Decency

by Rex Fuller

  “You wanted to see me?”

  “Hey, yeah, Bonnie. Thanks for your good work. Come on in.”

  “Thanks.”

  Bonnie Cummings was dressed for success, as every new associate lawyer in the world must be. Otherwise, the risk of wasting the investment in legal education, hers at Georgetown Law, was too great. At 24, single, and blessed with the even features of her Anglo-Saxon forebears, she was, perhaps, too slender for her own good.

  “The background in your e-mail was just right. No need to expand it just yet. But I do need you to do some actual legal work now.”

  “Sure.”

  “I need you to run down all of the relevant filing deadlines in this case. The death was nearly three years ago and the parents believe the statute of limitations is about to expire. That issue is discussed in the Omaha lawyer’s memo that I am giving you. I’ll need the administrative deadlines and the statutes of limitations for filing suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act, the Federal Employees Compensation Act, the Maryland wrongful death statute, the whistleblower statute - I can’t remember what its actual title is -and for Constitutional torts. Assume for now that relevant acts occurred up to three years prior to the death. Got it?”

  As she finished jotting it down she repeated, “FTCA, FECA, Maryland wrongful death, whistleblower, and Constitutional torts, up to three years prior to seven months ago. May I make a suggestion?”

  “Shoot.”

  “The Privacy Act.”

  “It’s a possibility. Most rights under it are extinguished by death, I believe. Wouldn’t hurt, though.”

  “Anything else.”

  “Yes, draft a complaint against the U.S. and the psychologist who evaluated Samantha, a motion for leave to file motions in camera, and a subpoena all to be served as part of the initial service of process. The minute we get enough evidence to have a reasonably good faith set of allegations, I want to file, in no event later than the third anniversary of death.”

  “Okay. Thanks for letting me work on this, Ms. Hawkins. It looks interesting.”

  “It might get interesting. NSA is a powerful entity. In the wrong hands that power can go awry. Hang on while I get our investigator cracking on collecting the witnesses’ stories. It’s been three years almost so we can’t expect much. But it’s the one thing the Pierces are really anxious to get.”

  Kelly dialed the number.

  “Van Gilder Agency.”

  The firm’s private investigator, Rudiger Van Gilder, “Gil” to all who know him, was a contradiction. He had his father’s Dutch stubborn determination and his mother’s sunny disposition and Irish passion for life. The stubbornness got him through law school and the passion turned him off from the dry practice of law. Next to his only wife and three kids, he loved food most of all, Italian, Mexican and country style American, in that considered order and his two hundred fifty six pounds on a five feet eleven frame showed it. He also inherited his father’s Dutch appreciation for a dollar. That was why his investigative business was geared to serving insurance companies. They paid.

  “Gil, this is Kelly Hawkins, how you doin’?”

  “Hey, Kelly, fine. What can I do for you?”

  “I have a new case. The name is Samantha Pierce. She died in Odenton about three years ago. We’re running up against the statute of limitations. Can you pretty much drop everything and concentrate on it?”

  “You know me, I can do anything if the price is right.”

  “Good. Try to get everything you can, interview the pathologist especially, the death certificate said natural causes and we think it might not have been. Also, the cops on the scene, if any. And try to check out their stories as much as you can. Get back to me in three days with whatever you have.”

  “Will do.”

  A neat, well-turned out woman in her sixties answered the door.

  “Mrs. Yoakum?”

  “Yes. Are you Ms. Hawkins?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Come in. My husband is expecting you.”

  She led Kelly down the hall of the Victorian house to the basement stairs and called down,

  “John, Ms. Hawkins is here.”

  A rumbling voice answered.

  “Excellent! Come on down.”

  Dr. John Yoakum stood like a lumberjack beaming up the stairs. His thinning, wild white hair and close cropped full beard encased a ruddy face. A red flannel shirt collar poked out of the neck of a heavy beige sweater that seemed big enough to cover a baby bed. Still at least six feet four, and well over two hundred fifty pounds, John Yoakum must have been a bear as a younger man.

  “Good to see you, Kelly Hawkins, welcome to my hideout.”

  As the basement room came into view it was what you might think of as a “man’s man’s” dream den. One wall was all photos, plaques, and framed certificates chronicling a long career. Another showed off at least a dozen fish and game trophies. A third wall had three television screens, a sound system, and a ham radio. The last wall was a work center featuring a computer, printer, fax machine, photo copier, and a library of several hundred volumes. The center of the room had a cluster of leather covered furniture and flokati rugs seemed to spread out everywhere.

  Yoakum’s handshake was vigorous, with his left clasped over their joined hands.

  “Very pleased to meet you, Dr. Yoakum. I admire your den.”

  “Thanks. I don’t really have to leave here for days at a time. There’s a refrigerator down here. I can make coffee or tea if you’d like some.”

  “Coffee would be great.”

  Disappearing through an unnoticed door, Yoakum called back.

  “It’s my own blend of espresso, kona, and Colombian. It’s good if you like it strong.”

