, one of our field offices, informing me that at their location in North Carolina the local police were very short-handed, and they were going to beef them up. All good and well, but that violated the Civil War-era Posse Comitatus Act. I told them they could go along if they left their weapons and badges in the office. That was one unhappy bunch of campers. They could only go as private citizens.
A month later, I got a call from them saying that they had been asked by the Secret Service to provide additional manpower for an upcoming VIP visit. They said they weren’t going to do it, citing my earlier guidance. Unfortunately, in this case, that was the sole exception to the Act. Any US Federal Law Enforcement Officer asked to assist the Secret Service in protection details was required to do so. A couple more of those and people just started showing up at my desk.
My Disdain for Incompetent Authority Becomes More Difficult to Hide
That’s when things accelerated quickly. First, I got called in to advise on the viability of a Special Access Program. My first question was how many people had access. “It goes up and down every week by about five hundred.” Second question was when the protected system would be deployed, and inevitably discovered. Six months. Third question was how many people were occupied full-time protecting this thing for six months. It was about fifty.
The Deputy Commanding General of the Intelligence and Security Command asked me what my opinion was of the status. “Industrial-strength stupidity.” After all, he asked. I saw people scrambling for the exits. “You can’t say that to me,” was met with the grammar Nazi: Of course, I can, I just did. If you mean I may not say that, then please use those words. He allowed as how I had been asked for my opinion. “What do you suggest we do?”
A few more questions, and I told him: Get two Privates on high-speed copying machines, copy all of the million pages of documents, then play fifty-two pickup. Load the results in a large truck, call the Soviet Embassy, show up in the truck with the documents and give them to the Soviets. It will take them more than six months to decide whether this is a US deception operation and then another few months to sort out the mess.
Then Brigadier General Dozier was rescued from Italian terrorists. I was offered the Army’s “slot” for his debriefing team. I suggested someone I knew from my time in Berlin who was far more familiar with the Briggatte Rosse. He replaced me, and I took over security for the debriefing. That involved training agents in what is known as bar coverage, a fancy term for sitting around listening for anyone knowledgeable discussing the undertaking. I also had responsibility for transporting the General and his wife and running communications.
A New Job: Training
Next, I was asked to assist the CIA in surveillance training. That was relatively straightforward. I assembled a team and we found encrypted radio equipment to borrow. There were few great highlights. I was professionally devastated: I was caught talking to my newspaper. I never did live that down, even after retirement.
The highlight was learning that a Far Eastern news organization had a newly arrived reporter in the area sitting at a traffic light at the top of a steep hill. He put the transmission into “N” for No Go and had no understanding about why he and his car were magically sent down the hill at high speed to broadside one of our vehicles. That team was out of action until an interpreter could be found. One of our Agents in the car spoke Mandarin, but the driver was Japanese. That further complicated things, and we had one set of “hounds” out of commission. The terms in surveillance are “hounds” for those conducting the surveillance. The target is the “rabbit.”
I was running the exercise but was not the senior-most person among the hounds. One person, senior to me, got bored sitting and waiting for the rabbit to come back by after turning around – I mean, who does Bill think he is deciding the guy will turn around and come back this way? – so he went hunting to get back in the game. That’s how we missed the rabbit coming right by where he had been.
Fortunately, another team was backing up the guy who couldn’t follow orders and picked him up. We tailed him, running parallel on side streets, and caught up with him at what we expected his destination to be – a large electronics outlet. At the debriefing we learned that he thought he had fooled us because where he parked, he might have been going elsewhere. But he wasn’t. And, had this been in Eastern Europe, the electronics store would have been swarmed and torn apart looking for the dead drop device he had planted there.
I had access to every Army counterintelligence organization east of the Mississippi and began picking up some grumblings. There was significant discontent among the ranks that many of their skills were atrophying. They were particularly concerned with surveillance, analysis and reporting. So, I visited the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command along with the Intelligence School and proposed a skills refresher training program. It didn’t take long to put together. The Army Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia, first requested we go there. I was the rabbit, there were a couple of controllers, otherwise everyone else was a hound.
At one point I took a countersurveillance route through a cemetery and left a flower at a hundred-fifty-year-old grave. Nobody took notice that I left a “Get Well Soon” card with the flower. I stopped in a bar just out of town and five or six hounds followed me in. There were half a dozen ladies present who were entrepreneurs, each with a memorized list of services. I spoke with one and pointed out a hound, gave her $20, and asked her to take him out on the dance floor and begin undressing him.
