In a move that has sent shockwaves through the intelligence community and left dictionary salesmen weeping with joy at the sheer audacity of the oxymoron, the effervescently unqualified Donald Trump has appointed Bill Pulte, a man whose previous experience with secrets apparently involved knowing where the spare keys to a council flat were kept, as the Acting Director of National Intelligence. Yes, you read that correctly. The man who was previously in charge of America’s housing stock, presumably making sure the nation’s eavesdropping devices are properly double-glazed, is now the nation’s top spymaster.
Pulte, a housing official, is now expected to oversee the CIA, NSA, and a bewildered intern who keeps asking if the ‘N’ in NSA stands for ‘Newtonabbey’. The appointment is a masterstroke of Trumpian logic: if you can manage the leaky roofs of America’s public housing, you can certainly manage the country’s most sensitive secrets. After all, what is national security but a kind of metaphysical housing association? The agents become tenants, the secrets become bathroom mould, and the whole edifice of democracy collapses into a damp, disturbing ruin.
One imagines Pulte’s first day on the job: “Welcome to the Situation Room, Mr Pulte.” “Thanks, but could you just call it the Common Room? And where’s the boiler? I need to check the pressure.” The image is both hilarious and terrifying, like a clown driving a tank. The intelligence community, already reeling from a previous administration’s disdain for nuance, now faces a leader whose primary qualification is that he once wrote a report on the distribution of subsidised bathrooms.
The reaction from the usual suspects has been predictably apoplectic. “This is madness,” wailed a former MI6 operative, clutching a copy of Len Deighton. “He’ll probably try to fix the NSA’s data servers with a plunger.” Meanwhile, the White House press secretary, a woman whose face appears to be made entirely of lip gloss and regret, insisted that Pulte’s background in housing made him uniquely qualified to understand the ‘architecture of intelligence’. One imagines she meant this metaphorically, but in Trump’s world, the line between metaphor and literal madness is as blurry as a tabloid photo of a celebrity leaving a nightclub.
Pulte himself has yet to make a public statement, though sources say he has already requested a full tour of the CIA’s ‘quiet rooms’ and asked if the NSA had a ‘shed policy’. Meanwhile, the nation’s enemies are reportedly delighted. “Finally,” said a Kremlin spokesman, “we have a man we can negotiate with about the damp issues in our cyber operations.” The Chinese have reportedly offered to share their expertise on the subject of ‘feng shui for submarine cables’.
But let us not be too hasty in our mockery. Perhaps Pulte will bring a much-needed sense of practicality to the intelligence world. Perhaps he will realise that the best way to intercept a terrorist plot is simply to ask them to fill out a housing benefit form. Or perhaps he will conclude that the greatest threat to national security is actually rising damp, and divert all resources to a nationwide programme of cavity wall insulation. In which case, we should all be very afraid. Because if the housing crisis can produce a spymaster, then the spymaster crisis can produce a housing official. And that, dear readers, is a circle of absurdity that only the Trump administration could draw.
So raise a glass of the cheapest, most acidic gin you can find. We’re going to need it. Cheers to Bill Pulte, the man who will finally tell us what’s really going on in the attic of the free world.
