A Brush with the Past

A few weeks ago I wrote about mysterious sights at sea. Here’s another one:

My grandfather, the painter Charles Hopkinson, had a lifelong love affair with the sea and ships of all sizes. In school and college he filled his books and papers (at times including examination papers, to the consternation of his teachers) with doodles and detailed sketches of skiffs, sloops, schooners, ketches, yawls, catboats, brigs, barques, and clipper ships. Long after school – indeed,  throughout his life – he would draw little sketches in the margins of books on ships and the sea to explain how a particular part of a ship's rigging worked, or to correct an error in the text or an illustration.

He sailed whenever he had a chance. As a boy summering in Maine he learned to handle small boats, and he was seldom without a sailboat of his own after he was married and settled down at the house in Manchester, Massachusetts, where he lived and painted for the rest of his life. Racing was not his thing, and he did not go in for long cruises either. Messing about in small boats was what he loved best, and he took great pleasure in passing along this joy to daughters and grandchildren alike.

Some of us took to it more than others, for this gentlest of men ashore was a stickler for perfection at sea: we soon learned that there was only one way to tie up a dinghy, fasten a halyard to a cleat, or to “shoot” a mooring (bring a boat up to the mooring buoy by turning into the wind and letting the sails luff at just the right point so that the vessel came to a complete halt just as its bow kissed against the buoy). If you didn't manage these and the myriad other skills a sailor must know just right, he'd have you do them again and again. To a small boy (and he started to teach me to sail when I was 8 or 9), he would seem a gruff taskmaster. But I remember that when I did master one of these skills at last, he was warm with his praise.

Charles Hopkinson in his (other) element

One July day in 1945, when I was eleven, he decided I was ready to handle his 17-foot centerboard sloop, the Armada, alone (almost alone; he'd be a passenger while I rowed us out in the dinghy, made sail, and handled tiller and sheets on a short sail around Egg Rock and back). The day was bright and clear, with a gentle breeze ruffling the water, and not a cloud in the sky.

He put a couple of sandwiches in a paper bag, squashed a weather-beaten hat on his head, and took

the oars out of the hall closet. The oarlocks clanged together, bringing John Joiner, his little Welsh terrier, bounding out of his wingback chair to join us. He was not about to miss a sail.

We walked together the half mile to the cove – through the woods, past the barn, through the orchard and along the lane to Kettle Cove, where the Armada was moored. I carried a bag with our lunch and our sweaters; my grandfather carried the oars across his shoulder; the oarlocks, dangling from their lanyards, chimed (e-flat) as they swung together with each step he took.

The tide in the cove was high. The venerable rowboat bobbed at the end of its running line fifty feet off the beach. I waded out a few feet to uncoil the line from its rock and pulled in the dinghy hand over hand, the water dripping off the line and soaking the front of my dungarees. The dinghy scraped on the gravel shore, the dog leapt aboard, I untied the boat, swung it around and we climbed aboard.

Under my grandfather’s watchful eye I rowed us out, carefully feathering the oars at every stroke. We were soon aboard the sloop. I tied the dinghy’s painter to the eye splice on the mooring pennant with a bowline, finished off with two half-hitches, unlaced the sail cover and stowed it away under the foredeck, hung the rudder on the transom, lowered the centerboard, hoisted the mainsail and jib, and cast off, leaving the dinghy rocking on the mooring.

We were soon out beyond Egg Rock. My grandfather hadn't said a word about my steering or sail handling. I was aglow with happiness. Then, almost without warning we were in thick fog.

The wind died away at the same moment, and we were left to rise and fall on the oily swell coming in from the east. The sea was gray satin, with only an occasional ripple to show there was still a ghost of a breeze.

We sat and waited. After a while he took a stub of a pencil out of his pocket and sharpened it with the jackknife he produced from another pocket. The shavings curled over the side. He produced an envelope from somewhere else, flattened it out, and began to sketch: a Gloucester fishing schooner heading home from the Banks with a trip o’ fish, thrashing along under shortened sail into a sou’wester. In a few strokes he had captured the driving wind, the long dark seas, the pounding of the hull into the waves, the decks awash with water pouring through the scuppers, the struggle of the helmsman to keep a sharp lookout and hold the vessel on course.

“Time for a bite to eat?” he asked me. I started to fish the sandwiches out of the bag, then stopped. I had heard a voice, off to port.

Then another, louder, more distinct; then a muffled laugh.

Then the creak of a block as a line worked back and forth over its sheave. The sound of heavy spars rubbing against one another. Something huge was out there in the fog, just beyond our narrow circle of vision.

Then the fog scaled up, and ... O, GLORY! A huge square-rigged ship loomed up above us, all sails set and drawing in the gentle breeze, easing along to the westward. We stared dumbfounded at the sight. Could it be real? Was it a mirage? A trick of the fog? A warp in time? What square-­rigger could be still be sailing in 1945? My grandfather would know, I was sure -- but a look at his face, as open-mouthed as mine, told me that he was as astonished as I, and not quite sure whether we were looking at reality or a ghostly apparition.

Three or four men stood along the vessel's starboard rail high above us; one, smoking a pipe, leaned over the side to wave, looking real enough. The water bubbled along the square-rigger's broad flanks and rippled outward to lap against our hull, rocking us back and forth; that too was real. John Joiner, loafing in the bilges, didn't seem overly impressed.

