NATIONAL SECURITY'S NEW INSIDERS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000100460009-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 20, 2010
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: March 3, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/20: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100460009-1
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
3 March, 1985
NATIONAL
SECURITY'S
NEW INSIDER
By Michael Wright
HERE IS SACEUR?"
demands a voice from
the command post.
All hell is breaking
loose in the Balkans,
the Persian Gulf is
ablaze with burning tankers, and the
Supreme Allied Commander Europe -
Saceur - is AWOL. He turns up,
breathless, 10 minutes late, explaining
that his pregnant wife had a false alarm.
It is crisis-simulation time at Johns
Hopkins University's School of Advanced
International Studies.
And once Saceur has
taken his place at a
crowded table bedecked
with miniature national
flags of the North
Atlantic Treaty
Organization, the game
resumes.
Ph.D's. An instructor and four students
who helped draft the 26-page game plan
preside at their slightly elevated
command post.
The player taking the role of the Greek
Ambassador bristles when he hears that
American infantry units have been
alerted for deployment from the United
States to the Persian Gulf. Greece needs
those troops, he complains, in view of the
just-disclosed Bulgarian invasion of
Yugoslavia. At the halfway break, the
"diplomats" and "generals" huddle
over coffee and chocolate-chip cookies,
trying to reach informal agreement on
actions that would
More than ever insure allied comity and
good grades. The control
before, civilian - group concocts a
Specialists are destabilizing element"
for the scenario: The
involved in war- Soviet Union is
interfering with flights
and-peace games, into West Berlin and
Here in the university
"war room" four floors above
Massachusetts Avenue, in the heart of
Washington's diplomatic quarter, the
uniforms of the day include pin-stripe
suits and sweatshirts. In real life, the 18
players are a cross section of the
Washington scene. One is an assistant
naval attache at the Spanish Embassy.
Another is an American Foreign Service
officer soon to be posted to Europe. A
third covers the Defense Department for
a news magazine. Most of the rest are
graduate students working for their
Michael Wright is an editor of The Week
in Review section of The Times.
moving troops toward
the German frontier. A little something
to make the class improvise in a hurry.
Almost any week, similar scenes take
place in campus war rooms across the
country. For these are boom times for
the national-security community - that
eminently American phenomenon that
combines civilian expertise with
government dollars to produce a flow of
studies and recommendations for the
better use of American military power.
In most other countries with
substantial military forces, such
planning is left to the government's
career bureaucracy. In the United States
these days, it is the 2,000 or so specialists
Continued
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/20: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100460009-1