Last August I received a phone call from Dana Priest. She asked if she could buy me lunch. I told her that anytime a two time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter wanted to buy me lunch I was game. We met at the Rams Head Tavern in Savage Mill.
Over lunch she told me that she was working on a series about the new emerging “tech corridors” in the country. She explained that the growth of the defense intelligence community at Fort Meade was transforming the I-95 corridor between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. into one of those corridors. She wondered if I wouldn’t mind giving her a commercial real estate tour of the area. We drove from Savage to Annapolis Junction, the airport, Hanover, Elkridge, Columbia and Maple Lawn. We ended up, conveniently enough, at my building in Emerson. She thanked me and we parted ways back at Savage Mill.
I didn’t hear from her again until last November. I was looking for something on The Washington Post website and I ran across her name. I sent her a quick email, “Was it something I said?”
She responded within hours saying that there were lots to tell me and that she’d call me the next day.
She didn’t call the next day.
This time I didn’t hear from her again until May. She wanted to buy me lunch again. This time we met at Clyde’s and she now tells me that her series is really all about the growing and multi faceted defense intelligence community. She had been spending time in other centers of this activity like Colorado Springs and San Antonio. The project was coming to close and she wanted to take one more ride around with me. This time she also bought along a friend.
Now, almost a year after our first meeting, the results of her labors will finally begin appearing in The Washington Post next week. The three part series begins on Monday.
