11 

When the last police car had gone from my yard I wondered how long I could keep quiet about Joe and Kate.

One of the advantages of always telling all of the truth is that you never have to remember what you said. I was well past that point now, and not for the first time, since it’s not unusual for me to keep some knowledge to myself. Usually it’s just because some information doesn’t seem important, but sometimes it’s because revealing the whole truth might not be in my best interests or in the interests of someone I value. I try to avoid out-and-out lies, but when I do lie I rarely feel guilty about it. I would have lied about knowing where Anne Frank was hiding and not have lost a wink of sleep.

Most organizations, like most people, including me, tell mostly the truth most of the time. When the truth hurts, though, they ignore the issue, dance around it, tell half-truths and blatant lies, and attack their questioners to deflect attention from themselves. And there are certain organizations that will never tell you all of the truth unless they absolutely have to. Intelligence agencies, for instance. They hate bright lights.

I dislike and distrust secret organizations and official secret keepers. Tell me that a meeting or a decision or a policy is secret and I immediately suspect that the odor eaters are covering up a bad smell.

Still, right now I needed to know more about a couple of such agencies in particular and about U.S. intelligence operations in general. I knew that there were a lot of agencies and that the rivalries among them were legendary, but I needed to know more.

One of the two that interested me was Joe Begay’s agency; but unfortunately for me Joe had never really told me where he worked, so I didn’t know its name, if indeed it even existed. However, I did know who Samuel Arbuckle had worked for: the Defense Intelligence Agency, so I could start there.

All intelligence organizations being secretive by definition, I didn’t expect to get a lot of information about the DIA. However, one never knows until one noses, so I drove to John Skye’s house and sat down in front of our almost-brand-new computer. Zee was still at the hospital and the kids were at school, so I would have to do this on my own.

Fortunately for me, both Zee and the children were patient teachers, so even though I was a slow learner they had taught me how to take excursions into the Internet. I can’t do complex things there, but I can do simple ones, so when Google gave me the opportunity to search for a subject, I typed in “Defense Intelligence Agency” and hit “enter.”

And, lo! Up came a lot of information about the DIA, such as its origins, its organization, its purposes, its relationship to other government groups, and the assertion that it employed over seven thousand people. Seven thousand people!? No wonder my taxes were so high!

It didn’t mention Samuel Arbuckle as one of the seven thousand, however, so I wasn’t able to identify his role in the agency, and I wasn’t surprised when I failed to find anything that suggested that the DIA was ever involved with anything illegal. Heaven forbid.

I thought about Sam. The fact that he had carried his ID with him suggested that he wasn’t doing a chore that required him to deny his affiliation with his employer. That didn’t tell me much, though.

Did the DIA operate both at home and abroad? If it did, would it say so?

I left the DIA’s website and went back to Google. There I entered a search for “intelligence agencies.”

Bonanza again! There was so much information about intelligence agencies that I could have spent the rest of my life reading it. I gave it a couple of hours.

First, I read newsmagazine and newspaper reports about general problems in the intelligence business: the separation between foreign and domestic intelligence and the relationships between the intelligence gatherers, the interpreters of that intelligence, and the policy makers who made decisions based upon those interpretations. I read about disagreements between agencies, about withheld information, about the consequences of good intelligence, bad intelligence, and improperly interpreted intelligence.

I read about which agencies specialized in particular kinds of intelligence and of their fondness for acronyms. I read about SIGINT, HUMINT, and OSINT and learned that the first referred to signals intelligence, such as cryptography, that the second was an acronym for intelligence gained from human sources, and that the last referred to so-called open intelligence, gained from sources such as newspapers, books, radio, and television. Right now I was apparently involved in a bit of OSINT of my own.

I thought of the ancient joke about government intelligence being an oxymoron.

I then went to official government websites and read that the United States intelligence community (known by the cognoscenti as “the CI”) was currently defined by Executive Order 12333, and that it included dozens of separate agencies that employed tens of thousands of people, most of whom were doing pretty straightforward office work but some of whom were doing other, undescribed jobs.

I found and read Executive Order 12333. It was fourteen pages of small print and though most of it was mundane, some parts were more interesting. Paragraph 2.11, for example, prohibited IC personnel or others acting on behalf of the U.S. government from engaging in, or conspiring to engage in, assassination.

I wondered how the actions of Joe Begay’s trade mission meshed with that directive. Not too well, at first glance, but maybe he and his associates had just helped some other anti-Bunny group to do the actual dirty work.

Paragraph 2.12, however, seemed to forbid any IC agency from participating or requesting any person to undertake activities forbidden by this order.

Hmmmm.

I came to paragraph 3.4(h), which defined “special activities.” The definition of these was “activities conducted in support of national foreign policy objectives abroad which are planned and executed so that the role of the United States Government is not apparent or acknowledged publicly, and functions in support of such activities.”

Hmmmm, again. An official provision that allowed the CI to do stuff they didn’t want the public to know about. No surprise there, if you remembered CIA activities in Central and South America. And Joe’s trade mission also fit the description of a special activity. Whenever official agencies don’t want you to know what they do, you should probably get a clothespin for your nose.

The prohibition against assassination seemed to have been ignored more than once by the IC, and since Sam had died in my yard, I had a personal interest in violence involving the DIA.

I exited from Executive Order 12333 and after a couple of stumbles through the Web discovered a site that informed me that back in 2001, efforts had been made in Congress to eliminate the prohibition against assassinations. A House resolution that became known as the Terrorist Elimination Act would have legalized political assassinations by the CI. I couldn’t find any confirmation that the resolution had passed, but I also couldn’t find any that it hadn’t.

Interestinger and interestinger. Zee’s fears were apparently not wide of the mark. We were doing the same bad things the bad guys were doing to us. From some recess in my brain I drew a memory of an early American intelligence official who was even more naive than I was. He was said to have been furious when he discovered that efforts were being made to break another country’s codes and to have exclaimed, “Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail!” There were probably not too many gentlemen in the CI these days, and it was probably a good thing.

I was glad I’d gotten out of the Boston PD when I did. Peacekeeping was a rough business and seemed to be getting rougher.

The Homeland Security Act came to mind, so I checked that out. The document was so long that I wondered if anyone had actually read it all. Certainly I didn’t. I did note a few things, however. The paragraph headed “Construction: Severability” seemed to say that if any provision of the act should be held to be invalid or unenforceable, it should nevertheless be construed so as to give it maximum effect permitted by law, unless it was utterly invalid or unenforceable, in which case it should be omitted from the act.

Either this concept was murky or my brain was. Maybe both. I skimmed on down through pages of governmentese before giving up and calling it quits. Someone once said that one requirement of research was a love of drudgery. My talent in the field was obviously thin.

One thing was clear, though: the Homeland Security Department was a gigantic bureaucracy at least the equal in size and power of the incredibly huge CI. No wonder people who perceived themselves as humanists and defenders of civil liberties and open government were getting nervous. But then, such people have always been nervous Nellies, according to their critics.

Come back, Cassandra! I’ll believe you this time in spite of the gods!

But neither Cassandra nor Maat appeared, so I got off the Net and phoned Joe Begay.