Part 8: The Institute

The Roman Republic fell, not because of the ambition of Caesar or Augustus, but because it had already long ceased to be in any real sense a republic at all. 

When the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, who voted without reward according to his own convictions, and who with his fellows formed in war the terrible Roman legion, had been changed into an idle creature who craved nothing in life save the gratification of a thirst for vapid excitement, who was fed by the state, and who directly or indirectly sold his vote to the highest bidder, then the end of the republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. 

The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing.  Theodore Roosevelt

At the lower end of Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. there sits a modest, nondescript four-story building of gray marble, reinforced steel doors with thick, bullet proof glass, and like the heavy windows, all are blue-mirrored allowing no one to see inside.  A very small, greenish-copper nameplate by the heavy door identified the edifice as the Studebaker Institute, displaying its motto beneath.  

Its neighboring buildings arrayed the same communications gear, the assorted antennae and parabolic dishes bristling on the rooftop, so it drew no special attention, not in Washington and particularly not on Embassy Row. 

Its motto, “The Future is Here,” had been an item of periodic debate as long as anyone could remember – did it mean the future had finally arrived or did it merely imply that the future was located within the walls of the Studebaker Institute itself?  Perhaps only the SI’s ancient chairman knew for sure. 

Once the booth-ensconced security guard allowed entrance to the fortress-like building after verifying whether or not an appointment to see someone inside indeed existed, the visitor waited in a cocoon-like holding pen until signaled to pass through an array of head-to-toe electronic and chemical scanners, all the while watched by invisible guards through one-way mirrors and thoroughly studied on video surveillance monitors. 

Finally through, the visitor received a temporary visitor pass and was shown to one of only four seats in the tiny reception area – signaling that this place wasn’t exactly accustomed to receiving new walk-in clientele. 

This subtle message was reinforced further as one took a second to study the room to see that there was nothing aesthetically pleasing to the eye; only chairs, floor, walls, and ceiling – no plants of any kind.  The only thing breaking the monotony of the cold bleakness was an old framed poster hanging on the wall protected by non-reflecting glass, looking to be vintage World War II propaganda-style judging by the hand-painted image of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress as seen from an under-belly perspective, soaring in the foreground with a glorious cloudy blue sky behind.

The poster contained two subtitles printed beneath the airplane: The proudest assignment in our history and Studebaker Builds Wright Cyclone Engines for the Flying Fortress.  Below these subtitles was a larger text that read: The same skill, the same Studebaker plus, that has gone into every Studebaker passenger car and truck, are today going into every implement of war being produced by Studebaker.  We’re proud of our assignments in the arming of the United States.  At the bottom of the poster was the footnote: Studebaker’s 90th Anniversary 1852-1942. 

Although gone from the American landscape as an industrial giant and car manufacturer, the original founding fathers of the firm established the Institute and lent to it the family name as the U.S. Civil War geared up and the company needed a Washington liaison office to win lucrative government contracts. 

When John Mohler Studebaker arrived in Placerville, California in 1852 as a would-be forty-niner, he quickly realized that all the good gold claims had been long taken.  Using money the Freemason earned from selling “Wheelbarrow Johnnys” and horse-drawn wagons during the California Gold Rush to forty-niners, the Studebaker Wagon Company of Ohio grew and grew, and by 1862 John Studebaker supplied the Northern Army with everything from wagons to canned beef to woolen socks. 

In 1902, the company began producing automobiles, first with electric motors, then soon later with internal combustion engines powered by kerosene or gasoline.  During World War I, the Studebaker Corporation turned out thousands of wagons, trucks, ambulances, tanker trucks, gun carriages, and other vehicles for the war effort, earning the reputation as a manufacturer of rugged, durable products. 

Hard hit by the economic chaos of the Great Depression, the company went into receivership in 1933, but reorganized to get itself back in business.  Studebaker’s federal government contracts office became a very profitable non-profit foundation during those years of increased, lucrative non-compete contract awards from huge federal spending programs, helped along by the fact that its relocation to the present day site in Washington was classified, for federal tax purposes by the Department of the Interior, as federal Indian reservation land.  

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It was the “sale” of thousands of Studebaker trucks to the Soviet Union which helped turn the tide against Nazi Germany and win the Second World War under Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Program, and made a fortune for SI in commissions, royalties, and success fees – all thanks to the generosity of the U.S. taxpayer. 

