He then described the then outsourcing to Encompass to cover California flights, Tradewind for Texas, plus access deals for members with JetClass in Europe and Fly Blade here in the U.S. as sort of an operations light model that would be the foundation of Surf Air's future.
"So it's a sort of a nostalgic operation".
His is sort of a holding operation — helping the team hold on to respectability until Namath returns.
In a part of the world where almost nothing gets done without sign-off from above, the current Saudi version that this was some sort of a rogue operation does sound implausible.
I liked that it was so new, that it was sort of a maverick operation, that it was privately owned and that it was in the arena of art, which I had already done a lot of thinking about and thought was a viable and worthwhile area for publishing, an underexplored area also.
If it is true that the C.I.A. participated, then this would seem to be a different sort of operation — a more committed effort — than the Pakistani-only "candh and release" operations that Islamabad has occasionally mounted against the Taliban in the past to appease the United States.
The picture that emerges from those interviews, and from additional interviews with drug addicts, rehabilitation workers and Federal, state and city law enforcement officers, is nothing like the widely held detective story conception of the heroin traffic as a vast conspiracy with a single head, a sort of super‐Mafia operation led by an evil genius.
The Croatian blitzkrieg, tacitly supported by the U.S., turned out to be a very American sort of operation, a model of, among other things, efficient media management.
"I've heard several admirals say their biggest nightmare isn't the president calling about a blowout in the Arctic, but rather, a cruise ship sinking with 1,000 people that they can't get off the boat," Ebinger told VICE News, explaining that this is precisely the sort of rescue operation a polar icebreaker would take on.
He felt that the Bush Administration, under pressure from the press reporting about torture, had started to imply that abusive interrogation "was sort of a rogue C.I.A. operation" carried out by "a bunch of guys who love their country and took counterterrorism very seriously, but things may have gotten out of hand".
