Word: wasn
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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General Mario Montoya, the Colombian Army commander, wasn't satisfied. Many of the agents looked like they were fresh out of spy school. Montoya wanted more potbellies and wrinkles. Several members of the team let their beards grow and had gray streaks added to their hair. They replaced their underwear, which was stamped with the logo of the army, sent their costumes through washing machines for a lived-in look, and filled their wallets with fake driver's licenses and foreign currency...
...heart raced. Each plastic- wrapped packet contained a thousand banknotes, or 20 million Colombian pesos - the equivalent of nearly $7,000. His wallet had never held more than petty cash, but now he was stuffing his uniform pockets with thick wads of currency. It wasn't easy because his whole body quaked with the snap realization that he, Walter Suárez, a $44-a-week anonymous soldier condemned to a mission impossible, had just won a kind of ad hoc lottery...
...officers, never seriously contemplated doing the right thing. His troops were so poor that none of them even qualified to pay income taxes. Besides, Sanabria figured that if they turned in the money, higher-ranking officers would give his soldiers three-day passes, then start filling their own pockets. Wasn't that what always happened? It was like that scene in the Clint Eastwood flick Kelly's Heroes, where the preppy American captain warns Big Joe and his exhausted foot soldiers that the punishment for looting is death even as he considers the logistics of loading a German yacht aboard...
...Gates wasn't impressed by the scheme. "After more than a decade of research and development, we have yet to achieve a laser with enough power to knock down a missile ... more than 50 miles from the launchpad - thus requiring these huge planes to loiter deep in enemy airspace to have a feasible shot at a direct hit," he noted after he axed the program. "Moreover, the 10 to 20 aircraft needed would cost about $1.5 billion each, plus tens of millions of dollars annually - each - for maintenance and operations," he added. "The program and operating concept were fatally flawed...
...lots of conflicting answers to that question, from partisan rancor to internal Democratic politics to Reid's own electoral weakness. But the one thing everyone agrees upon is that Reid's announcement could have been handled better - so that the primary message coming out of the whiplash moves wasn't that Democrats are at odds with one another. "Maybe there should've been a better job reaching out to the White House," concedes Jim Manley, a senior adviser to Reid. Manley says Reid decided to pull the bill when he couldn't get an agreement from the Republican leadership...