Likewise, it was the tracked all-terrain vehicle, the little amphibious Studebaker Weasel that helped turn the tide of the war in the Pacific and earned SI even more profits.  Even as its namesake-manufacturing corporation began dying out in the 1950s and 1960s, the Studebaker Institute was spun off as a legal stand-alone, not-for-profit entity and managed by a group of partners who, for the most part, were ex-federal officials previously highly placed in federal government circles.  Many of these ex-bureaucrats had also dabbled in business, rounding out their resume with “private-sector” experience.

FDR had described the Lend-Lease Program as a way of loaning a garden hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire, thereby protecting one’s own home, and when signed into law in March 1941, Congress gave the President the discretion to set any repayment terms necessary in order to keep supplies flowing to friendly nations fighting the Axis Powers. 

That meant that first Great Britain, then the Soviet Union, China, later Italy, until finally by war’s end forty nations received billions of dollars worth of materiel that they never paid for, and after the war concluded never returned anything back to the United States – including military equipment, munitions, and even naval ships. 

It was Studebaker trucks that powered the Soviet Army to Leningrad and Stalingrad, and carried over six million Soviet troops westward to Berlin in 1945.  This helped explain why, that during the entire Cold War period and even today, the SI had always seemed to have one foot in the door at the Kremlin, and Chairman Greese had almost national-hero status in both Russia and China.  “Beware of that country, China,” he always said.  “If we let them, they’ll eat our lunch.”

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Called “SI” by the Beltway insiders, its headquarters office, besides the four stories above ground, had three floors beneath street level – two floors for parking and blue-collar employee cafeteria, and the lowest level, built as atomic bomb shelters during the Red Scare of the 1950s, was still in use today but with anti-biological/chemical protection gear now installed, and also sharing space with old company archives and confidential documents. 

The ground level floor space not dedicated to entrance, security, general maintenance, and reception area, was used to house the communications and computer center where high-powered IBM and Cray supercomputers, which could do a trillion calculations a second, ran day and night. 

Over the past few months, they had been sifting through worldwide data on international economies and of late, anything and everything having to do with gold – mining, transportation, pricing, bullion reserves, trading, futures market, sunken treasures, industrial applications, and new space and military applications. 

The second and third floors housed the administrative offices that had frequent contacts with overseas-partner consulting and law firms who did work for foreign government officials and private banks, and white-collar employee cafeteria; the top floor of suites and conference room were reserved for SI’s executive staff – including the executive director, his boss the chairman of the board, and the other board directors coming to nine good and noble men in all (and all Caucasian, there had never been a woman or person of color on the board, nor any Catholic or Jew for that matter). 

Entry into the fourth-floor inner sanctum, including the executive dining room, requires retina and thumbprint scans for all, including the board’s directors.  This rule also applied to janitorial and maintenance personnel.  The main elevator is large enough to accommodate several people and is disabled-person compliant.  There are surveillance cameras throughout the building floors and premises.  

The chairman refused to submit to protocols he himself prescribed for everyone else, not wanting to be included with the unwashed masses, so he was left alone to take his private elevator up to his office and therefore bypass intrusive security rituals whenever he felt like it.

The executive director was a full-time employee whereas the other board members (except the chairman) came and went frequently since they had their fingers in many pies around the city, but most managed to meet at least once a month for board meetings – and all were present without fail at the annual year end board meeting when bonus checks were handed out.

There were also full-time white and blue collar personnel, including minorities and women working in the building as secretaries, security guards, office equipment maintenance personnel, and janitorial staff, symbolizing SI’s commitment to affirmative action and diversity in the work place. 

The highest-ranking minority at SI was a young black professional who held the title of Director of Strategic Planning and Business Development, the executive director’s special assistant, who also had an office on the fourth floor, next to the small room housing the floor’s photocopy machine. 

Since becoming a consulting business, the SI had always had a board with nine directors, men who had worked in federal government always in high-level federal positions – Cabinet Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries, Deputy Secretaries, a couple of past Vice Presidents, and even a President of the United States, and so on – although former elected public officials were a rarity; career bureaucrats were preferred. 

Invariably, the actual time the die-hard career bureaucrats spent at SI was termed by board directors and the press as “so and so returning to the private sector” although most had never even run a candy store. 

