Intel Wars by Matthew M. Aid

Author:Matthew M. Aid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press

CHAPTER 6

Men of Zeal

Homeland Security and Domestic Terrorism

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

—U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICE LOUIS D. BRANDEIS (1928)

On most days, the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing of the White House hums with activity. On weekdays there is almost always a meeting taking place in the Sit Room’s famous conference room. President Obama comes down to the Sit Room several times a week to chair National Security Council meetings with all of his senior national security advisers, as well as to chair the weekly meetings of his homeland security and Afghanistan-Pakistan policy teams.

Unlike how it is portrayed in popular television shows like The West Wing, the Sit Room’s windowless conference room is cramped and somewhat claustrophobic. The room’s wooden conference table can seat only a dozen or so people, and not particularly comfortably. Complaints about the cold in the Sit Room are legion because the system is set to keep the room at near-arctic temperatures.

It used to be much worse, before the advent of laptop computers and powerful air-conditioning systems. President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, hated the Sit Room’s conference room, describing it in less than glowing terms as a “tiny, uncomfortable, low-ceilinged, windowless room.”

During the weekly National Security Council principals’ meetings, the president sits at the head of the conference table with an ever-present can of Diet Coke in front of him. Vice President Joe Biden sits on his right, usually reading through a pile of unread policy papers while sipping on a bottle of water. Until he was fired in October 2010, Obama’s national security adviser, retired General James L. Jones, or Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, sat on the president’s left. Against either wall of the conference room are rows of leather chairs that can seat up to twenty junior staffers and note takers. On most occasions, the large video screens at the far end of the conference room display the visages of foreign government officials or senior American military commanders thousands of miles away who have been patched in so that they can participate in the conference via secure video teleconferencing technology.

But the Sit Room is much more than just a snazzy high-tech conference room. Since it was created back in the summer of 1961 in what used to be the White House bowling alley, the Sit Room’s principal function has been to be the president’s eyes and ears on the world, a combination of watch center and intelligence fusion facility, whose mission is to provide the president with up-to-the-minute intelligence and alerts of significant events taking place around the globe, as well as with secure communications allowing him and his senior staff to talk securely to cabinet secretaries, military commanders, and the nation’s top intelligence officials anywhere around the world, twenty-four hours a day.*

The Sit Room has its own staff of thirty senior intelligence officers and military personnel seconded by the CIA and other branches of the U.

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