  “Sounds fine.”

  The whirring buzz of the coffee bean grinder lasted a full thirty seconds.

  As Yoakum reappeared, he gestured to the plush leather chairs.

  “So you just need background on the NSA’s psychology office?”

  “Yes, I’m not interested, at least not now, in any individuals or in anything that might be classified. I’ve looked at their website and other published material.”

  Yoakum laughed. “The website is their whore in church routine, Sunday show has little to do with the way they make a living.”

  Kelly smiled.

  “Kelly…it’s okay if I call you Kelly, isn’t it? And please call me John.” He did not wait for consent. “I chuckle about your saying ‘anything that might be classified.’ As you probably know, over there they think their shoe sizes are classified. But really, it’s pretty easy to steer well clear of the specific information I have from when I was there, which I’m still bound to keep to myself.”

  “Abe said you’d be that way.”

  “Good ol’ Abe. We go way back…” A wistful note softened into his voice,

  “How is he?”

  “Fine. He said to tell you he promises to get in touch and catch up soon.”

  “He already did leave a voice mail. I owe him a call back…Anyway, you’ve come to the right guy. I was present almost at the creation. Let me get our coffee and I’m all yours.”

  He ducked back into the other room and emerged with two oversized mugs of a great smelling brew.

  “Here we go. Anything in it?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well now, the saga of NSA psychologists. Please understand I’m going to give you only what you can find in the public record if you know where to look and look hard enough. I’m not going to mention any names.”

  Yoakum waited, with a steady, unsmiling gaze.

  “Understand.”

  Yoakum then explained that first, from the point of view of psychology, NSA had from the very start been a place where special demands were placed on people. NSA had to find very talented people who were satisfied to do some rather tedious work that required exquisite precision. The people had to be satisfied with doing their work without so much as a shred of recognit
ion from outside of the organization - not even from family.

  He said the slang phrase for this kind of people used to be ‘nerds.’ What with the rise of the personal computer the term now was ‘geeks,’ and not a pejorative anymore. The easiest way to get a handle on this was to think of NSA as the biggest bunch of geeks there is.

  The work, he said, was crushingly grueling and precise. What they did had always involved looking at millions, and millions, and millions of coded words, decoding them, translating them to English, and sorting them out by subject matter and significance. If you wanted to test yourself on how challenging that can be, watch television for about eight hours straight and count the number of times the word ‘the’ occurred. That was a lot like the process of deciphering code.

  So, he said, the nature of the work process was inherently stressful and only people psychologically equipped for it were going to be any good at it.

  Next, you had to understand something about the stresses that arose from the nature of the information that was involved in this work. By definition, coded information was intended to be secret. But if your code was broken, the secret was revealed. You did all sorts of things to protect the information. You tried to make it look valueless. Obviously, at minimum, you changed codes. You made it harder to find information that needed to be coded subsequently. The code breaker had to duplicate previous effort, to break the new code. Plus, he had to go check information in the new code against all sorts of screens to see if it was bogus, or otherwise designed to mask the value of the information that was in the old, broken code.

  In other words, the worst possible thing you can do, just from the point of view of your own efficiency was to allow any hint that what you were doing was successful.

  So, it meant you had to tightly control the channels that the results of your work flowed in. Simply put, there was no such thing as ‘water cooler chat’ about it, or ‘sharing your day’ with family when you went home.

  From the point of view of human psychology, you needed people who could tolerate being kept in the dark about everything that was going on around them. They had to be able to stomach a kind of perpetual solitary confinement in terms of contact with others.

  “Any questions so far?”

  “And you were actually able to find any of these geek mushrooms to work there?”

  Yoakum smiled.

  “You got the point. I’ll take that as a compliment about my communication skills which aren’t always what they should be.”

  He sipped the coffee.

  “Now, next you need to add another layer of psychological stress. Because you have to precisely control the flow of all of this information, you have to cross-check whether your controls are working. You have to be watching your people with all of your other people. They have to report any discrepancies in procedures. These ‘geek mushrooms,’ as you put it, also have to be rats.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Isn’t it? However, we have to make a distinction here. Lots of people have to keep secrets. Priests, and psychologists…what am I saying…I’m talking to a lawyer…in your own law firm you have all kinds of client secrets that are not supposed to be shared across your entire payroll and you also have ethical duties to report and minimize harm from unauthorized disclosures. So, it’s not so much the kind of stresses, as it is the intensity of them, that is difficult to deal with.”

  Yoakum continued. The next point was that from the employee’s point of view, the hardest part of all was that it just did not let up. It never went away and it never changed. Kind of like water behind a dam it will seek out any little crack and push against it, unremittingly.

  When the person’s mental and emotional make-up began to compensate for this was when you got the problems. In the population at large you would see stress compensation across the spectrum from violence, such as spouse abuse, to complete mental implosion. In the more rigorously selected population at NSA, you were more likely to find anxiety, depression and paranoia.

