Even an outsider to the Beltway's inside could see it coming: the christening of a new buzz word in Washington, where news cycles travel faster than a speeding bullet. Remember al-Qaida? If our post-Sept. 11 lexicon now includes such phrases as "the Phoenix Memo" and "Watch Lists, " then "The Wall" could be included as well.
"The Wall" has been the reverent nickname for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. But this past month, another kind of wall has become visible: the historical wall that can hinder intelligence sharing among the country's intelligence community, namely the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.
This wall has been a persistent image in the hearings held to investigate U.S. intelligence failures in the 18 months before Sept. 11. At the Hart Senate Office building, FBI agents working in terrorism have testified they couldn't open criminal investigations based on intelligence information because of "the wall." Their jarring testimony seemed right at home in a government building primed for drama.
The entire Hart building was closed for three months in last year's anthrax scare, and Room 216 - the site of the joint 9/11 hearings - served briefly as the anthrax testing site for Senate workers. Once dubbed "the capital's Scandal Central," Room 216 was home to the Keating Five hearings in 1990 and hearings on illegal campaign fund-raising allegations in 1997.
With balconies for TV studios and telegenic marble, wood paneling and red table coverings, the room is bathed in hot lights and equipped with screens for concealing witnesses' identities. During the current hearings, an opaque screen was replaced by a completely darkened wall. The made-for-TV hearing room is as fitting a government site as any for putting up walls - and exposing them.
A wall is a daunting image - the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China. Unlike a ceiling, a wall theoretically can be scaled. The walls between and inside U.S. intelligence agencies evoke the image of bodies of information trying to get a leg up and over. As one joint committee member asked, "How damn high" must that information get to get over the wall? Damn high, obviously.
"I used to believe in the wall, but I don't now," says Washington attorney Stewart Baker, former general counsel to the National Security Agency. "What you're seeing is a crumbling of a mindset."
The hearings have made an argument for the mindset's crumbling.
