Murder at the Opera - Margaret Truman [105]
Mackensie and Annabel Smith were another matter.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
This morning was not unlike most other mornings for Joseph Browning III.
He awoke before sunrise and took a cup of coffee and the newspaper to the small brick patio outside the kitchen of the Alexandria, Virginia, home he shared with Christine, his wife of thirty-two years. He’d been a Washington bureaucrat for twenty-seven of those years. Possessing a freshly minted Yale law degree, he’d gravitated to the nation’s capital as a young attorney for the Department of the Interior before progressing through a succession of jobs, each with a higher GS rating and increasingly involving intelligence functions—State, Justice, the FAA, and now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Cynics might view his career as one in which he was incapable of holding a steady job. But Joe knew better. Surviving changing administrations was a talent unto itself, and Browning took pride in still being gainfully employed after seeing a string of presidents join the ranks of the unemployed.
The summons to assume a post at the newly created DHS represented, at least to family and friends, an important step up in his career. The safety and security of the United States of America, and the fate of its citizens, necessarily took center stage after 9/11. Being in the forefront of protecting the republic would be a heady experience, one that he’d attack with purpose and dedication.
But as DHS morphed into a larger and more unwieldy entity, assimilating twenty-two separate intelligence agencies under its umbrella, he found his enthusiasm waning. It wasn’t that DHS’s stated mission of protecting America had dimmed. Far from it. It was the way that mission was becoming increasingly compromised. This took some of the spark out of getting up in the morning, donning a cape and shield, and doing battle with the terrorists who’d so callously wiped out more than three thousand innocent American lives.
He’d ended up second in command of DHS’s Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate (IAIPD), which was to coordinate interagency counterterrorism efforts with members of the “Big 15,” the fifteen major agencies comprising the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)—the FBI; the CIA; the Defense Department’s National Security Agency (NSA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); the State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR); the intelligence agencies of the army, navy, air force, and marines; as well as lesser known, shadowy, and seldom understood intelligence agencies, such as the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA), and the intelligence community’s internal overseer, the Defense Security Service (DSS). Add to that jumble of acronyms the newly formed Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), a CIA task force of analysts with plans to integrate with the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) and the FBI’s counterterrorism division; plus the latest, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX)—and Lord knew how many others that had sprung up under the now wider national security umbrella (even Browning didn’t know, and he was an insider). Intelligence reports were modified for distribution to local law enforcement agencies around the country, including Washington’s police department.
This had spawned another acronym among Browning and his colleagues, spoken only in private: BON, “Bureau of Noncoordination
The truth was, Browning had learned that, despite all the promises, all the lofty rhetoric, and all the potential of creating a Department of Homeland Security as the first line of defense against further terrorist attacks—and despite the