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SI was not alone in this regard since there were many think-tank entities heavily influencing federal government policy in Washington cleverly disguised as “private-sector” or “not-for-profit” institutes, foundations, boards, groups, and sometimes even named after some former government bureaucrat who set up his own business and gave himself some fancy sounding title on his business card: The John Smith Research Group, John Smith, Chairman & CEO. 

Of course, the whole thing was a gigantic farce – the former government official had no business expertise whatsoever and was just using the contacts he still had from his old job, and charging somebody to help get his or her foot in the door to win lucrative government procurement contracts or meet the right people in U.S. Congress to influence upcoming legislation.  In other words they were snooty lobbyists.  As the saying goes, “incest is best.”

Paying “John Smith” for his private-sector business services were consulting companies, corporations, foreign governments, special interest groups, associations, and even religious institutions with an agenda.  John Smith earned huge commissions and fees, much more than the paltry salary he had earned while a humble public servant working for government, or retirement pension he currently collected, but should the opportunity arise and the position be high up enough, he would surely return to work for government again – because after all, once a bureaucrat always a bureaucrat. 

This was the creepy world of Washington Beltway Bandits, the smooth-talking, fancy-dressed, modern-day snake oil salesmen and carnival hucksters, a consulting and lobbying brotherhood employing by last estimate 1,000 ex-members of Congress and higher-ups of the federal government, whose sole job was to get their customers what they wanted. 

The “bandits” (an appropriate name) didn’t particularly care what moral cause their employer supported as long as the fat paychecks and perks kept coming.  Ultimately, the vast chunk of the bandit’s livelihood was paid for by U.S. taxpayers, so the larger the federal budget each year and the higher the deficit, the more money they made, in good times and in bad.

And like all of these entities including SI, the owners, partners, and board members gravitated between public and private sector positions in a concert of musical chairs creating a steady stream of new and old faces back and forth. 

Never was a board member of SI charged with, much less convicted of, any crime having to do with conflict of interest from working in the public sector where he was privy to classified and insider information, then peddling this knowledge upon leaving government, or using foreign government contacts to help line his pockets in private life. 

It was not customary for former public officials to express remorse in earning ten times in private sector what they earned working in government; no sense of guilt that it was the American taxpayer who funded their training, continued education, and travel; and certainly not customary for them to pay back the government from money they earned selling books written about their experiences while getting a paycheck from Uncle Sam. 

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One former U.S. President who worked briefly as a board member of SI in the 1990s was provided with a hot insider stock trading tip from “friends” of an upcoming IPO in the telecommunications industry and parlayed his $10,000 investment into $6 million dollars in two years – and no one in the press or the Justice Department blinked an eye since this sort of conflict of interest had become so commonplace in the nation’s capital that no one cared.

All nine men making up the current SI board had at one time or another worked in some high-level capacity in federal government and were now making good wages and huge bonuses working in “business” – the one-and-only current chairman of SI had also moonlighted as a Deputy Undersecretary at Treasury under both Eisenhower and Kennedy, the current executive director was once an Assistant Secretary at Defense’s NSA, while others had held high ranking jobs at State, the Interior, the Fed, and Justice; and one was even a retired three-star admiral. 

All received federal pensions upon retirement from government based on time in service, and free healthcare coverage for life.  Besides having in common a record of public service, the nine board members also had affixed to their lapels a small pin depicting the American flag.

The ancient chairman of the Studebaker Institute, Zachariah Greese, was a legend inside the Washington Beltway and not a man who suffered fools lightly.  Born into a well-connected Brahmin east-coast family, a very young Zachariah, according to his own first-hand personal account, had met Theodore Roosevelt twice – once in 1908 when Teddy was still President, and again later after TR’s grueling trip down Brazil’s River of Doubt in 1914. 

He claimed to still remember both meetings wherein his father introduced him to the Colonel, and in the second meeting recalled vividly that Roosevelt looked to have aged twenty years since their first encounter, just a skin and bones scarecrow wearing his trademark pince-nez glasses .  Greese had met every U.S. President since then – “Big Bill” Taft, Wilson, and Harding informally, but later presidents starting with Coolidge in some professional capacity or another.

He did not like much his nickname “Zack the Knife,” pinned on him after he cleaned up the Studebaker Motor Corporation during the 1930s, brought it out of receivership, and became its chief executive officer.  Because of the Great Depression and general turmoil in the economy, Zack closed factories and offices putting hundreds of men and women in bread lines – “it had to be done,” he would later say, “to save the company.”  He preferred the newer nickname he earned in later years, “The Profit Prophet.” 

