The time I met Bobby Ray Inman.
Every time I write about military or national intelligence I always feel I should toss in this pointless anecdote I have about the time I met Bobby Ray Inman. I remember it just like it was 25 years ago. But first one more thing about the heart of the previous matter. What can a grand and a half of manpower and a billion dollars do for you? Run system and program analysis, to determine the quality of the collection and analysis? Identify and acquire the communication and data management equipment needed to at least physically allow true IC information sharing? Bust enough balls so that you can actually make decisions on what information it is you need, and buy the big ticket black boxes that will collect it? Or, again, to be a production unit for artificial intelligence? I have trouble visualizing what a thousand people can accomplish. UMCP libraries has between three and four hundred on staff, and we are an agency in a coordinating milieu. We share our opac database with all of the state's sixteen other college libraries. Double that personnel figure to encompass the stake-holders of this database. If, say, a national entity were to walk away from a portion of their mission charter, if the Library of Congress were to suddenly give up doing serial and series authority work, how many people here and elsewhere would it take to reproduce that coordinating functionality? But of course LC would never do that and my friend Robert would not have to circulate an online petition to keep them from doing that. One day I had to deliver some documents to the office of someone named Sumner J. Shaprio. He wasn't in. but some other men were there. A Captain, his EA, who I knew by sight. A man named Burkhalter, I think, and a man I didn't recognize. This man reached out and started to take the packet the documents were in away from me. Saying "Oh I'll take that for you, sailor." I snatched it back out of his hand. Why? Well, it was an eyes-only sort of thing, and he wasn't Sumner J. Shapiro. The other two men froze when I did this. The man in front of me, who was Bobby Ray Inman, just looked puzzled as I stood there clutching the documents now with both hands. Finally he said with a light chuckle "Its ok, I think I'm cleared for it." About that point the tunnel vision I was afflicted with started to subside, and I begain to re-observe my surroundings. I saw the four gold stripes going around his sleeve, and further, the one thick gold band that was there with it. "Say", I thought to myself, "this here is a four star Admiral. Those guys can be kinda touchy." The Captain who was looking a little pale at this point said: "just give him the documents, please." Naval officers, they are so polite. My job being done, I went back to my office, hearing someone say as I left "who was that guy?" I don't know what they thought the difficulty was. My job after all wasn't just to walk around and hand such documents to the first stranger I saw. Moral of this story: I've never known what to do with the ever-present disparity between my understanding of duty and things, and other peoples'.
11:43:36 PM  ;;
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