As quickly as the ship had appeared, she passed us by to disappear into the mist once more. But we both saw her name as she ghosted by: Joseph Conrad was picked out on her broad black transom in bright white letters.

The Joseph Conrad now lies at Mystic Seaport, where's she's been moored to a dock for most of the sixty-four years since her ghostly appearance off Cape Ann.

The Joseph Conrad

The Author, 1945
Portrait by Charles Hopkinson

A version of this story appeared in the Gloucester Daily Times in 2009

Our Top Secret World

The ongoing sagas of whistle blowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have brought to the public eye the astonishing extent of secret programs run by branches of the United States government. Just the number of people cleared for Top Secret information and its more specialized, still more secret sub-compartments is mind-boggling:  since 2010, government agencies have  been required to report the number of persons holding security clearances. By 2012 the number had risen to over 4 million, nearly 1.5 million of whom were cleared for Top Secret.

But that’s only part of the story. Top Secret clearance alone will allow authorized personnel access to a large body of classified information, but there are clearances beyond Top Secret provided only to people involved with specific intelligence and other national security programs. The number of people with such special clearances has not  been made public, but it too may number in the tens – maybe even hundreds --  of thousands. And people cleared for some of these programs might not be cleared for others, thereby adding yet another element of confusion to an intelligence system already bogged down with more secret information than humans are able to handle.

I lived in this bizarre world for a  few years. In the mid-1950s I was an infantry officer stationed in the Panama Canal Zone. When my tour there was up, I was sent, to my surprise, to the Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, MD, to learn to be a photo interpreter. After six months of training, I reported with a few other graduates to the Pentagon, where we were informed that we had been selected to study aerial photos taken by the then-secret U-2 high altitude spy plane. We were all cleared for Top Secret, but also for a special subcategory of Top Secret reserved for people working with the U-2 photos. A special codeword was assigned to the program, and another codeword to the photographs and the reports we wrote about the installations we analyzed. But even we were not supposed to know how the pictures were taken or what aircraft was involved. For that you needed another special clearance and codeword.

When satellite photography came into service in 1961, there was yet another new family of  special clearances and code names for the various kinds of satellites and the film and digital imagery they produced.

And another to work with so-called “Special intelligence (“SI”) gleaned from communications intelligence (COMINT), and still another (“Q” clearance) if you were working on issues related to nuclear weapons design and performance. And there was yet another for intelligence derived by secret submarine missions inside Soviet or Communist Chinese waters. And those were only the ones my job required me to know about in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today there are reportedly hundreds of special access intelligence programs, each with its own code name.

An inevitable result of all this complex compartmentalization, codeword clearances, need-to-know requirements and other restrictions was to reinforce an already entrenched cult of security surrounding the users of classified intelligence: the more information to which the system granted you access, the more important you were seen to be, and therefore the more important you came to feel.

The person who had more little letters surrounding the photo on his or her CIA badge, denoting access to more categories of information, the smarter, and more powerful he or she obviously was. It was demeaning for me, first as an Army officer and then as a State Department employee, to have to be escorted around the CIA buildings—even to the bathroom—wearing a visitor’s badge on a chain around the neck.

When the CIA finally issued me a photo badge of my own in the mid-1960s (I was then working for the State Department, in a job that regularly sent me to the CIA to consult with various officials there) I finally had the freedom to roam the halls. At once I found myself looking down with condescending pity on escorted visitors with their shameful scarlet letter of a visitor’s badge hanging round their necks, slightly inadequate, not quite to be trusted.

One Sunday morning in 1964 the New York Times Magazine carried on its cover the picture of an earnest National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, standing in the White House Rose Garden explaining something to an attentive President Lyndon  Johnson. Clearly visible under Bundy’s arm was an open copy of that morning’s Current Intelligence Bulletin, a document prepared each night by the CIA and containing the latest current intelligence and brief analyses of critical issues of interest to top decision makers. On top of the visible page of the document, in bright red letters, were the sacred words “TOP SECRET DINAR,”—“Dinar” being the then current codeword used with documents containing information derived from SI (COMINT) material.

The security people must have gone wild. Here was one of their cherished secrets, flaunted around the world. The code word was changed immediately. To do so meant sending rush messages to every security agency, military unit and diplomatic post that might have access to COMINT material, reclassifying every new Top Secret SI document not yet in final form.

And the worst of it was that there was no one to punish. You couldn’t jail the President’s National Security Advisor or the New York Times photographer. Presumably some hapless NSC staffer was given a tongue-lashing. The world may never know. In due course a new codeword began to appear on the pages of the Current Intelligence Bulletin and all other COMINT documents.[1]

The uproar over the Manning and Snowden revelations may result in some much-needed controls over NSA access to telephone and internet records of American citizens and to the content of their phone calls and email messages, but it will likely do little or nothing to end the bureaucratic fascination with the cult of secrecy. 

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[1] Ironically, the printed information visible under the TOP SECRET DINAR classification line happened to be a summary of newspaper commentary on the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident— not classified at all. But the bulletin's pages were preprinted with the highest classification of any article that might be carried in a particular edition. I happened to have been the State Department representative on the interagency team that had prepared that particular day's “CIB” and remember observing the flap with wry delight. More security-conscious intelligence types were less amused.