Many of the motor company’s closings and discharging of employees had come at year end, around the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays, but the young Greese was ruthless in returning his company to profitability.  When the Studebaker Institute was spun off from the parent company, it seemed perfectly natural to everyone that “Zack the Knife” would run it as he saw fit, so no one objected. 

The one black mark against him in an otherwise sparkling career, a subject that no one dared ever bring up in his presence, was the corporate scandal that erupted back in 1964 after Greese’s departure from Studebaker Motor Corporation to head up the Studebaker Institute full time. 

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While still CEO at the corporation a few years before, he had dreamt up a catchy slogan to attract the best and brightest people around: You may be a long way from retirement age now.  Still, it’s good to know that Studebaker is building up a fund for you, so that when you reach retirement age you can settle down on a farm, visit around the country, or just take it easy, and know that you’ll still be getting a regular monthly pension paid for entirely by the company.

The 112-year-old company collapsed that year leaving 4,000 people without their promised pensions, and eventually Congress enacted legislation to set minimum standards for private-sector pension plans and created the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation – PBGC - as a result of what had happened at Studebaker. 

With the passing of years, however, and after many generous contributions to charitable events and political campaigns, Greese and the SI were able to separate themselves from the “other evil” Studebaker, so virtually no one linked the chairman’s name, or his beloved institution, anymore with that scandal. 

Greese worked back then, and still worked today, twelve-hour days six days a week, sometimes sleeping at work in the small efficiency apartment connected to his office.  His keep-it-simple-stupid mantra evolved over the many years into his own unique business theorem called, by Beltway Bandit think-tanks, the Greese 2Q2E – Quantify, Qualify, Execute, and Evaluate – becoming Holy Scripture in the consultancy industry for developing strategic planning models for business and government.

The young Dr. R. Cinza Brown, SI’s brilliant economist (also having a doctorate in anthropology) and Director of Strategic Planning and Business Development, had entered Greese’s private office only once and then very briefly during his job interview a few years prior; while the executive director, Buddy Peoples, had been inside only a handful of times himself. 

It was an eerie sight to behold.  Sitting behind a huge chair in a room almost totally dark except for a desk lamp, was this tiny little man, with deep sunken eyes, thin wispy hair, hook-nose, cadaver-looking face, jaundiced skin, and starved, bony hands covered in copious liver spots. 

Zack still had most of his teeth but they were a hideous muddy yellow, a subject that he enjoyed bringing up when reminiscing about his old friend Chairman Mao Zedong, who used to say that old lions never brushed their teeth.  His teeth’s muddy color was actually a personal badge of honor.  Yet Greese’s voice was deep and strong, and when he spoke, always very slowly, he conveyed a sense of awe and reverence so profound that few people were able to utter a coherent phrase while in his presence. 

When he chaired the board meetings at SI, almost no one else spoke, and when he suggested some action be taken, it was the word of God – so let it be written, so let it be done.  No one argued, no one disagreed, and even men who formerly held positions of great power within the federal government trembled at his every word. 

No one knew what the actual age of the ancient chairman was, but he had to be pushing in excess of a hundred years old if the stories about him were true.  His favorite sayings were, “Come into my web said the spider to the fly” and “What we need around here is another Armalite project,” referring to a consulting contract the SI won back in the early 1960s which was still producing fat profits via royalties for his beloved firm.

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Greese was an agnostic and thought religion silly, yet did not mind that other people believed in the existence of God so long as their beliefs did not conflict with his desire to always make more money for the Studebaker Institute.  He had nothing against Muslims, actually having lifelong friends in Middle Eastern countries, even though he thought their religious beliefs rather paradoxical and odd – if you died in a jihad theoretically you went to heaven to live for all eternity in paradise, but if you got killed in the process, how then did you live forever? 

On the other hand, Christians believed in heaven and eternal paradise when they died, provided they behaved and didn’t go to hell instead, so one religion was just as illogical as the next.  His problem with Islam wasn’t religion, it was the massive wealth Muslims possessed underground and the power base it gave their religious dogma.  He often muttered in meetings, “It’s their black gold versus our yellow gold; all this shit is about money and power in the end.”

