Chapter 19: The Federal Records Request Comes Back

The email arrived on a Thursday, at 11:47 AM, while Chu was eating a carnitas burrito at his desk and reading a CI report about a distribution shift in the Barelas neighborhood that was almost certainly unrelated to the compound case but had to be read anyway because that was the work.

He saw the sender — Federal Records Compliance Unit, Washington Field Office — and set the burrito down.

The response was two pages. The first page was a cover letter explaining, in the careful passive voice of institutional liability, that the enclosed information represented the maximum disclosure permissible under current classification review protocols, that certain elements of the subject's service record had been withheld pending inter-agency consultation, and that any further inquiry should be directed through the requesting officer's supervisory chain via a separate form, which was attached as Appendix B and was not, Chu noted, actually attached.