Designation Gold

by Richard Marcinko

  There was an internal memo (it was stamped “unclassified with removal of Tab A”) from the technology directorate of the Defense Technology Security Administration, properly acronymed DTSA, but pronounced and written by most folks at the Pentagon as “DITSA.” The memo, which had been written by the chief of the Strategic Trade Technology Division, recounted an eyewitness in an unspecified Middle Eastern country stating that he had seen, during a visit to a metallurgical plant, a metal-casting furnace being unloaded from a shipping container bearing French and Swiss markings. The eyewitness stated that the furnace had “a parenthetical legend underneath indicating it had a charge capacity of 25 kilograms and a vacuum capability of 10-5 BAR.” The last five words had been highlighted. And below, in Paul’s handwriting, was the phrase “Dual use—nuke refinement—embargoed IL 1080 (d).”

  Okay, tadpole, what do you make of all of these fragments?

  They make no sense at all. Master Marcinko-san. It is simply a confusing collection of documents, collected randomly, and stuck in a file for convenience sake.

  Ah, tadpole, let us go back to the ancients. The Ch’i dialogue described by the great warrior T’ai Li’ang in the seminal Li’ang Hsi-Huey asks, “How can reality be known?” The answer, responds the Master, is simple: “To succeed in The Way is to know all things. The significance of the pebble is no less than that of the boulder. Reality is what is.”

  You are giving me gibberish and pseudowarrior psychobabble bullshit. Master Marcinko-san.

  If you believe that, tadpole, you are unworthy pond scum and you have no right to be in my temple. Now listen—and learn.

  Item: the fragment of waybill I found at the dacha mentioned France and Switzerland. There were French and Swiss markings on the container mentioned in the DTSA memo. Happenstance? Coincidence?

  Item: Paul, a submariner whose degree at Annapolis had been in nuclear engineering, believed the material mentioned in the DITSA memo was embargoed nuclear dual-use technology, which meant the furnace could be used for either commercial or military purposes.

  Item: the news magazine clip mentioned accelerometers—another nuclear-weapons industry device. Happenstance? Coincidence?

  Item: the half dozen more-than-a-year-old newspaper clips in the files showed that the Russian Mafiya had already been caught trying to smuggle nuclear weapons to the West. Paul was making notes and organization charts on the mafiya. Happenstance? Coincidence?

  Item: Like most SpecWarriors, I am good at breaking into places. My training allows me to come and go virtually at will—and leave no tracks. I only leave tracks when I am probing a target and want to see how the security forces react. So the DIA memo detailing the incursions at NATO installations told me that somebody was nosing around—and probing the readiness of the security force. The State messages told me the same thing: somebody—maybe the mafiya, maybe the Russkie military, or maybe a combination of the two—was testing our counterintelligence capabilities (e.g., the false flag recruitments), probing our security apparatus (e.g., the incursions at U.S. and NATO facilities), and eliminating anyone who discovered that this-all was part of a coordinated effort (e.g., murdering Paul). Now here is a lesson for all of you aspiring SpecWarriors out there: you generally do not test, probe, and kill unless you are about to go on a major offensive.

  Now all of the above, when taken into consideration with what I’m about to tell you, made me nervous. What am I going to tell you? It is that the Russkies had taken a huge step backward in the most recent parliamentary elections. Remember? The Communists took more than 20 percent of the vote, the ultranationalists got another 11 percent, and the fringe parties—the real crazies—received 6 percent. Coalesced, that comes to 37 percent of the Duma. The progressives were running scared these days—and they were making concessions. So, I had a troubled and instinctual premonition that these probes were neither random nor unplanned but part of a bigger, covert scheme that Paul had somehow uncovered a part of.

  Why? Because Paul had understood the often ambiguous dynamics of this convoluted, contradictory, confusing country as well as anybody. Moreover, the simple fact that he had put all of these seemingly miscellaneous fragments in one manila folder told me that he was looking at them as parts of a whole.

