She had determined that MECS—the acronym on the Park Closed Until Further Notice sign on Roosevelt Island, where the pilot crashed—stood for Media Exploitation Component Services. There were only a few mentions of it online. One said it was the National Security Agency’s analysis program for documents and data seized in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locales. She found a company Web site or two that described contracts it had with MECS. One sold a linguistics platform-server to MECS, to process and extract information—people, places, phone numbers, addresses, and other “entities”—in the native script of forty different languages. A national-security blogger said West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, of the Senate Intelligence panel, secured six million dollars for MECS. The blogger, a political-science student at Georgetown, said MECS was established in late 2001 to coordinate efforts among the FBI, CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Security Agency (NSA) to analyze and disseminate information gleaned from millions of pages of paper documents, electronic media, videotapes, audiotapes, and electronic equipment seized by the U.S. military and intelligence community in Afghanistan and other countries.

Vera found a MECS job listing, for an Audio Video Exploitation Specialist. She found a 2004 House Armed Services Committee statement by Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who said that DIA was the executive agent for Media Exploitation Component Services … whose mission was being moved to lower tactical levels so that forces can take advantage of documents and other media found on the scene.

But that was it. There was not a single story in a major newspaper. No television transcript contained it. There were a few mentions buried in appropriations bills, but they were short, and told next to nothing, except that MECS did exist. The Pentagon reporters told Vera they’d never heard of it, but when she shared what she knew, they shrugged and called it a data-management office. What exactly was she thinking was newsworthy about it? She told them it was strange that such an office would have anything to do with an F-16 pilot’s crashing. What does Pentagon Public Affairs say about that? First they said there was no such sign on Roosevelt Island. She faxed them the photograph, and the following day they came back to her and said it was not a Defense Department sign—it lacked some numerical coding all such signage had. What was it, then? Off the record, the spokesman told Vera—some prank, kids probably.