She did so, and as the whole team was cheering her on, I got up and left. We had given the hounds a biography of the rabbit, and when they lost me, they consulted the biography and decided where I was most likely to be. They found me based on that. It was fun all around. Well, mostly.
I was staying in a cheap motel, and the activity around me aroused the suspicion of a local drug gang. One of the gang members followed me into my room. The local police, with whom we had coordinated when setting up the exercise wound up in a gun battle with therm. A fun time was had by all.
We wound up traveling the country and presenting the training more than half a dozen times. A second training team was put together by the battalion handling the Western half of the country.
Poindexter, Ollie and Me
Eventually I was pulled into a secret program, and wound up working for the National Security Advisor, John Poindexter. One of my coworkers was Ollie North, a blowhard. He told me one day he wanted to introduce me to someone he thought I would like. Turned out to be my brother-in-law, a senior guy at NSA who was the NSA rep to one of the multiple secret squirrel organizations in the basement of the Pentagon. I noticed Dave Major sitting in the corner and let Ollie run his mouth. Dave was an FBI Agent. Wasn’t long after that he was testifying before Congress.
I was tasked with finding a way to destroy the Soviet Union economically. That turned out to be relatively easy. There’s not much I can say about what I did; most of it is still classified.
During that period, I got to go to Germany to play in the woods, to Fort Sill to learn everything I ever wanted to know about Artillery but was afraid to ask; to a tropical atoll where I was chased up a palm tree by a feral pig; and kidnapped once again.
Then one of our geniuses decided he’d create a fake capability to outgun Soviet artillery. I told him no, finally went as far over his head as I could, no joy. Soviet doctrine did not allow for being outgunned in artillery. Whatever we thought they were going to do in response to learning we had them outgunned, the most probable course of action was to start World War III. I shut that down, at great personal cost. Time to move on.
Yet Another Job
I was already in the personnel program, so I went to a secret location to train in clandestine operations. That was fun. I fucked with the instructors every time I got a chance. I knew one of them was an attorney, although the role he was playing was that of a warehouse owner. He had things in his warehouse of which he was unaware. I asked him if the stuff in his warehouse a simple bailment or a bailment for hire, a fairly sophisticated legal concept. He replied it was a bailment for hire without thinking. Then he stopped himself. “How do you know about bailments?”
I told him that at home every night someone would pick out a word from the dictionary and we’d then discuss it over dinner. Last night had been bailments. He got very careful around me after that.
One of my classmates was a prime fuckup. He went into a department store and asked how many entrances and exits there were. Yes, you must know that if you’re going to go into the store. No, you don’t ask questions. I had to bail him out of jail.
Then we had an exercise involving dead drop devices. The guy who was supposed to be his partner spoke Spanish (the fuckup was from Morocco and spoke English, French and Spanish equally). The partner explained “Es un ladrillo.” That’s a brick. Not supposed to do that, but he knew the guy would fuck it up otherwise. So, Fuckup returns with a stick. Holy shit.
Days were long, and every time we had a meeting with a source to recruit him, we had a lengthy report to complete. My best friend in the course was a Haitian, Marciel, a member of the aristocracy. He wrote beautifully, but in French. I helped him express his thinking in English, and another friend, from Bolivia, to take his flowery Spanish and convert it to straightforward English. The support staff at the school were not world travelers, and if they became involved in the training it was always fun. For example, we had an exercise in which we practiced checking into a motel under a cover name. Not as easy as you might think. On that occasion I checked in, then turned to Marciel. “Boy, you’re black, you must be the bellboy. Take my bags up to my room.” He grabbed my bags, did a credible impression of Steppin Fetchit, and the support staff came to a sudden stop and just stared.
I learned real-world skills including elicitation, the art of getting information from someone without her/his knowledge. I already had some knowledge of it before hand but became quite practiced at it. All good things must come to an end, so following graduation we all went our separate ways. I went to Munich, Germany, where I encountered a close American community, the likes of which we had last seen in Berlin. That’s in the next chapter.
You mean the Ft. Meade in MD. not the town in Fl that used to be Ft. Meade.
I think you need to start these stories with more info for your non-military readers.
Ft. Meade--the one where you were--is probably not known to many. I advise everyone to know the forts and their purpose. To most they are opaque. I lived next to CENTCOM for years and 99% of people in Tampa had no idea...
This story reads like Hunter S. Thompson.
You make my back-to-back assignments as an 83F20 at Lawton, OK and Anchorage seem boring and trivial. But, it was really cold up North & we did a great job protecting the USA from the Evil Empire throughout my tour of duty. Happy Vet's Day, Vet!