  And tonight, I get to add the Air France waybill to Paul’s folder. Why? Because I think it belongs there. Said document tells me that there are concrete French and Swiss connections—the Swiss bank Lasalle; the Paris-based company called Lantos & Cie. And, given the evidence already in the folder, it means that the equipment therein listed—widgets whose applications I have no idea about—is probably going to be similar to the dual-use widgets Paul wrote about.

  Okay, okay—I hear you out there. You’re asking me what it all means.

  Answer: I don’t know yet. But if you know me, you know that I’m gonna find out. My friend and his family were killed because of it.

  I eased into the room, turned on the single bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, dropped my weapons on the bed, and started to pull off my still-damp (and thoroughly frigid) clothes when I saw a small pile of messages, all of them, I noted, marked URGENT or MOST URGENT, sitting on the small, shabby table in the small, shabby third-floor room I shared with Machinist’s Mate First Class Stevie Wonder, who groaned, rolled over, and looked upon me with a nasty expression.

  Ah, yes. You ask, perceptive readers that you are, why the old Rogue Warrior was residing in a small, shabby hotel room. I shall tell you. We were here because the embassy’s acting deputy assistant sphincter to the acting assistant deputy colon to the acting chief administrative asshole in charge of housing had stashed my guys and me in a small, shabby, fourth-class hotel, located just off the twelve-lane-wide Garden Ring Road, a twenty-minute walk from the huge mustard (or puke, depending on your philosophical stance) and white U.S. Embassy compound.

  Now, there are guest quarters aplenty inside that walled compound. In the heyday of the Cold War, nobody wanted official delegations staying at Moscow’s hotels, where they were at the mercy of KGB eavesdropping, honey traps—those were the legendary Soviet sex enticements, targeted at visiting businessmen, politicos, and military attachés—and other nefarious activities. And when I say eavesdropping, I’m being diplomatic, if you catch my drift. I mean, we’re not talking about your everyday radio transmitter in the flower vase or the high-frequency tap on the telephone. I’m talking about impertinent, rude, surly bugs here. Cameras in the showers to catch you whacking off. Cameras above the beds to catch you in flagrante delicto (which, those of you who read Green Team and Task Force Blue know, means flagrant pussy licting). And microphones everywhere—cars, trains, elevators, hallways—you name it.

  Here’s another piece of Cold War trivia for you folks out there. The KGB used to position mikes next to the urinals in public bathrooms at the hotels where platoons of diplomats stayed during the big ministerial sessions, and also in all the pissoirs at the Foreign Ministry building. Why? Because when diplomats take their drain-the-lizard breaks during negotiations at the Metropol, the Intourist, or the Rossiya hotels, or head for the head at the Foreign Ministry, they tend to (a) go in pairs, and (b) they tend to forget all about OPSEC, and whisper secrets whilst they whizz.

  That ain’t all, folks. If a real high-ranking VIP showed up, the KGB even bugged the Johns—sluiced the water off the toilets so that fecal and urinalysis studies could be performed. Well, to be honest, that behavior was common practice all over the world. Christians in Action did the same thing when Nikita Khrushchev stayed at a Washington hotel back in the sixties. And what did they learn by their tough shit-detection? I can now reveal they discovered that he needed more fiber in his diet.

  But I’m digressing. The bottom line here is that the embassy of the United States of America has ample guest space for official visitors. Currently, in fact, more than a dozen class-B rooms (for guests at or below FS-I or GS-13), three class-As (for your FS-Is and GS-14s and 15s), and two ministerial-grade town hou
se suites were vacant.

  So, why is it that we didn’t stay there, you want to know. Well, the answer is that they—they being the diplomats—obviously didn’i want us Navy security types around. They, you sec, wear bespoke suits, carry hundred-dollar pens (with which they write lots of polysyllabic, fifty-dollar words), and have manicured nails. We dress in early prole, tend to say fuck a lot, make our notes using stubby pencils, and do manual labor with our calloused hands. Allowing us accommodations inside the compound would have been like the Romanoffs inviting a bunch of grimy serfs from Narishkino sur Volga to stay at the: Winter Palace

  Still fuzzy or confused? Then let me give you some additional background. And as the old chiefs at Organized Chicken Shit (which is how I refer to Officers Candidate School or OCSI used to tell us incipient ensigns, do not skip this material, became—is you will see—it has a good chance of becoming reasonably essential as the novel progresses.

