The Memorial Wall is one of the most haunting memorials I have ever seen in the U.S. federal government—more unsettling than any military cemetery I have visited, from Gettysburg to Normandy. Below the famous anonymous stars themselves sits a book that explains the year each star was added and, sometimes, offers the name of the Agency case officer or analyst killed. Some stars—even some stars going back decades, to the height of the Cold War—do not have a name that accompanies them.
It is sobering to realize that each of those stars on that wall represent hundreds of men and women who had the courage to do what I could not bring myself to do: leave their friends and family and sign up for one of the most lonely, demanding jobs in the U.S. government—all with the knowledge that if they were caught, they faced not only torture and a gruesome death but the prospect that their families might never learn how or why they died.
That’s why the Agency employees with whom I spoke over the weekend were appalled by the president’s speech—that he would cheapen the most sacred space at the Agency, that their leadership would allow it to happen, and that some of their co-workers would disgrace themselves and the Agency by raucously applauding lines from a stump speech.
It’s tough to place too much blame on the Agency’s leadership: Their position with the new president is tenuous, at best. The Agency needs some very important things from the president. It needs him to take his daily briefing, and to take seriously—and keep quiet about—the clandestine operations for which the Agency puts the lives of Americans at grave danger. There is little reason for optimism thus far that the president will deliver on either requirement.
But while it’s tough for anyone to say no to the boss—especially when placed at such a disadvantage up front—the Agency’s leadership is going to encounter a staff today that is livid with the way in which the speech was delivered. The fact the speech was given on a Saturday, when only those Agency employees most enthusiastic about the new president would come in off their weekends, will also be a point of dissatisfaction. For those who weren’t there or for the leaders sitting in the front row, some may feel they were made to look a fool, seeing their Agency turned into another campaign rally and hearing their professionalism questioned—yet again—by the media.
Quite apart from the Agency, though, all Americans should have been worried by the substance of what the president said. I have spent much of my adult life in the national-security institutions of this country and am inclined to consider them largely benign. But even I was unnerved by the president going before the world’s most powerful intelligence service and declaring war on the media.
Think about this, for one moment: The president stood before an organization that runs innumerable clandestine, deniable operations and called out, by name, a journalist who had displeased him before a laughing, clapping crowd. You do not have to be a member of the American Civil Liberties Union to be scared by that.
You also don’t have to be one of the several thousand Americans deployed to Iraq to understand how the line about taking Iraq’s oil will go down there. Trump’s rhetoric along these lines was a problem when he was a candidate. Now that he is the president, Iran’s militias and their media will have a field day, putting the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk.
No comments:
Post a Comment