Information Sources for Scenarios for “Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders” Projects

Mitch and I, co-writers of the ebook technothriller “Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders,” have a long personal history of interest in military and intelligence stories.

From September 1970 to May 1972 Mitch served on active duty as a U.S. Army military intelligence officer after being R.O.T.C. at Michigan State University, where we met on the college newspaper.

After Armor Officer Basic training at Ft. Knox and military intelligence training at Ft. Holabird, we were stationed in Munich, Germany, with Mitch working on the Sociological Desk at the 18th Military Intelligence Battalion.

After many months of struggles with the Civil Service bureaucracy, I qualified to be a GS-2 at the Army-Air Force Motion Picture Service. Then when my own security clearance came through, I moved up to a GS-3 position in the counterintelligence section of the 66th Military Intelligence Group.

From our experiences in Europe protecting West Germany (and by extension the rest of Europe) from an invasion from the Soviets, Mitch and I became lifelong consumers of military and intelligence information.

(Actually, during winter semester of my second year at Wharton’s M.B.A. program, I applied to the CIA, filling out tons of forms on a manual typewriter. Ultimately, when the call came to invite me for a two-day visit to Langley, I had to turn it down — to my everlasting regret. And the next time I almost got to visit the CIA, the spy Aldrich Ames had just been revealed and the CIA was shut tight against visitors.)

Today Mitch and I get our military and intelligence scenarios from several unclassified sources of information:

U.S. Naval Institute’s monthly magazine Proceedings (Mitch is a member of the institute)
AFIO (Association of Former Intelligence Officers) Weekly Intelligence Notes
(Mitch is a member of the association)
NMIA (National Military Intelligence Association) ZGram several times a week (Mitch is a member of the association)
Department of Defense’s Bloggers Roundtable briefings from top-level personnel (Phyllis is a member due to her blogs supporting U.S. troops)
Phyllis’ social media connections to military personnel and organizations, especially on Twitter, where she maintains the list https://twitter.com/#!/list/ZimblerMiller/us-troops-supporters

The information cache of these articles is often amazing, and all are gist for our fictional story mill.