A Time for War by Michael Savage Read Free Book Online Page A

Doc and Abe inevitably brought up the 1960s again. They were a microcosm of the era: the my-country-right-or-wrong warrior and the unreformed hippie. Despite the extremes, there was nonetheless common ground: the longing for an era when both sides still cared about the country, and put the well-being of the United States before their personal needs. That was gone now, swallowed by the sinkhole of entitlements and putting hyphenate interests before the best interests of the nation.
    â€œAmerica really is at a tipping point,” Jack said at the end of the meal.
    Bruno had come out to say good-bye to them. “The world is at a tipping point,” he said.
    â€œThe world is always in peril,” Jack said. “Americans are accustomed to disagreements and even a little chaos. But even the Civil War was between two big factions, big ideas. To feel the foundations of the country being undermined by countless little cracks and self-interests for the first time—that’s new to us.”
    â€œThere’s no patching it,” Abe said. “It’s over.”
    â€œI don’t believe that,” Jack said. “As long as people of different opinions can be brought to the same table by common ground, as we do all the time, we will endure.”
    Suitland, Maryland
    When the Office of Naval Intelligence was founded in 1882, its charter was to “evaluate” the navies of other countries. That was government-speak for “spy.” After the attack on the battleship Maine in the Havana, Cuba, harbor in 1898, the ONI charter was expanded to include the “protection of Navy personnel and the ferreting out of spies and saboteurs.” Its mission remains unchanged, and as the oldest such agency in the American military the ONI has a high degree of autonomy within the larger National Maritime Intelligence Agency, which is itself a part of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
    Suitland is an unincorporated community in Prince George’s County and a suburb of Washington, D.C. When Dover Griffith moved there five years ago after graduating from NYU, she told her parents that the town was famous for being the home of the Census Bureau and having the highest crime rate in the county. She found it darkly amusing that the murder rate caused residency data to fluctuate wildly, but her parents didn’t see the joke. They worried whether their five-foot-seven daughter, with blond hair and blue eyes, was too easy a target.
    Griffith had landed the job in D.C. when she was thirty-one years old, just after she received her master’s degree in journalism. During her final summer in New York, while earning tuition money at the sales counter of the Strand Book Store, she wrote a play called Ops Attract about a pair of spies who fall in love. It played Off-Off-Broadway as part of the Fringe Festival and was well reviewed; it was seen by the Director of Civilian Operations for the ONI, who asked for Griffith’s resumé and offered her a job when she graduated. Since there were precious few jobs to be had in traditional journalism, she accepted the position. Dover’s grandfather—a pilot in the Royal Air Force who was shot down by the Luftwaffe over the White Cliffs, hence her name—would have been proud.
    â€œExcept for the part about him risking his life and me sitting at a desk,” she had told her parents when she returned from her interview in Suitland.
    â€œIt took people on the ground, in bunkers, to invent the radar that told him where to go,” her father had said.
    After a four-month training session at the National Maritime Intelligence Training Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Griffith took up residence in the sprawling 4-story, 226-acre complex at the Suitland Federal Complex where she edited the internal publication Eyes On, a traditional tabloid-size newspaper that was part news, part social calendar for all of the ONI. Because she was able to reduce complex