A special IRS codicil written exclusively for the SI and approved in the late 1960s by a Congressional Sub-Committee, drafted by a Treasury Department functionary who became an SI board member later on (and earned gargantuan salary and bonus), allowed directors of the SI board to classify all income earned while working at the Institute as state and federal tax-exempt. 

The nine SI directors are not required to list earned income anywhere on their form 1040 U.S. individual tax return or state tax form – therefore making a stint at SI one of the most coveted board seats within the Beltway for high level ex-government officials, and making the Studebaker Institute itself the most prestigious Beltway think-tank of them all. 

Equally, the piece of land the Institute sat on along Massachusetts Avenue was once Anacostia Indian soil, and still retained its legal Indian reservation status, meaning the business sitting upon it paid no D.C. or federal corporate taxes. 

And like Indian gaming establishments, the SI was not subject to U.S. federal financial disclosure or the Freedom of Information Act, and not required to have its taxpayer-funded information, like federal non-compete contracts won, to be made public knowledge without its consent.  Neither the IRS nor the SEC had jurisdiction on SI land and as a result, the SI was the most profitable not-for-profit business in Washington and perhaps the world.

And there’s another very important attribute SI had that no other think-tank had: within its communication center there existed authorized and unrestricted electronic access to classified files and top secret information, gathered by the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI database, the CIA database, that of Homeland Security, and the best of the best data residing within the Department of Defense and its myriad of intelligence related agencies, including the ultra-secret NSA. 

The DOD had 80-percent of the federal budget dedicated to espionage and intelligence gathering activities and former employees had been on the SI board every year since its founding.  Taken altogether, the Institute was a de facto federal agency with all rights and privileges accorded thereto, including being attached to all greater Washington federal courier routes with authorized usage of U.S. Government Messenger Envelope interagency correspondence.  Even SI’s postage expenses were paid for by taxpayers. 

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McKinley “Mac” Kopstein, the director of security and a thirty-man team at the Studebaker Institute, did not take his job lightly – and not because he got a handsome mid six-figure annual salary – he was a Quantico-trained professional with twenty years of prior experience with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Despite his strange dress habits and Chihuahua-like appearance, he felt that beneath his sheepish-looking exterior there beat the heart of a tiger, and more than once he proved himself in the boxing ring down at Quantico during the seventeen weeks he was there, kicking the ass a few times of classmates much larger than he. 

He was accepted into the Bureau by the skin of his teeth because he barely met minimum standards of height, weight, body fat levels, and vision acuity required for new recruits; where he excelled, though, was in brainpower. 

Eventually he needed eyeglasses, which only enhanced an already nerdy look, and for some unexplained reason developed a fondness for wearing blue seersucker suits all year round with white bucks, red suspenders, and a pink bow tie. 

Clearly an outcast from the establishment’s ivy league, pin striped, conservative-dress image promulgated by the late J. Edgar Hoover when he invented the Bureau, his employer found a home for Mac in the field of electronic surveillance which he could perform in the bowels of the FBI headquarters building in D.C., well hidden away.  It didn’t take long for the renegade genius-kook to be considered one of the experts in the field, but still his career languished because of his eccentric appearance and the odd nature of his character.

Not helping matters any was his apparent fixation on the influx of illegal aliens into the United States, particularly from Latin America, which he claimed was upsetting the demographic balance in the country and would have grave consequences in the future for law enforcement and for the nation’s war against terrorism. 

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He would often talk to colleagues using detailed statistics on costs to taxpayers to support his claim for the need of stricter immigration policies and on more than one occasion, there were heated exchanges with people who disagreed with him.   

Mac’s unabashed criticism of weak immigration federal policy did not sit too well with his superiors at the Bureau, particularly his boss, Assistant Director Juan Antonio Sanchez, second generation Mexican-American.  But Mac didn’t stop there.  His solution for the problem was so Orwellian that even his friends at the Bureau began shunning him. 

He strongly advocated a national policy of constant electronic scrutiny and monitoring of every man, women, and child who set foot within the United States, its Territories, and Possessions, in addition to retaining all current measures already practiced at airports and seaports. 

