An Army Intelligence Warrant Officer Chapter V
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 Ollie 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, except that I learned of a new item developed by the Army. It defeated everything the Soviets had. So, I arranged for them to get a bunch of test results showing it didn’t work very well. Then I went to the Chief of Naval Operations and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, who agreed to stand down their own development efforts and help fund deployment of the new stuff. It worked.
Sometimes You’re the Windshield, sometimes you’re the Bug
In 1991 we sent twenty thousand Marines in a collection of ships to sit off the coast of Kuwait. The Iraqis were using Soviet anti-ship missiles. They fired on all the ships but never hit one. The feint of using Marines for a mock invasion from the sea wound up working.
I developed several other schemes but am still prohibited from discussing them. The CIA refused to come on board with one in particular. Later, I learned that they had stolen it, modified it, and caused it to fail.
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.
One of the things I took with me was that Warrant Officers are viewed often as glorified enlisted members. The only real analogy in the US military is the Navy LDO: Limited Duty Officer. They hold a rank from ensign on up, but cannot be assigned to command. The same applies to Army Warrant Officers. What differentiates the Intelligence Warrant Officer from others is that he is typically on a first-name basis with everyone from Sergeant to General.
More School
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 was 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 have to 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.
Finally in the Field
On arrival in Germany, I was assigned to Munich, and traveled throughout the country. I recruited a fellow who had access to the gun-running business. From him I learned about a plot to overthrow the Philippine government. I recruited a fellow from Slovakia who located a Soviet-gauge railroad 150 km further West than we had known. And, I turned a base-area spotter into an active agent providing first-person reporting about a variety of topics. She was on the faculty of several medical institutions, and I attended one of them part-time for four years, and actually started a residency in psychiatry. I was in no danger of being unleashed on an unsuspecting public; I had to pass four rotations, including surgery, to be licensed as an individual practitioner. Given my lifetime clumsiness, there was no chance I would pass surgery. In my first practice Tracheotomy I decapitated the dummy.
After four years of touring West Germany, I left as the wall was coming down. I learned several things from my peripatetic career, seeming to lurch from one calling to another:
- Don’t worry about losing your job; just reinvent yourself.
- If you aren’t learning where you are, go elsewhere.
- Once you’re making enough to live on, the rest is just a status symbol.
- Everything you learn will eventually be useful.
Nowadays, compared to me, Forrest Gump is a genius.
This reminds me of the movie character Forrest Gump. Preposterously always in the historically right place for a photo op/story.