  Okay. If there is any caste system more insidious, noxious, or demeaning than the Navy’s caste system, it is the State Department’s caste system. In the Navy, there are the Annapolis grads—ring-knockers we call ’em—and there is everybody else. If you didn’t go to the Academy, you are at an automatic disadvantage when it comes to assignments, promotions, and other career enhancements. Annapolis grads—think of ’em as Naval Academy Mafiosi—always look after one another. They do it whether they were friends at the Academy, or not. They do it simply because they are all part of the same ring-knocking fraternity, and they consider the rest of the world nothing but pond scum. That means outsiders like me are put at the end of a long, long line when the goodies are being passed out.

  Of course, as a mustang—that is, an officer who came up through the enlisted ranks—I’ve learned how to deal with the ring-knockers. I do it the same way I did when I was a radioman first-class. I smile, and I grin, and I say, “Yes, sir.” But I spell sir with a c and a u, and then I do exactly what the F-word I want to do. Or, if I have to be somewhat more devious, I employ the safety net of chiefs I’ve built over my career to thread my way around the caste system. And if that sub-tile Machiavellian tactic doesn’t work, I will bust right through the motherfucking system and bore it a new goddamn asshole. Occasionally, you will recall, I have been known to do that, too.

  It is harder to circumvent the folks at State, especially if I am operating outside CONUS, which is how SEALs commonly refer to the CONtinental United States. (We Frogs, incidentally, are not the only governmental types to engage in rampant acronymism. The Leader of the Free World is nymed POTUS by the Secret Service in all its message traffic. I’ve always found that term humorous sounding. I mean, somehow, POTUS doesn’t quite have the same high-flown cachet that President Of The United States does. Moreover, that particular acronym lends itself to crude, rude, lewd, but nonetheless sometimes appropriate jokes.

  Bill Clinton, who early on suffered a rash of what one of his press secretaries yclept “bimbo eruptions,” was, for example, sarcastically referred to as IMPOTUS—the IMprobable President Of The United States—by his own Secret Service detail.) Anyway, my point is that it’s harder to diddle the State system as an outsider. First, I don’t have a safety net of chiefs at State, which puts me at a tactical disadvantage operationally. Second, the cookie pushers, which is how our heel-rocking, pocket-change jingling, cotton-fluff memo-writing diplomats are commonly known, do control their turf efficiently. Well, they should—because most of ’em are dyed-in-the-pinstripe bureaucrats. Professional apparatchiks in the worsted way. Anyway, when one be overseas and assigned to an embassy, one operates at their mercy. They control the access, the housing, the credentials, and all the other facets of life necessary to do business in a foreign land. And they do it in the sort of high-handed manner that makes one want to commit murder.

  Overseas, these very same diplodinks, who during their infrequent Washington tours live in tract housing an hour-and-a-half commute from main State and whose idea of gourmet dining is Mickey D’s or Wendy’s big and juicy, now get spacious, government-furnished quarters, servants, entertainment allowances, and chauffeured cars. It gives all too many of’em a case of the grandiose self-importants, which is the most dangerous symptom of the dread diplomatic disease affluenza.

  Yeah, I know that there are probably some devoted, hardworking Foreign Service State Department types out there, doing the Nation’s business overseas and helping keep the world safe for democracy. And when I finally meet one, you’ll be the first to hear about it.

  In the meanwhile, however, I have to spend most of my time overseas, not planning unconventional warfare against tangos or other bad guys. I have to spend most of my time and energy trying to work my way over, under, around, or through the State Department assholes who’ve thrown roadblocks up all around me.

  Take my current situation. (Please—take it off my hands right now.) I’d been assigned to Moscow as the head of an NSMTT, a mouth-filling acronym that stands for Naval Security Mobile Training Team. As usual, the military was playing catch up. Since Paul’s driver hadn’t known how to react when the car was attacked, the powers that be had finally decided that perhaps it might be a good idea for a security team to go to Moscow and teach all the enlisted drivers about evasive and defensive driving techniques, counter-surveillance, and other tradecraft that can save lives in hostile environments.