He had recommended email and Internet censoring; biological scans to measure perspiration and flow of blood in the bloodstream to aid with polygraph testing for random stop and frisk actions by law enforcement; GPS chips embedded in all cellular phones, laptop computers, and iPods; fingerprint and iris scans for all federal, state, and municipal employees to permit authorized access to buildings; ad hoc polygraph testing authority for police forces to use whenever they deemed necessary anywhere in the country; and a new national fingerprint database with capacity for six billion sets of prints – for pretty much everybody on the face of the planet. 

Furthermore, he felt this new, strong surveillance policy should be made into law as a codicil of the U.S. Patriot Act.  When his boss jokingly asked him, what next, implanting microchips into every human being on the planet, Mac didn’t smile – to him it sounded perfectly logical as a next step.  As a result of his views, his performance ratings suffered.

Upon completing his twenty years with the FBI and feeling totally unappreciated and underutilized, if not overtly unwanted due to political incorrectness, Mac Kopstein decided to take retirement with pension from the Bureau and seek employment opportunities in the very lucrative private-sector security industry, including cyber security, where many former law enforcement professionals were making major bucks given the new age of terrorism paranoia in America. 

He no sooner got his resume out on the street then he had at least a dozen serious offers of employment, so in demand were his skills and experience. 

Hands down, the best offer was made by the very prestigious Studebaker Institute who almost doubled his FBI salary, and threw in an attractive benefits package to boot.  Now almost five years into his new job, he was double dipping – earning a retirement pension from the federal bureaucracy while at the same time earning huge salary and bonus via government contracts his SI employer landed.  Life was good and taxpayers were footing the bill.  Then the proverbial shit hit the fan.

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Some grunt down in maintenance had somehow gotten his hands on classified documents from the fourth floor – the Institute’s Valhalla – and the old chairman went ballistic.  It had been Mac who had brought the matter directly to the attention of the chairman on a bright and early Tuesday morning in early June, and now he regretted somewhat that he hadn’t spoken first with his boss, the institute’s executive director, Bartholomew “Buddy” Peoples. 

But his training taught him to go right to the top of the food chain and omit from suspicion as few people as possible from being a criminal suspect.  His rationale was that Zachariah Greese had no reason to steal documents from himself and Mac knew he was innocent, so by process of elimination that left everyone else.  Then he was summoned by the ancient one.

“I thought you Jew boys were so fucking smart Kockstein.  How the hell did this happen!”  Mac didn’t bother trying to correct the chairman’s pronunciation of his last name – when you were in the presence of the great man you just shut up and took your medicine.  This was also the first time he had heard the chairman use profanity in the almost five years he had been with Studebaker, which in itself was disconcerting.  The windowless, darkened office with single desk lamp gave him the creeps.

“We’re spending a goddamn fortune on electronic gadgets and gizmos that you insisted I buy, and now this shit happens!  Back in the day, this never would have happened!  I’d have called J. Edgar, queer that he was, and he’d caught the sonsabitches before sundown.  If you asked me, we rely too much on all this electronic crap anyway.”

At the appropriate polite moment of pause, Mac answered his agitated inquisitor by saying, “Actually Mr. Greese, the matter came to light not as a result of electronic surveillance, but rather by good old-fashioned detective work.”  By patronizing Greese he thought he could deflect any further criticism, but he was wrong. 

He explained that his department, in addition to electronic and other surveillance measures, also used a grid system on each floor and division in the building as a way of sorting through shredded documents, trash, and anything else that was eventually considered garbage (he quickly added that the chairman’s office was exempt so as not to give offense). 

The sorting was done at the end of every business day when employees had gone home, and in one such search three torn and crumpled sheets of paper, two being readable, were found in the basement’s cafeteria which were clearly in the wrong grid – furthermore, the footnote on the most legible document indicated it had a SI top-secret classification following its government-sanctioned marking protocol. 

The torn pages had been dug out of the garbage and pieced back together, and because they had been protected somewhat by sandwich plastic wrap from discarded food moisture, the evidence was solid.  Mac and his team had been up all night investigating the matter.

“Are you fucking kidding me!  I spend $25 million a year on security for this place and you caught some crook by sifting through garbage.  What kind of operation are you running here Kockstein!  So exactly what do these documents say?”

“Mr. Greese, they appear to be the last three pages of a longer document, faded photocopies of an internal memorandum dated May of this year entitled ‘Atlantean Geodesy.’  Stamped at the bottom of one of the pages, the last page, are the words ‘U.S. Government Classified Document.’ I checked it out and that particular page sir was indeed the last page of the original document and the author is Dr. Brown here on the fourth floor; the addressee is Mr. Peoples.”

