dogimo: Today we are very pleased to welcome a pretty exciting guest to the program, a man whose name you probably have not heard before: mister Benjamin Semper. If you haven't heard of him, rest assured it's for a good reason: Ben Semper was a highly-placed covert government operative back in the late 80s to mid 90s.
Semper: Small correction. I was not in fact a Field Operative for the majority of my tenure. There were some occasions when I did operate in the field, in the capacity of Junior Associate Operative attached to certain of the units that I helped to bring into being.
dogimo: Ah, thank you for the correction. The amount of info that I had going into this, pretty sketchy. So you were more a shadowy power behind-the-scenes?
Semper: Yes, well, more than you might expect. Primarily, I was a grant writer.
dogimo: I see! Which...that is a skill in high demand, in many fields. I'm a bit surprised to think of espionage as one of them.
Semper: You would be correct to be surprised. I myself was surprised when I applied for a position as a grant writer in the political science department at [ CLASSIFIED ] University, only to be handed secrecy agreements to sign, and to be told by my interviewers that they were recruiting not for a university position but for the government.
dogimo: But why does the government have to write grant proposals to itself? Isn't that just more unnecessary bureaucracy? Can't you just, "Get 'er done"?
Semper: I hate that saying. Don't say that. To answer your question, in the old days we didn't have to. But then, by the late 1970s, when the brakes were being put on a lot of Intelligence programs and spending across the board, Congress was looking to find ways to institute some controls on the process. One of the things they came up with was grant proposals for any new programs requiring funding.
dogimo: And these proposals would be approved by whom?
Semper: Formally, approval or rejection was determined by a small joint committee composed of representatives from each key agency plus 2 members from each house of Congress, reporting directly to the Covert Intelligence Oversight Subcommittee, which at the time was housed within a permanent sub-joint subsection of the subcommittee on appropriations within the House Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate. But during my time, all the real decisions were made by this guy we called Blackhead. That's a code name.
dogimo: Was he black? Did he have acne?
Semper: I never met the man. I think it's just a name they came up with when they were working up the new code name list. Of names to give out. There's an alphabeticized list, you get what you get.
dogimo: Do you have a code name?
Semper: I had several, for the different missions that I was attached to. That's all classified, I can't tell you any of them.
dogimo: No cool ones, huh?
Semper: It's classified.
dogimo: So tell me, when you were writing up a grant proposal for a new project or mission, what sorts of strategies did you use to get it approved?
Semper: Well, it was a pretty difficult time for a while there. All of the pressure was in the direction of cutting back, not expanding into new operations. But after a while, I was the one to figure out that the guy making the final decisions had a real thing for acronyms. That was the breakthrough. After that - you still had to take pains to make your proposal smack of fiscal responsibility, but if you could dress it up with an impressive acronym, you had a better than even chance.
dogimo: I love acronyms. Do you have any acronyms that you came up with that you're particularly proud of?
Semper: There were a few. I guess if I had to pick a favorite, it would be the Covert Operations Strike Team Expeditionary Force For Extralegal Commando Type Insertion Via Espionage.
dogimo: ... gimme a second ... say it again!
Semper: "Covert Operations Strike Team Expeditionary Force For Extralegal Commando Type Insertion Via Espionage"..."C.O.S.T. E.F.F.E.C.T.I.V.E."
dogimo: A-ha...! Nice. Covers both key areas of concern.
Semper: Fiscally responsible, yet...
dogimo: ...badass.
Semper: To put it delicately.
dogimo: Which illustrates what I've always said, a little Intelligence goes a long way!
Semper: Indeed it does.
-END OF PART 1-
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