Clear and Present Danger

Ryan didn't know what to say. Still short of forty, he now had one of the premiere intelligence posts in the world. As a practical matter, he'd had it for several months - even for several years, some might say - but now it was official, and somehow that made it different. People would now come to him for opinions and judgments. That had been going on for a long time, but he'd always had someone to fall back on. Now he would not. He'd present his information to Judge Moore and await final judgment, but from this moment the responsibility for being right was his. Before, he'd presented opinions and options to his superiors. Beginning now, he'd present policy decisions directly to the ultimate decision-makers. The increase in responsibility, though subtle, was vast.

"Need- to-know still applies," Ritter pointed out.

"Of course," Ryan said.

"I'll tell Nancy and your department heads," Moore said. "James ginned up a letter I'll read. Here's your copy."

Ryan stood to take it.

"I believe you have work to do, Dr. Ryan," Moore said.

"Yes, sir." Jack turned and left the room. He knew that he should have felt elated, but instead felt trapped. He thought he knew why.

"Too soon, Arthur," Ritter said after Jack had left.

"I know what you're saying, Bob, but we can't have Intelligence go adrift just because you don't want him in on SHOWBOAT. We'll keep him out of that, at least isolated from what Operations is doing. He'll have to get in on the information that we're developing. For Christ's sake, his knowledge of finance will be useful to us. He just doesn't have to know how the information gets to us. Besides, if the President says 'go' on this, and he gets approval from The Hill, we're home free."

"So when do you go to The Hill?"

"I have four of them coming here tomorrow afternoon. We're invoking the special- and hazardous-operations rule."

SAHO was an informal codicil of the oversight rules. While Congress had the right under law to oversee all intelligence operations, in a case two years earlier, a leak from one of the select committees had caused the death of a CIA station chief and a high-ranking defector. Instead of going public, Judge Moore had approached the members of both committees and gotten written agreement that in special cases the chairman and co-chairman of each committee would alone be given access to the necessary information. It was then their responsibility to decide if it should be shared with the committees as a whole. Since members of both political parties were present, it had been hoped that political posturing could be avoided. In fact, Judge Moore had created a subtle trap for all of them. Whoever tried to decide that information had to be disseminated ran the risk of being labeled as having a political agenda. Moreover, the higher selectivity of the four SAHO-cleared members had already created an atmosphere of privilege that mitigated directly against spreading the information out. So long as the operation was not politically sensitive, it was a virtual guarantee that Congress would not interfere. The remarkable thing was that Moore had managed to get the committees to agree to this. But bringing the widow and children of the dead station chief to the executive hearings hadn't hurt one bit. It was one thing to carp abstractly about the majesty of law, quite another to have to face the results of a mistake - the more so if one of them was a ten-year-old girl without a father. Political theater was not solely the domain of elected officials.

"And the Presidential Finding?" Ritter asked.

"Already done. 'It is determined that drug-smuggling operations are a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. The President authorizes the judicious use of military force in accord with established operational guidelines to protect our citizens,' et cetera ."

"The political angle is the one I don't like."

Moore chuckled. "Neither will the people from The Hill. So we have to keep it all secret, don't we? If the President goes public to show that he's 'really doing something,' the opposition will scream that he's playing politics. If the opposition burns the operation, then the President can do the same thing. So both sides have a political interest in keeping this one under wraps. The election-year politics work in our favor. Clever fellow, that Admiral Cutter."

"Not as clever as he thinks," Ritter snorted. "But who is?"

"Yeah. Who is? You know, it's a shame that James never got in on this."

"Gonna miss him," Ritter agreed. "God, I wish there was something I could take him, something to make it a little easier."

"I know what you mean," Judge Moore agreed. "Sooner or later, Ryan has to get in on this."

"I don't like it."