In her first orientation meetings down at the Farm, she had had the notion beat into her that it was not her job to offer ideas. It was her function to be tasked by “downtown.” It was there in the Constitution: the elected people, not the civil servants, make policy. “It is not ours to ask, it is ours to answer.”
That was the CIA line, and Betsy came out of the Farm believing it. But as time went on, she remembered Larkin Schoendienst’s take on it: “The people who know the most are not allowed to ask questions—or even to make suggestions. The least common denominator sets the standards. Just wait until you see Washington, Betsy—these goddamn car salesmen and small-town lawyers come into town every two years not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground, and this enormously sophisticated and powerful and dangerous system is at their mercy. The Agency distorts information to fit the half-assed policies they scheme up.”
She called up all the visa records from Immigration, combed through them, picking out the student visas, identified all visas granted to South and Southwest Asian students, and then fed the results into a cartographic system, making a 3-D plot of the information. The result was a picture of the continental United States with the topography exactly reversed: the coasts were low plains, and the Great Plains states were studded with precipitous crags, centered on places like Elton, New Mexico; East Lansing, Michigan; Stillwater, Oklahoma; Wapsipinicon, Iowa.
She knew most of those universities well; they were the kinds of places where she and her fellow agro-Americans tended to apply for grad school. Narrowing the search to cover Iraqi students only, and running the cartographic program again, she got a similar result, with fewer and starker peaks: Auburn, Colorado State, Texas A&M, Eastern Iowa.
During numerous blowing-off-steam sessions over cases of bad zinfandel on the balcony of their apartment, Cassie and Betsy had arrived at conclusions similar to Larkin Schoendienst’s. Cassie, from her job at the Hoover Building, and Betsy, at the Agency, each had access to certain information that convinced her that she actually knew what was going on, at least within the confines of her designated compartment. They were sworn not to divulge specifics to each other. But they agreed that at any one time there were in town at least five people, desk officers six levels down from the President, who actually knew what was going on.
There was no lack of information. The combined forces of the intelligence community—with all its spectacular satellites, sneaky HUMINT heads, NSA intercepts, independent contractors such as Dr. Schoendienst, the never-flagging torrent of governmental studies and statistics from national and international bodies, privileged information from multinational firms, and the best mainframes and libraries in the world—provided all the information that anybody needed.
There was no lack of smarts among the analysts, either. But the six-level editorial process so distorted what they wrote that several times Betsy could not recognize items that were attributed to her in the President’s Daily Briefing.
The problem was the managers. Not for them the open struggle of ideas in the marketplace of policy. It was turf politics, building alliances not to further the general good of the body politic, but to cement advantage to gain entrance to the exalted level of the Senior Executive Service Corps, to use whatever administration that was there to feather their own nests—not to solve problems, but to use problems to strengthen their position.
“Watch out for the iguanas,” Larkin Schoendienst had told her. Betsy hadn’t understood the reference until recently. But now she saw iguanas all over Washington, people who sat sunning on their rocks, destroying anything or anybody who came within tongue’s reach, but doing nothing.
So now she was a branch chief (interim), working directly beneath Spector. But her higher status wasn’t helping her catch any bad guys, especially since Millikan had convinced the President that by all means we had to prop up Saddam. To the contrary, she’d spent much of the last month out of town, down at the Farm or out at Airlie House, attending courses on how to be a branch chief.
Once back in the office, she found that at least half her days were taken up by meetings of one kind or another and the other half by paperwork and editing the work of her subordinates. The message was not lost on her: someone had decided that she couldn’t get into any more trouble as long as she was buried in administrative tedium.
She got the worst of both worlds—because she was only interim, she received no pay increase. Her only break was that King would not do her yearly evaluation. She encountered unspoken hostility from all of King’s old friends who had learned of her perfidy. Still, she enjoyed the change from soybeans, and a casual observer would conclude that she had adjusted well to the shift from worker bee to manager.