The One-Page Summary
In the early 1980s, I had an appointment with George Ramonas, my longtime friend, a Legislative Assistant to New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, on Capitol Hill. I was late, and by way of explanation, told him I had been writing up letterhead memorandums (LHMs), from defector debriefings. With his knowledge of my FBI investigations, he knew I was referring to Romania’s General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the Cold War.
I told him that, a few days before, I had received an immediate request from FBI Headquarters to summarize a ten-page LHM, I had written the previous week, down to a one-page LHM. I was glad to do it, but it didn’t make sense to me.
Then, on this morning, a second request came in from FBIHQ for me to take that same information and re-summarize it into a longer, three-page LHM. The information was still fresh in my mind, so it was easy to rewrite into three pages. That had been what delayed me.
George gave me a long and knowing look and said, “You know what that is, don’t you?”
I hadn’t a clue.
He said, “That’s Reagan!”
Dumbstruck, I asked him to explain.
His boss was the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and had many dealings directly with the White House and the president, himself. George explained there was so much for President Reagan to read, he wanted anything someone wanted him to know to be provided in a one-page, summarizing document. Then, if he had an interest in learning more, he asked for another paper, this one three-pages long, with a commensurate amount of further details.
“Then,” George said, “if he really wanted any more on the topic, he would ask to be given the whole, original document.”
George asked if this had happened to me before, and I told him it had, several times.
“Then,” he said, “President Reagan knows what you know.”
On June 12, 1987, President Reagan gave a speech at the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall. It would be one of his most famous speeches. At the end, he pointed up to the massive wall and, while speaking to the crowd, as well as a large international audience on television, but particularly to the Soviet Premier, he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
The pundits laughed it off and said it was just “Reagan being Reagan.” It was later learned that the President’s speechwriters and, especially, the senior staff at the State Department, were very much against the president making such an inflammatory statement.
By this point, I had debriefed about twenty defectors and recruitments-in-place, of what would be a total of twenty-five during my career. Most had a particular sentiment that was difficult to quantify, but General Pacepa, at the top of the pile in his Warsaw Pact country, portrayed it better than others. He said the economy of Eastern Europe was like a great oak tree, which looked mighty, but was rotten inside, with little holding it up but the bark. It would only take a strong wind to knock it over. But who would have the power and authority to be able to pull that off?
President Reagan began his “Star Wars” (Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI) program to have lasers orbiting in space, with the capability of shooting down incoming missiles, at least in theory. There was some technology to back it up, but the research was under way to make it a reality. While there were hundreds of other issues in international interactions for the Soviet Union, to dedicate enough of its resources, successfully, to counter the new SDI program would have put their economy in a ruinous state, and they knew it. Besides, it would have altered the long-standing nuclear position of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. Were it to have come to a hot war, the U.S. would not have been destroyed at all, but not so for the Soviet Union. So this was a very important program with immediate and devastating effects on a nation that had been our enemy of over forty years.
So, would General Pacepa and the other defectors get any credit for the fall of the Soviet Empire? Of course not. But President Reagan had learned what General Pacepa knew by reading it, first, in one page, then, in three pages, and finally in the full details of the original letterhead memorandum.
* * *
More than three decades later, on July 18, 2019, I was visiting Washington, D.C., and had the good fortune to attend the monthly luncheon of the Society of Former FBI Agents. It was held at the Westin Hotel in nearby Tysons Corner, Virginia. This group, with so many who had served at FBI Headquarters, but also in the Washington Field Office, the Alexandria Office, and the FBI Academy at Quantico, would always fill the big banquet hall for a speaker of consequence. On that day, it was Edwin Meese, III. He had been the Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. They had been friends for many years, and Meese was a trusted colleague of one of our greatest presidents.
As the luncheon proceedings began, Mr. Meese was introduced in spectacular fashion, with the introducer touching on many highlights in his career, his early years with the president, and even some pretty amazing positions after he left government service.
When Mr. Meese got up to walk to the lectern, he was given a standing ovation. He was using two black canes and was hobbled with arthritis. Yet, at 87, he stood comfortably, spoke for over thirty minutes, and even took questions at the end. He told behind-the-scene stories and anecdotes of his time with President Reagan. His body may have been diminished, but this brain hadn’t lost a step, and his humor was as quick as it had ever been.
The applause was no less after he spoke than before, and it had been a rousing speech, with some wonderful reminiscing of Cold War times, when so many in the audience had worked on counterintelligence squads.
Afterwards, while visiting with old friends at another table near the front of the room, I turned to see Mr. Meese sitting by himself at his table-for-ten. The others had gone their separate ways, and his aide was arranging for his transportation. But, for a few moments, he sat unattended.
I approached him at his seat and turned a nearby chair so I could sit facing him. I told him I could not leave him sitting all alone, only feet away, with the banquet hall filled to capacity. I asked if I might join him for a few minutes.
His smile was welcoming and he extended his hand. I introduced myself and told him I had one story about his pal, President Reagan. He seemed all ears, so I told him of my task of writing various lengthy letterhead memorandums from debriefing a Romanian Intelligence general, which had to be summarized into a single page.
“That’s Reagan!” he responded.
Without batting an eye, Mr. Meese said that when he was new to Governor Reagan’s staff, around 1967, the governor was going to give his first speech in Sacramento to the Chiefs of Police from all over California. Meese said he had prepared several pages of notes on what would be important for Reagan to cover, and he had boiled it down, at his boss’s request, to one page of about fifteen bullet points.
Right in front of him, in the green room, Reagan scanned the page quickly, and then, at that inopportune moment, Meese was called out of the room. When he returned, he found the governor had left for the auditorium, but, much to Meese’s surprise and dismay, he saw his page of bullet points still sitting on the table.
He told me he was nearly frantic, grabbed the page, and rushed down the hallway to try to get them into Governor Reagan’s hand before he began to speak—but he was too late.
When he entered the hall, Reagan was already at the lectern and beginning his speech. Meese said he could only sit down and hope for the best.
Then Meese smiled at me. He said he listened to the governor go on for about forty-five minutes, managing to weave into his speech every one of Meese’s bullet points in an orderly and natural way. So, he had taken that single page, read it and memorized it, and then used his talents as an actor to relay them to California’s Chiefs of Police.
Mr. Meese looked straight at me and said, “So that is when I learned that if Ronald Reagan wanted to be given information, he wanted it, summarized, into a single page. So, yes,” he said, “your ten-page memorandum, summarized into a single page, landed on the desk of the President of the United States.”
Reston, VA
July 21, 2019