Abstract
Commentary 1: Notes from the other bank of the Potomac
Andrew Friedman’s densely researched, beautifully written and deeply geographical account of the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC as the ‘covert capital’ of the post-Second World War US empire is as fine a piece of scholarship as I have read in many years on any subject. His meticulous mapping of the connections between individual actors in the evolving covert complex spanning the Pentagon, Dulles Airport and CIA headquarters in Langley, VA, and of the political tissues linking their violent imperial adventures in Vietnam, Central America or the Middle East to the everyday lives and built environments of Northern Virginia, is so full of felicitous thoughts and phrases that the reader despairs at the task of selecting any particular illustrative passages. Covert Capital is at once a piece of classic geography (locating people and activities in places) and a cutting edge exploration of the convoluted topologies of those places. The spatial figures of the covert capital are, as Friedman so deftly brings out in his readings of the lives and liaisons of his subjects, heavily laden with affective energies modulated by ideologies and performances of gender, race and nationality.
As a privileged white male who grew up in the suburbs of DC during the 1970s and 1980s, and whose biography has been intimately entangled with the multi-scalar processes of empire Friedman describes, reading Covert Capital has given me invaluable insight into my own local and family context, and the impact of this context upon my own formation as a subject. I grew up in the Maryland suburbs, which are almost entirely absent from Friedman’s narrative, though they are linked in complex ways both to the geopolitical nexus of Northern Virginia and to the ‘overt capital’ of Washington DC itself. In the series of maps of Northern Virginia sprinkled throughout the book, suburban Maryland, like DC, appears as a featureless space, a space named (‘Montgomery County’) but otherwise unpunctuated by places or people relevant to the covert capital. I will draw on my own indigenous, though of course not necessarily representative, knowledge of the region both to argue that ‘covert’ and ‘overt’ cannot be so neatly mapped onto the two sides of the Potomac and, in an ancillary point, to note that Friedman’s narrative of US empire strangely devotes little time to the category of overt US military activity, which sits uncomfortably between public accountability and violent subversion of democratic and human rights.
Much of my own experience suggests that Friedman’s cartographic amalgamation of Maryland with ‘overt’ DC as an area of less consequence for covert activity is justified. Some of the political dimensions of difference across the Potomac are obvious. Northern Virginia has a long tradition of political conservatism. By contrast, Montgomery County, MD, the quintessential seat of suburban cultural liberalism and social conscience, along with Prince George’s County just to the east, long home to a large black middle class, have both been reliable Democratic bastions. Most of the public-sector or government-related jobs held by people I grew up with and know have been with agencies of light and public knowledge (such as the Library of Congress or the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), rather than those of shadows and secrecy.
Residential spaces in the Maryland suburbs don’t seem to have as many geopolitical secrets to ‘hide in the open’ as do their Northern Virginia counterparts. My mother was a real estate agent in the Maryland suburbs. Most of her foreign clients were diplomats attached to embassies or were parts of relatively prosperous chain migrations. As Friedman makes clear, suburban landscapes of denial could and often did link innocuous institutions such as ethnic restaurants to the machinations of empire. And diplomats can of course also be spies. However, it is striking how seldom my mother spoke of clients with any links even to the overt, military side of the defense-security complex that so strongly marks Northern Virginia.
The impression of a neat geographical overt-covert split at the Potomac is further reinforced by other aspects of the local political landscape. Perhaps most telling in terms of political symbolism is the fact that Takoma Park and Garrett Park, two of the first three municipalities in the US to declare themselves nuclear-free zones, are located in the inner Maryland suburbs. As Friedman makes clear, such initiatives would not have found much resonance in Northern Virginia.
If the anecdotal evidence related so far were the entire story, the message of this commentary would simply be that Friedman’s illuminating narrative needs supplementing with a proper study of the ‘overt’ Maryland suburbs whose features I have only barely begun to sketch here. This would be valuable in any case, but things are more complicated, for me personally as for the overt-covert dichotomy in general. Even in institutional terms, as Friedman would undoubtedly acknowledge, the dichotomy is too neat. US empire (covert as well as overt) also has a major footprint north and east of the Potomac, most obviously in the massive NSA complex at Fort Meade, MD, and in the thousands of Maryland residents who either work there or depend indirectly upon the NSA. One of my high school classmates has worked at the NSA since the mid-1980s, where she started out as a Bulgaria specialist (though I never learned what this meant exactly). Over dinner at my mother’s retirement home last year I learned that one of her 80+-year-old table mates was a career NSA hand. After revealing this, he gave me a mischievous smile and clearly savored his chance to deliver what is undoubtedly a long-standing cocktail party punchline among NSA employees, ‘Now I’m afraid I’ll have to kill you’, before returning to his buttered carrots.
In keeping with Friedman’s typically pithy dictum that ‘the personal is the geopolitical’ (p. 301), the overt-covert dichotomy reaches much further than this into my family and circle of Maryland friends. My father, a computer programmer and software engineer, worked on a series of programming projects relating to telephone, billing and urban transportation before gravitating in the 1970s toward the more shadowy activities of the covert capital. At LINK Systems in Northern Virginia, as far as I can tell from the few papers he left, he wrote software for fighter jet simulators and a range of other complex systems. The short post-Vietnam hiatus in large-scale military and covert activity of the late 1970s that Friedman chronicles was a period of unemployment, stress and heart attacks for my father, who then recovered to work in the 1980s for Information Spectrum, Inc. (ISI), a classic Reagan-era military-covert contractor.
