Neighborhood
Surveillance
I suppose
everybody has their own peculiar routines. An innocent label for mine would be
“just looking around.” Given my background, I prefer “neighborhood
surveillance.” Not the creepy kind, though it might have a superficial
similarity to something that would make you queasy. But, hey, somebody who
spent an entire career on the Inside, in the shadows, is likely to seem odd to
someone who’s only lived on the Outside, among the innocents. Let me describe
my mission before you make your assessment.
My routines for
starting and ending the day are pretty bland. There are always multiple pills,
eye drops, tooth brushing, checking the weather. The interesting part is the
daily surveillance, which targets the western view, toward the back yard, from
the vantage point of a second-floor window. Tactical wisdom prefers the high
ground.
There are two key
targets visible from my perch. Left to right, they are the Professor’s House
and the Foreigner’s House. The remainder of the target area is designated The
Back Lawn.
My SOP varies with
time of day. Before 1200 Zulu, the houses do not emit sufficiently in the
visual range to provide much intel. Therefore, the mission becomes anomaly
detection in support of intrusion defense of The Back Lawn. Collection focuses
on a variety of signals: signs of animal activity, vegetation out of place,
disorder in the wood piles, pooled water in the swales, etc. Recognized anomalies
would include bears in the yard or even bear tracks, downed tree branches,
downed power or cable lines, signs of prowlers, dead animals, dead prowlers,
and any trace of counter-surveillance, such as Cuban, Nicaraguan, Iranian,
Russian, Taliban or ChiCom pocket litter. Night ops are different because the
targets begin to radiate after dark. With their lights on, I can collect data
in the visual range.
The Professor’s
House has recently become a more active target. He’s even older than I am, so
proof of life is always in doubt and must be confirmed daily. Lately, he’s
changed his pattern of life and is visible walking around in the back rooms of
his house. This allows me to collect on his mobility status (which makes me
sympathize with the OG Kremlinologists counting how many times Brezhnev
coughed, etc.) Oddly, after more than 30 years of propinquity, I have no HUMINT on this target. There is
RUMINT that he was a professor. This seems plausible, as he has “that look”,
which so many know so well: smarter than thou, holier than thou, and above all
meaner than thou. We all know the MICE acronym for the biggest reasons for
treason: Money, Ideology, Compromise,
and Ego. With professors, it’s Ego in spades. They obviously don’t care for Money
or they’d do something else. They are usually atheists with no Ideology beyond
Godlessness. As for Compromise, they look like they’ve never had sex in any of
its many forms and don’t even care. So it’s down to Ego with professors. A big
ego implicates a big target. I keep watch.
The Foreigners’
House is the higher priority target for obvious reasons. Why would anyone move a restaurant from Kabul,
where everyone has to eat that stuff, to the Albany area, where nobody has to
eat that stuff? The house is inhabited by the one I call the Warlord, his
shadowy wife, and five fighting-age males, each equipped with a personal
vehicle that they use in ways I cannot monitor but must surely be suspicious.
The Warlord himself has rarely triggered surveillance, suggesting extensive
counter-surveillance training. We had a brief personal contact last summer, in
which he asserted that I seemed to be preparing my home for sale. I assess with
high confidence that he has conducted active reconnaissance of my location. To detect
that massive dumpster that was in my driveway, he would have had to
deliberately drive past my front yard. He asserted that his sister iwass looking
for a five-bedroom home in town and aggressively interrogated me about number
of bedrooms (not coincidentally five), sethe lling date, asking price. All this made
it obvious that this is a penetration aimed at establishing a large, permanent
Taliban compound and listening station within our very borders. It is well known that refugees' status serves
as a cover for sleeper agents. My urgent report on this situation has so far
received no reply from Washington other than a brief “Didn’t we tell you to go
away years ago?” I sense another 9/11 in the making. Nobody listened to Ali
Soufan either, and look what it got us.
Perhaps this
report makes my surveillance activities seem a bit… futile. I admit that I
would have a hard time gainsaying the point. But there comes a time when one
has no more Ayatollahs, Ruskies, ChiComs, Talibs or ISIL crazies to intercept,
monitor, geolocate, or otherwise attend to. One’s world shrinks, and one’s
tradecraft finds more pedestrian applications. The tradecraft doesn’t fade away;
it simply fades to irrelevance. There is an acute risk that one could become nothing
more useful to the Great Game than an old guy with a toothbrush in his mouth
looking out his bathroom window.
Thomas Reed
Willemain
Dr. Thomas Reed Willemain is a former academic, software entrepreneur and intelligence officer. His flash fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Ariel Chart, Granfalloon, Hobart, Burningword Literary Journal, The Medley, and elsewhere. He holds degrees from Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.