  Let me give you a bit of background here. Diplomats have their own protective agency, the Diplomatic Security Service. It is a part of the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. DSS protects embassies. Its Regional Security Officers, or RSOs, oversee what goes on in their geographic regions. Teams from its MSD, or Mobile Security Division, come in-country to train local personnel in everything from SWAT-type assaults, to evasive driving skills, to street-smart antirape techniques. But DSS’s bureaucratic responsibilities exist only between Twenty-first and Twenty-third, and C and D Streets, Northwest—that is to say, inside the State Department’s doors. The panjandrums at the Department of State will explain this by saying that State, by its very charter, can neither protect nor train any U.S. military personnel assigned to an embassy.

  So in Russia, the ambassador’s driver and the DCM’s driver (both of ’em Russians, or FNs—Foreign Nationals—in State Department parlance, I might add) had received extensive counter-terrorism driver training from a visiting Department of State MSD within the past six months. The defense attaché’s driver, however, was an American military personnel type. As such, she had not been eligible for that training—even though the senior trainer in the State Department’s MSD had asked that she be allowed to join the group. Our old friend Bart Wyeth, the DCM, had rejected the request. Ludicrous? Of course. But that, friends, is life in the real world, where competing bureaucracies often cost lives.

  Now that Paul was dead, however, the Navy woke up. Ah, said the system, perhaps we should send some folks to Moscow to teach the military drivers how to stay alive if they are attacked. My five men and I were the lucky FIQs, or folks in question.

  Why us? Well, I could say it was because we’re the best suited for the job. But, to be perfectly honest, we’re here because Rear Admiral Kenneth Ross, the newly appointed Director of Operations, Plans, and Politico-Military Affairs in the office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy, and Operations (let’s just call him the DOPPMA/DCNOPPO, okay?) insisted.

  Twenty-four hours after Paul was killed, Ken assigned me to lead a six-man NSMTT to Moscow on a Designation Gold priority. In other words, he wanted us there yesterday. The ostensible reason was to train the military personnel in ways to stay alive. The real reason (remember, I told you I’d get to this sooner or later) was that Ken Ross had been getting backchannel messages from Paul Mahon that worried him. When I asked for specifics, Kenny told me they’d be in Paul’s safe, gave me the combination, and ordered me to keep every bit of information I discovered on a close-hold basis. Paul had been working on his own, Ken Ross said, developing intelligence he
’d hinted was critical to the Russian-U.S. relationship. But he’d been killed before he was able to pass on any precise data.

  Despite my Designation Gold priority, and Rear Admiral Ross’s concerns, it took another two and a half weeks before we were able to wheels up. The reason, friends, is twofold. First, it takes time to obtain diplomatic passports and ask the Russkies to stamp the sorts of diplomatic visas that would allow us to bring all kinds of normally verboten materials into the former Soviet Union. Second (and perhaps more relevant), the system’s wheels grind exceedingly slow when there are turf wars to be fought—and the Department of State, or more specifically, AMEMB (AMerican EMBassy) Moscow did not particularly want an NSMTT anywhere near their home field.

  AMEMB’s feelings became obvious from the moment we arrived. Everyone from the top-ranked diplomats on the ninth floor, to the working stiffs who run the embassy’s security, made certain we knew that they didn’t want us around. Why not? Because I guess we six SEAL serfs represented an outside threat to the embassy’s sovereignty. Much the same thing happened when I ran Red Cell, a group of fourteen shooters—the best of the best——recruited from SEAL Team Six. Red Cell’s overt mission was to probe the security conditions at Navy installations all over the world. (Our covert mission I will expound on when I’m not in a hotel room that might be bugged.) Anyway, back in the mideighties, it occurred to my then-boss, Admiral Ace Lyons, that Navy installations were vulnerable to terrorism. He told me to form a unit that would help base commanders assess their vulnerabilities, and plug the holes. It was a great idea. But when we actually took the field, I discovered that the vast majority of COs didn’t want any “help” from Red Cell.