In Friedman’s compelling account of Reagan-era landscapes of Tyson’s Corner, he observes that the compartmentation-by-privatization of covert activities into the bland modernist office cubes and major chain hotels that sprang up there during the 1980s was a logical development of the CIA doctrine of compartmentation and plausible deniability. My father’s trajectory brought him directly into this world. Somewhere along this path he was granted ‘secret’-level DoD clearance, and may have spent time in the ‘Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities’ (SCIFs) which Friedman so effectively places at the heart of the covert capital’s opaque architecture. I found a floor plan of ISI’s offices in my father’s papers. No rooms are explicitly identified as SCIFs, but in line with the logic Friedman lays out, the conference rooms are all located at the core of the building, as far away from exterior surfaces as possible. In any event, my father was clearly one of tens of thousands of desk operatives for the US empire.
However, the fact that he was centered in Maryland meant that the relation between his work and his suburban context was different than what Friedman chronicles for Northern Virginia. Silver Spring, Takoma Park, Kensington and surrounding areas were and are well known as Democratic or progressive suburbs. My father embraced this public political orientation even while helping to hone the capabilities of US empire abroad.
More interestingly for me, this dual existence in Maryland and Virginia appeared to me to strain his sense of his own masculine credentials in a way that complicates Friedman’s narrative of the Reagan-era attempt to put an end to the Vietnam Syndrome. My father had been in the military (as a motor pool mechanic, in Japan and Korea), but had almost no combat experience, and his military experience was not essential to his identity. However, he was surrounded at work by people whose identities were strongly organized around military masculine ideals, and it was clear to me as a teenager already that the macho environment in which he worked caused him some difficulties. He came home with a full quiver of sexist jokes and swashbuckling phrases that never quite squared with the many other generous and non-aggressive aspects of his personality. Outside of the covert capital context, his masculine self-image seemed much more strongly tied to the alternative ideals of impartiality and cool calculation typical for the natural sciences.
One of my oldest friends is in a similarly disjointed position now. Again, his career seems to follow the stations of Friedman’s argument in everything except the formative suburban Maryland milieu and liberal family culture. His parents are both of Chicago-area Irish-American extraction and trained as educators. He did a degree in finance and started out selling residential alarm systems to wealthy homeowners in the 1980s (Friedman’s account of the ironic connection between the growing DC-area refugee populations generated by the destructive adventures of the covert capital and the racialized fear these same populations instill in local whites is another of the many elegantly argued points in the book). My friend is now a high-ranking civilian official in the military establishment, and as such is clearly privy to all kinds of sensitive information about DARPA budgets and classified research. With him I have the literally familiar experience of not having known anything specific about what he does for decades now. When I am visiting the DC area, my friend and I can usually only talk or make plans after 7pm because he spends so much of his long workdays in SCIFs, without access to his cell phone.
Like my father’s, though, my friend’s political views are far to the left of those of most of his colleagues. In his conversation, too, it is not hard to hear the pressure of the hyper-masculine behavioral norms and conservative cant he faces at work. One of the telling phrases that pops up repeatedly in his occasional stories about the hard-asses he works with is ‘these guys’. The phrase ‘these guys’ comes in one of two modes. Either it introduces an awed account of just how crazy/tough/uncompromising ‘these guys’ he works with are, or alternatively, it frames stories he has heard from ‘these guys’ about even crazier/tougher military ‘guys’ from other countries. It would be interesting to explore further the extent to which the peculiar ability of social and cultural liberals in the US to tolerate or support violent US imperialism abroad is motivated not just by perceived economic self-interest but also by a gendered logic of compensation for the permanent failure of so many men to live up to the ideals of masculinity embodied by military ‘guys’. In this sense, the (c)overt suburbs of Maryland may provide a different piece of the puzzle of US imperialism to that legible in Northern Virginia.
There are roughly 145,000 federal workers in Maryland, as against 173,000 in Virginia and 204,000 in DC (Governing the States and Localities, 2016). How many from the Maryland contingent are actually involved in the core activities of the covert capital is difficult to estimate. Certainly the numbers are smaller than in Northern Virginia. But they are just as certainly not negligible, especially if the military is not simply classed as a set of ‘overt’ institutions. The contractors for which my father worked, for example, did jobs for the military, but probably also for covert agencies or for other covert private contractors. They formed part of the shadowy infrastructure for both. Friedman’s early chapters give the Pentagon a central place in the development and significance of the Dulles corridor, but it drops from view as the book proceeds. The resulting impression is that the lack of public oversight and democratic accountability enjoyed by operatives of the covert capital constitutes a distinct world from that of the armed forces. The Global War on Terror of the George W. Bush administration should have put this impression to rest.
Although this commentary has been based chiefly upon unrepresentative personal anecdotes, it has hopefully at least established the point that the seemingly straightforward overt-covert dichotomy Friedman aligns with the Potomac River needs both supplementation and complication. The Maryland suburbs both play a role (if a subordinate one) in the machinations of the covert capital and, in doing so, produce and reproduce fundamentally different trans-scalar constellations linking everyday suburban life and US empire. To the extent that my own family and friends are any indication, one feature of these constellations is a comparatively stark disjuncture between local political cultures and underlaboring for empire. Another distinctive feature, for many men at least, is a potentially stressful accompanying split experience of norms and performances of masculinity.