  So, NSA had always understood it needed psychological expertise to both recruit and select the right people and to identify problems with them as they developed. So, it always had some kind of psychological evaluation.

  But in the beginning the personnel who performed the psych evals were way too few in number to really do any good and their functions were somewhat ill-defined. Generally, they provided advice to management about a variety of issues.

  In 1960, the proverbial stuff hit the fan. Two of NSA’s people defected and went to Moscow. The result was not a pretty sight. NSA superiors lost their jobs. And Congress did a rain dance.

  There was a Commission to study the problem. One of the recommendations was to revamp the psychology assets. They added more, both psychiatrists and psychologists. They more clearly directed them toward screening of applicants, designing pre-employment tests, designing post-employment evaluation tools and techniques, and the like.

  Eventually, the psychiatrists left, apparently because NSA did not differentiate them from psychologists. For a good while, there was a tidy battle between two basic functions, one represented by industrial psychologists and one represented by clinical psychologists, as to who was in control. This still continued to some extent, but the two had largely settled into their spheres.

  The industrial psychologists designed qualifications, pre-employment testing and post employment measurement tools. The clinical psychologists did the evaluations of individuals referred to them by management to determine continued reliability. There was a third group that dealt with treatment of individual employees.

  But the bottom line was the clinical psychologists did not see themselves as called upon to do anything but evaluate individuals that management referred to them and to report back to management.

  Yoakum stopped speaking and it caught Kelly by surprise. Slowly Kelly formed a thought. An awful thought.

  “Dr. Yoakum…John…am I to understand that there is no incentive for the psychologists doing the evaluations at NSA to do anything other than what management wants them to do?”

  Yoakum’s gaze was utterly unflinching and he did not speak.

  “My God…!

  “Kelly, that’s not quite all there is.”

  “What?”

  “Put yourself in a government worker’s shoes. The thing you fear most of all after you have a few years under your belt is losing your pay and pension. To many, losing that or the threat of it is worse than the threat of death. Death is an end, maybe with life insurance to take care of surviving loved ones. Losing financial security is worse because you don’t know if it will end. It’s not too strong to say it’s a threat of economic torture.”

  “So…a psychologist…answering to management…can take your job with a bad evaluation…”

  “From the worker’s perspective it’s sort of like the Inquisition.”

  …Stalin’s political purges…?

  “John, I don’t intend this to sound mean, but how much can a psychologist fake?”

  “Was it Brandeis who said the lawyer who defines the facts wins the case?”

  “I think so. How do you know that?”

  “See these books.” He gestured to the wall behind him. “Morbid curiosity about a lot of things. Law is one of them. Psychology and law have Brandeis’ point in common. The conclusions one draws in either area depend on analysis. The analysis depends upon facts. The facts depend on the perception of the analyst. So you have facts scuttling over and around each other like a basket of Maryland crabs. One or two catch holds change and the facts totter among each other and the analysis swings off in another direction. The analyst is in control of the perceptions, and therefore, of the facts, the analysis and, perforce, the conclusions. The analyst controls the conclusions.”

  …Samantha’s description of psych evals easily fit the general pattern…

  “Thanks, John, I think. That’s what I need to know for now. I hope I can call on you again.”

  “Ke
lly, I’ll be happy to tell you anything I can tell you. Call me any time.”

  …no incentive to buck management, threat of economic torture, and control…

  13

  Sitting in the Old Post Office Pavilion, sipping good coffee had become a favorite escape. The Pavilion was one of the successful Pennsylvania Avenue redevelopment projects. The huge interior space was beautifully executed and was a good place to stop and unwind. It offered diversion in the form of people-watching and relaxation in the form of anonymous isolation.

  You could easily get hooked on this. Wonder if that is what happens to you when you lose something important? Can you just drift away from daily obligations? Is that happening?

  A friendly man, probably just shy of fifty, abruptly sat down at the same table, murmuring, “Mind if I join you?”

  But he did not wait for permission. Typical.

  “No. Fine. I’m about to leave anyway.”

  Swathed in a nondescript charcoal suit, his smart burgundy silk tie shone against a gleaming white shirt like blood on snow. He was finely groomed and had an air of authority. He leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table, smiling.

  “Ms. Hawkins, you are entering Wonderland, where nothing is as it seems.”

  The statement struck like a rifle shot. He might just as well have said, “The back of your chair is on fire.”

  “What…?”

  “Sorry to jump you.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “Because I believe you could do great good but could suffer great harm in the process.”

  “What the hell does that mean, and who the hell are you?”

  “If you will permit me, I am simply here to warn you…”

  “Not if you jump me this way. You’re here to make me think there is something to be warned about. You can ‘warn’ me after introducing yourself.”

  “I take your point. Again, I apologize for the…surprise. But hear me out.”

  He paused, apparently calculating his words.

  “Simply put, I know that you represent the parents of a deceased NSA employee…”

  “Wait a minute. How do you ‘know’? It’s not a secret, but outside of my firm only the parents themselves know that.”