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Both the chairman and the director of security were fully aware that a federal document, their “federal document”, stamped as “U.S. Government Classified” meant that it carried with it a top-secret classification, and theoretically the FBI should be called in as standard protocol procedure. 

However, before calling the Feds, it was a good idea to make sure a crime had been committed as opposed to some stupid accident.  Ordinarily Greese would have told Kopstein to take the matter up with the Institute’s executive director who sat next door, Buddy Peoples, since he dealt with administrative matters, but he was glad the matter was brought to his attention first.

“Hmm, this is indeed a serious matter Mr. Kockstein.”  The ancient chairman had regained his composure upon hearing the name of the document. “You are aware of course we are working on a very classified, very important project in concert with the federal government called Operation GERDA mentioned in this memorandum?” 

Mac certainly was aware of GERDA, it was being touted as being potentially the biggest federal government contract award in the Studebaker Institute’s illustrious history, even bigger than the Armalite project, and potential profits were stratospheric.  Only a very short list of people knew about GERDA – Gold Extraction & Relocation for Defense of America - and Mac was one of them.

The movers and shakers on SI’s board were all over town schmoozing and using their influence to make sure the White House knew that their employer possibly had a way out, via a secret project, of the housing-bubble-induced economic train wreck heading in America’s direction, although they themselves knew very little about details.

“Yes I am Mr. Greese, and that’s why I brought the matter directly to your attention rather than to that of Mr. Peoples.”  This was a good time for Mac to get in a few much-needed brownie points and make clear to the boss man he wasn’t just some fucking potted plant at SI.  Then the boss spoke up. 

“These documents you found, they tie into our project, although we don’t think very highly of the ‘Geodesy’ itself.  We really struck out with that dog.  Still, in the hands of the wrong people – I’m referring here to our very aggressive competition and the liberal press – Studebaker could be compromised in achieving its goal,” said Zack the Knife who was suddenly calm and focused.  “Tell me what you have so far.”

“My department went back and reconstructed the timeline, working backwards from yesterday evening when the torn up documents were found and examining surveillance tapes from the cafeteria hours before.  Actually, it was pretty easy to determine who discarded these documents after viewing tapes – it was Archibald Jefferson, the disabled black maintenance man who you may recall seeing occasionally in the building in a wheelchair. 

We next turned to reconstructing a timeline for Mr. Jefferson and determined that he had indeed been up here on the fourth floor repairing the photocopier in the copy room next to Dr. Brown’s office yesterday between 11:02 a.m. and 11:44 a.m., this according to the work order he filed.  Surveillance tapes showed him working on the copier, but we can’t actually see him remove any documents from the copy room because the positioning of his body in relation to the camera partially blocked our view.”

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Mac was being extremely detailed and thorough for Greese, which impressed the chairman, “Furthermore, we determined that Dr. Brown had been the last person to actually use the photocopier because we have him on tape at precisely 10:46 a.m. and no one entered the copier room after he finished up and left, that is, until Jefferson. 

Therefore, we must conclude that either Dr. Brown made three copies that were not of good quality and he carelessly discarded them in the wastebasket next to the copier – I must reiterate again that just two of the copies we found in the cafeteria’s trash were faded but legible – or Mr. Jefferson somehow gained access to the originals and made photocopies himself. 

The latter possibility I find very remote because the originals are kept locked in Dr. Brown’s safe and we checked late last night when he wasn’t present; they’re all there and no breach appears to have been made indicating unauthorized entry into his office or safe.”

“So what is your professional opinion Mr. Kopstein?  Is it possible Jefferson saw more than the last three pages, or stole more of the document itself, and we only found part of a larger theft so far?  Or that we have some other mole inside the building stealing documents and passing them on to the competition?”  For some reason, the chairman had remembered the correct pronunciation of Mac’s last name.

“I don’t see anything sinister here to be honest, sir.  I suspect Dr. Brown was careless making copies from the original ‘Atlantean Geodesy’ document and he somehow left behind inferior quality copies.   Rather than follow SI’s document shredding protocol, he simply threw them in the wastebasket next to the copier leaving them for Jefferson to find.  I think Mr. Jefferson got scared when he figured out the documents were classified and got rid of them as soon as he could.  Why he took them to the cafeteria in the first place I don’t know, maybe just curiosity.”

