scornful of the goons at SAP, it’s not because I thought their jobs weren’t important. It was their lack of style that bugged me: a weak broth of McCarthyist paranoia and patriotic posturing. Why couldn’t they get a real writer on their staff to add some flair to their reports and memoranda? The answer was self-evident: a talented writer would have to lobotomize himself just to get in the door. It was all about FOUO and an aesthetic they had probably ripped off from a Renaissance fair. Their logo was actually a purple dragon!
I went into my office, logged on to my cleared computer, and checked my inbox. Besides writing profiles for the print version of Surge , I reworked SAP’s jumbled press releases, translating them into standard English for the Surge feed, and Golz had e-mailed me an MQR—mandatory quarterly reminder—for SAP’s online schedule of espionage-awareness classes:
SAP Week at the Laboratory is geared to raise awareness or instruct employees on counterintelligence and counterterrorism with a series of talks or seminars that instruct employees on what to guard against when traveling abroad, and the basics of counterintelligence and how you can be targeted by people unless you are aware of the possibilities. And other classes on electronic spying and terrorism.
What a train wreck! I loved the juxtaposition of that first run-on sentence with the last fragment, vagaries like talks or seminars , and that pearl of passive-voice construction: how you can be targeted by people.
I couldn’t complain. The fact that national-security wonks can’t write kept me well fed. To make it tweetable, I turned the copy into haiku. I typed:
Traveling abroad?
Unless you learn how spies think,
they could target you.
Take a SAP Week class
in online espionage
or terrorism.
Chuckling (always chuckling) privately (always privately), And for this you get 125k and bennies , I bounced the revised MQR brief back to Golz and asked her to declassify it so I could post it to the feed.
Although I had my own login and password with complete publishing rights on the blog, Communications Protocol insisted on this precaution as a CYA, and I always sent even the most basic post to Golz for declassification.
Golz was my favorite kind of editor: she who does not write. She never changes what you write, but she ultimately has to answer for what gets written.
Within minutes Golz replied with a Declassify , and the post went out.
Besides proofing the blog and keeping it readable, I wrote four or five short features a month on retired scientists’ hobbies and recreational interests for the glossy print edition of Surge . My copy workload added up to about 1,500 words a week. That left a lot of time between profiles for scenic drives and rounds of golf.
Profile struck me as an apt word for these pieces, designed to show only one side of the subjects’ faces. Klein grows gigantic green chile in his backyard vegetable garden. Saporov catches a prize-winning trout at Abiquiu Lake.
What they did at their jobs I couldn’t ask. “Get a feel for your subjects,” said Golz, “light features. Nothing classified.” If during Q&A I got too close to the bone of what one of my subjects was actually working on, I’d get the L.A. glaze and faraway eyes.
A few of them might admit to being physicists, but I wasn’t even allowed to ask specialty—e.g., theoretical or particle physics? That’s life in Los Alamos. That’s security awareness. That’s SAP. And Surge , with its slick production and trendy design, was just a vanity sheet to stroke the scientists’ egos.
The print run was in the thousands, but we didn’t have to sell advertising. It didn’t matter whether anyone off the Hill read Surge. The intended audience wasn’t necessarily even other employees at the Lab. The real target was the subject of the profile himself.
Golz and I never spoke openly about it, but we both knew my job and the role of Surge was to placate all of
I went into my office, logged on to my cleared computer, and checked my inbox. Besides writing profiles for the print version of Surge , I reworked SAP’s jumbled press releases, translating them into standard English for the Surge feed, and Golz had e-mailed me an MQR—mandatory quarterly reminder—for SAP’s online schedule of espionage-awareness classes:
SAP Week at the Laboratory is geared to raise awareness or instruct employees on counterintelligence and counterterrorism with a series of talks or seminars that instruct employees on what to guard against when traveling abroad, and the basics of counterintelligence and how you can be targeted by people unless you are aware of the possibilities. And other classes on electronic spying and terrorism.
What a train wreck! I loved the juxtaposition of that first run-on sentence with the last fragment, vagaries like talks or seminars , and that pearl of passive-voice construction: how you can be targeted by people.
I couldn’t complain. The fact that national-security wonks can’t write kept me well fed. To make it tweetable, I turned the copy into haiku. I typed:
Traveling abroad?
Unless you learn how spies think,
they could target you.
Take a SAP Week class
in online espionage
or terrorism.
Chuckling (always chuckling) privately (always privately), And for this you get 125k and bennies , I bounced the revised MQR brief back to Golz and asked her to declassify it so I could post it to the feed.
Although I had my own login and password with complete publishing rights on the blog, Communications Protocol insisted on this precaution as a CYA, and I always sent even the most basic post to Golz for declassification.
Golz was my favorite kind of editor: she who does not write. She never changes what you write, but she ultimately has to answer for what gets written.
Within minutes Golz replied with a Declassify , and the post went out.
Besides proofing the blog and keeping it readable, I wrote four or five short features a month on retired scientists’ hobbies and recreational interests for the glossy print edition of Surge . My copy workload added up to about 1,500 words a week. That left a lot of time between profiles for scenic drives and rounds of golf.
Profile struck me as an apt word for these pieces, designed to show only one side of the subjects’ faces. Klein grows gigantic green chile in his backyard vegetable garden. Saporov catches a prize-winning trout at Abiquiu Lake.
What they did at their jobs I couldn’t ask. “Get a feel for your subjects,” said Golz, “light features. Nothing classified.” If during Q&A I got too close to the bone of what one of my subjects was actually working on, I’d get the L.A. glaze and faraway eyes.
A few of them might admit to being physicists, but I wasn’t even allowed to ask specialty—e.g., theoretical or particle physics? That’s life in Los Alamos. That’s security awareness. That’s SAP. And Surge , with its slick production and trendy design, was just a vanity sheet to stroke the scientists’ egos.
The print run was in the thousands, but we didn’t have to sell advertising. It didn’t matter whether anyone off the Hill read Surge. The intended audience wasn’t necessarily even other employees at the Lab. The real target was the subject of the profile himself.
Golz and I never spoke openly about it, but we both knew my job and the role of Surge was to placate all of
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