My Cousin the Spy

Dear all,

So Melanie and I went to the last session of General Conference yesterday, which was, predictably, wonderful. Our seats were pretty decent (although Mel said, "There isn't a bad seat in this house," which is true) and perfectly oriented to see a few members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir come in late, working their way toward the stand through the audience. Mel and I later found out (from Mel's aunt Jan, who sings in the choir) that the late choir members had been stranded on the massive roof of the Conference Center, which is a large landscaped garden where the choir eats lunch. The lesson of the story, I suppose, is that, if you're a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, get your lunch and then get out. You might be serenading the crowds outside the Conference Center if you're not careful. (Jan, by the way, is very careful and wise. She gets off the roof ASAP.)

And it seems that she's passed that wisdom, that savvy situational awareness, that world-weary acumen, onto her daughter--my cousin-in-law--Dani, because Dani has become a spy. She's such a good spy, as a matter of fact, that she doesn't even spy for the government. No, Dani is a spy for a private corporation, which I shall not name, because I don't want to disappear in the middle of the night. That's right--Dani spies for one of those shadowy conglomerates that's always trying to achieve world domination in James Bond movies, a group of clandestine power-brokers that flies under the radar of conventional scrutiny...

Actually, I hyperbolize. Dani works for a large construction company; about the only thing they've ever staged a coup d'etat over is a pile of cinder block (even though I joke with her about her ballpoint pen really being a gun). However, she really is a spy--she goes around to competing businesses and checks them out, photographs their facilites, gets information from them while not letting on that she's from a competitor. (After all, if she waltzed up to a competitor and said, "Hey, I'm from X Construction Company and we're thinking about how we can better compete against you--or buy you out--so give me a list of your prices," about the only thing she'd get would be a snicker and a quick trip out.) So she travels around the country, doing in-depth research on her business peers.

And I think that's really cool. I mean, there's been a lot of talk, lately, about the government's sad lack of "HUMINT," or human intelligence--meaning on-the-ground, people-based intelligence about our enemies. Some people postulate that, had the government been able to amass substantial HUMINT before the invasion of Iraq, we wouldn't have invaded--but, as it was, our intelligence-gathering capabilities were focused on satellite images and recon flights and the like, and we couldn't tell whether Saddam Hussein had WMDs or not. Now, I'm not going to turn this into a forum to debate the Iraq War (Gulf War II?), but I think it's cool that Dani serves as a positive role-model for our nation's intelligence community.

So here's to you, Dani. Kudos. I hope that this blog post doesn't blow your cover.