“And your suggested course of action?”  By now Zack the Knife had calmed down sufficiently and was now willing to delegate this matter to his subordinate and Kopstein’s boss, the executive director of Studebaker.  The chairman hated to deal with petty administrative matters.

“I looked into Mr. Jefferson’s personnel file,” was Mac’s response.  “He’s a decorated Vietnam veteran who’s been receiving disability pay from the U.S. Army since 1965, has been in and out of VA hospitals over the years for complications stemming from his paraplegic condition, and has held a lot of odd jobs before coming to SI four years ago, but I see absolutely nothing in his file to indicate he might be a security threat. 

On the contrary, he seems very passive, based on the background check we did on him before he came on board. We found no criminal record or any other red flags.  As far as we could tell, he’s pretty much a loner and listed as personal references a few war buddies he knew back in the ‘60s. 
             As far as Mr. Jefferson is concerned, I recommend we just keep our eyes open, maybe police his correspondence for a few weeks, but take no other action other than to investigate if he could somehow have acquired more than just those last three pages.  It might look bad for the Studebaker Institute if we get carried away and have him arrested; there may be questions about our lax security that our competitors would surely take advantage of.” 
            “Well, that’s fine Mr. Kopstein, I concur with your recommendation.  You’re spot on there.  I authorize you to give Mr. Peoples, and only him, a complete briefing on this subject right away and let me know if anything more comes up on this affair.  Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention.”  Normally, it was at this juncture that the invitee to the chairman’s inner lair could take the hint that it was time for him to exit stage left, but Mac opted not to take the hint; he had more to say.

“Yes sir, but what about Dr. Brown, I mean either directly or indirectly his actions resulted in the security breach, shouldn’t we at least look at his personal situation?”  The chairman knew exactly what Kopstein was getting at.

“Mr. Kopstein, I as well as his immediate superior, Mr. Peoples, know full well that Dr. Brown is gay, but to be quite frank we really don’t give a rat’s ass.”  The chairman was being as blunt as possible. “What he chooses to do outside the Studebaker Institute on his own time is his business.  He’s discrete and assumes no one knows he’s queer so just play along, he’s a very fine young man and I like him.  The fact is, Dr. Brown is a brilliant mind and under the tutelage of Buddy, he’s come up with a project that may very well change the future of this entire country as we know it. 

That fact alone clearly outweighs any suspicions you may have regarding these discarded documents, and what he does behind closed doors, so let’s leave Dr. Brown outside the need for further background checks and nosing around his electronic messaging and files, okay? 

As I said, it might interest you to know that the paper in question, the ‘Atlantean Geodesy,’ was not well received by SI’s board, by Mr. Peoples, nor by myself when we first read it last month, and Dr. Brown was admonished accordingly for his writing style and tactical flights of fantasy – but not his strategic thinking which is flawless.”  Mac Kopstein had never heard the old man be so talkative in his presence.

 "Like my old pal Sam Rayburn used to say, ‘any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one,’ and Dr. Brown’s a world-class carpenter.  The last thing we need is to dredge this thing up, admonish him again for something as petty as not following document shredding procedure, and then for him to get pissed off at us and go over to the competition; am I clear on this subject Mr. Kopstein?”

“Crystal sir,” was Kopstein’s reply.

In reality, the old chairman was not worried about the departure of the young Dr. Cinza Brown; the non-disclosure and non-compete agreements he had signed were legally ironclad, and if those failed to keep Dr. Brown from departing there was always a Plan B - termination with extreme prejudice, which he had sanctioned very sparingly in the past through intermediaries.  His current intermediaries would be Kopstein and Peoples and when Zack said jump, those two bozos would salute and reply, “How high?”  

No, Zack the Knife could afford no slip ups on this one because Dr. Brown agreed with him that the only way out of impending financial Armageddon for the United States was nothing less than to have the country return to the gold standard! Should the good Dr. Brown or anyone else for that matter stand in Zack's way, well then, they would all have to go.

(This is a work of fiction.  Although some real-world names, organizations, historical settings, and situations are used to enhance the authenticity of the story, any similarities to actual persons, organizations, or situations are coincidental and all portrayals are purely the product of the author’s imagination.  This is the second edition abridged version 2019.  First edition Copyright © 2006.  All rights reserved)