The eyes are less steely, and the once strong chins now sag with flesh. I recognized the faces of some of these old spies as they gathered to vote at
Christ Church in Georgetown this morning.
I did not know their names, but I'd seen a few at a gathering honoring the late uber-spy of the cold war, the late former CIA Director
Richard M. Helms, at a Georgetown University
gathering last year.
They are on their last legs, these men and women, who parachuted into occupied France, liberated Europe, and stayed on to help win the Cold War.
Even with their walking canes and feeble hands, and without a lapel flag pin among them, they still look like a tough enough bunch.
Indeed they, along with their past contemporaries from the State Department, make up a considerable, if fading, segment of the "
Georgetown cocktail set" that Republican presidential candidates going back to
Richard M. Nixon love to bash.
Ironically, Sen. John McCain drank again from that bitter well, even as he called for refashioning the CIA into something resembling the OSS, the World War Two spying and sabotage outfit that some of these very same Georgetowners served so well and honorably.
To be sure, there remains a recalcitrant bunch among some of the old hands.
Last week some CIA old boys I know were circulating vitriolic, even racist comments and articles about Barrack Hussein Obama, one of which
obsessed on the bloodlines of the likely next president of the United States.
"He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects," it said.
"The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya. Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively.
"What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is 'African-American,' the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it.
"Let that sink in: Obambi is not the descendant of slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners. Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah."
"We associate them with the temper of Third World societies," wrote Fouad Ajami, the frequent TV pundit and professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
"We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right."
Much e-mailed chortling greeted that from among these former intelligence professionals, some of whom keep a hand in training the current generation of spies.
One dissenting voice finally piped up, from a retired CIA station chief who had served the spy agency for 24 years, in such cold war cockpits as Prague, Berlin, Beirut, and Tehran. He also served in high CIA managerial posts. I'm not identifying him because it's a private list.
"I do see a yearning among thoughtful people in this nation for something other than the same old crap we always get from the Republicans and the Democrats alike," he wrote, "and I see Obama as the sort of person who might attract that yearning.
"Much as I admire Fouad Ajami, he, too, should stick to foreign affairs - in the Middle East!! What he doesn't understand is that there is absolutely no parallel between an American crowd and the 'Arab street.' They differ in literally every conceivable respect except numbers! The only thing [equivalent] we have here in America is a large pool of devout racists, some of whom, under sufficient, intemperate incitement, might decide to take this matter into their own hands."
And that's something the CIA's old boys know something about.
As they shuffled toward the polling lines outside Christ Church in Georgetown Tuesday morning, I thought I could see it in their eyes.
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