“We have a small in-house assessments staff who see everything that comes in and then draft our estimates — or analyses, as you call them. We often call on someone from the Foreign Office to do the first draft. Depending upon the topic, we even ask a don or two from Oxbridge — all perfectly vetted, of course. Then it’s a free-forall, with the Defense Ministry, Foreign Office, Home Office, SIS, et cetera, all having their whack at it. Finally, it comes before the JIC, and we polish it off and send it through the wall.
”Rusty frowned at the last part. “Through the wall?”
“Oh, yes, literally.” Sir Dennis stood and walked toward the back of his long, thin office. “I am not high-powered like your Director of National Intelligence, but when I wear the hat of Intelligence Coordinator, my number-one client is the Prime Minister.” He pulled a key from his vest and gave a shove to a bookcase on rollers. Behind it was a door, which he proceeded to unlock and throw open. “Ta da!” Sir Dennis exclaimed. “Number Ten.” He then disappeared through the door and could be heard saying, “Penning-Smith here. Closing back up.” No alarms seemed to have gone off, no electronics appeared to be involved.
When Sir Dennis Penning-Smith reappeared, MacIntyre was still laughing, “You mean you have a secret door that brings you around the corner to Downing Street? What if the Prime Minister is in his silk pajamas?”
“Not to worry,” Sir Dennis assured him while locking the door and easily moving the bookcase back into place. “They live on the upper floors. The point of this little magic trick, however, Russell, is to be seen by the others around town as having direct access to the PM whenever I want it. I have done that act for every member of the JIC, one at a time.” He clapped his hands to shed any dust and sat back down in the Queen Anne — style reading chair.
“I do a little magic myself,” Rusty said, smiling. “But it’s strictly on a more amateur level. I do agree with you about the value of open-source intelligence,” he went on, trying to get the conversation back on track. “In fact, we’ve just given out a major contract for an automated system of collection, web-crawling, and cataloguing. If that works, we’ll be glad to share it with you, of course.”
“Automated crawlers, well…We may have different views of open source, Russell. Tell you a story about our mutual friends, the Israelis. They had a problem once with Libya. Haven’t we all? Seems old Muammar was planning to buy missiles or something from Korea or somewhere, doesn’t matter, and the Israeli Prime Minister wanted to know right away when the bloody things arrived.” Sir Dennis was warming to his own tale.
“So they assemble their Israeli version of the JIC and task each agency to find out. Next week the Air Force reports that it has flown reconnaissance flights over Tripoli harbor and seen nothing new. The Navy intelligence people have stationed a submarine off the coast and have slipped into the port for a peep, and nothing. Mossad suborned Qaddafi’s tailor, some queen from the Via Veneto, and lined one of Muammar’s flashy robe things with a transmitter, but all they heard was Beatles music. The White Album, by the by.
“Finally, Russell, the little man from the Foreign Office intelligence staff, Avi something, says, ‘The ship from Pyongyang arrived last Wednesday, unloaded at Pier Twelve, and set sail Saturday.’ How do you know, they all ask. ‘I called the harbormaster and asked him,’ the little bugger says. That, you see, is open source, no crawly worms involved.” Penning-Smith smiled and sat back.
MacIntyre was chuckling. “You may have a point there, Sir Dennis. So what concerns you now? What are you looking at?”
The Joint Intelligence Committee Chair stood again and opened doors that revealed a blackboard, on which he, or someone, had written the plan for the first quarter in red, green, and white chalk. “Next up is ‘Whither Islamyah?’ Who is going to emerge from the Shura Council to run the place, and what will he want to do?
“Then, staying in the region, what’s the latest in ‘Iran-Iraq Relations’? Can we figure out seams and pressure points so that we can rend apart this entente cordiale between the two great Shiite nations?
“Moving east, the ever-popular ‘Heroin Production in Afghanistan,’ which is way up again. How do we stop it from showing up in Brixton?
“To the Orient, ‘Chinese Economic Trends.’ Can they continue to plow money into military modernization and keep every little Chan happy with modern gizmos?
“Then, oops, you shouldn’t have seen this one, ‘America’s Next Steps: Learning from Failures?’—an examination of how policy problems with Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi will affect nearto midterm decision making in Washington. I should, of course, ask you that,” Penning-Smith said, shutting the doors to the blackboard.
“Seriously? I don’t know if we are learning from failure,” MacIntyre said, not contesting the premise. “Yes, we have had a bad start to the twenty-first century. The Iraq War did not result in the people there loving us and did produce this continuing low-grade Sunni insurgency against the Shi’a government, which does seem more and more aligned with Tehran. At least we are finally out of there.
“On Tehran, we could never tell when they went nuclear or where they store them, but we are pretty confident now that they slipped that past us successfully while we perseverated in Baghdad.
“Afghanistan is probably best described as again a borderline failed state, decentralized, but the regime in Kabul is clearly toeing the line of the fundamentalist coalition in Pakistan, which in turn is overtly nuclear-armed. It’s that coalition of military and clergy in Islamabad that worries me most. They’ve stopping hunting al Qaeda, won’t talk to India, and seem to be in bed with that new gang in Saudi Arabia.
“And then there is Saudi Arabia. We rode that horse too long. Didn’t have our own sources in the country to tell us that the opposition to the Sauds had grown, organized, and coalesced. So now it’s Islamyah, its future too early to tell. I am convinced that if we are not hostile to them, we can still keep them from becoming a threat. Their revolution is still young, malleable. I would love to see what your estimate ends up saying about who will emerge from the pack to lead it,” MacIntyre concluded, holding his two palms open. “Some of these guys were once al Qaeda, or clergy, but most were reformers, democrats, or just disgruntled bureaucrats and military fed up with the stagnation and inbreeding of the House of Saud.
“Yes,” Sir Dennis said, checking his red Economist Diary appointment book. “Yes, indeed, lots of policy problems. You know, Russell, you are my last scheduled thing today. What do you say we discuss this over a wee dram?”
After a short ride through the traffic of Trafalgar Square, the Cabinet Office driver dropped them off at what looked like a Florentine palace on a quiet dead-end street.
After depositing their overcoats, they ascended the Grand Staircase together, MacIntyre trying not to appear a country rube as he gaped at the portraits, the chandeliers, and the Greek frieze in the library. “Yes, stole it from the Temple of Apollo. The Greeks want it back, the buggers.” As they sat down in armchairs by a window, Sir Dennis touched a large red button. “Will you do with a Balvenie, Russell?” he asked as a bookcase slid aside, revealing a butler’s pantry and a butler, carrying six glasses on a tray. Three of them had water. None of them had ice.
Smiling at another door pretending to be a bookcase, MacIntyre said, “Next time you’re in the States, Sir Dennis, I’ll have to take you to a castle I belong to in Los Angeles. It has a number of false doors, too.”