Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  Other lost souls may get less gentle treatment. At the height of the Persian Gulf War, motorists who wound up at the CIA’s rear entrances while looking for the Turner-Fairbank Research Center or the Claude Moore Farm found themselves confronted by CIA guards, who ordered them out of their cars before they would give them directions. Guard dogs, normally inside the guard posts, stood at the ready outside the gates.

  In 1985, construction began on an addition to the CIA at the rear of the compound behind the old building. The first employees began moving into the addition in June 1988. The new building has 1.1 million square feet. Unlike the old building, which has tiny slits for windows, the new building makes use of large expanses of green-tinted glass, giving it the appearance of a multicolored silicon chip. With the new building, the CIA’s land and structures, along with the Turner-Fairbank Research Center, are assessed at just over half a billion dollars.

  Just over half the CIA’s 22,000 employees work at Langley. Fifteen percent work overseas, and the rest work in some twenty-two CIA offices scattered throughout Washington, or in the CIA’s domestic stations.

  Visitors to the CIA may be directed either to a lot on top of a parking garage in front of the new building, or to the VIP parking lot in front and slightly to the left of the old or original building. Inside the compound, there are tall oak trees that occasionally sprout closed-circuit television cameras. Near the front entrance of the old building are weeping cherry, magnolia, and tulip trees. At various times, azaleas and rhododendron bloom near the old building, and daffodils and tiger lilies adorn the beds.

  A futuristic concrete bus shelter rises in front and slightly to the right of the old building. Here, blue and white shuttle buses pause on their way to other CIA offices around Washington, and Metro buses let off employees who take the McLean-Crystal City line. In the late 1970s, a Soviet diplomat got off the bus in an apparent attempt to test CIA security. A CIA guard who checks building passes as passengers alight put the man back on the bus.

  Just behind the bus stop is the CIA’s 7,000-square-foot auditorium. Because of its globular appearance, the auditorium is known as the “bubble.” A tunnel connects it to the old building. Next to the auditorium stands a statue of Nathan Hale. During the American Revolution, Hale volunteered to go behind British lines and spy. The British captured him on September 21, 1776, and hanged him the next day. His last words were said to be, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

  Fifteen doors at the main entrance lead to a lobby of different shades of gray and white Georgia marble. Along the left wall is a statue of William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. On the wall is a biblical inscription from John 8:32: And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

  Along the right wall are fifty-three gold stars flanked by an American flag on the left and a flag with the seal of the CIA on the right. Each star represents a CIA officer who lost his or her life in the service of the agency. Beneath the memorial stars is a glass case that displays a book listing the years when the officers died. In some cases, the names of the officers are listed—Richard Welch, for example, who was killed by terrorists in Athens in December 1975, after the English-language Athens News published his name and home address. Most of the names are not listed because the officers were operating under cover, and their affiliation never came out.

  When Adm. Stansfield Turner was director of Central Intelligence, the memorial book disappeared for two weeks. Turner’s assistants were frantic. Could someone have stolen one of the CIA’s most revered possessions, a symbol of the dedication and sacrifice of every CIA officer? The Office of Security was called in to investigate, but it could find no clues. Finally, just as suddenly as it had disappeared, the book reappeared in the display case. It turned out that a CIA employee who was supposed to add a new name to the book had gotten tired of waiting for the Office of Security to give him the key to the case. So he pried it open without telling anyone.

  Visitors present their signed visitor forms to one of the receptionists at the far end of the lobby. The receptionist calls the employee listed on the form, and the employee comes down to escort the visitor. If the visitor is going to the director’s suite on the seventh floor, he is usually taken to the director’s elevator to the left of the lobby. From the elevator, the director can descend to the garage, where thirty of the agency’s top officials are allowed to park.

  In July 1991, Dr. Stanley Moskowitz, the agency’s director of congressional affairs and formerly associate deputy director for intelligence, left his car in the garage. Later in the day, the Office of Security called him. Would he mind stepping into the garage and opening his trunk?

  It seems a dog trained to sense explosives had fingered his trunk for harboring a bomb. Because of Dr. Moskowitz’s status, a second dog was called in. The dog confirmed the diagnosis.

  No problem, Moskowitz said. He opened the trunk to reveal the item that had offended the dogs’ senses—workout clothes concealed in a gym bag.

  The director’s elevator operates only with a key that is given to those who report to the director. Other visitors—and employees routinely going to work—use one of six turnstiles to enter the rest of the building.

  Armed guards watch as the escort first inserts his or her identification card in the turnstile and punches in a code. Then the visitor inserts his or her visitor card. The card must be inserted again when leaving the building. Each time a card is inserted, a second bar closes behind the person using the machine. If there is anything wrong, he or she is trapped.

  Every hour or two, there is the sound of a buzzer and nervous laughter as a quirky turnstile malfunctions and traps an employee or visitor trying to enter or leave the building. The guards usually explain that the turnstiles are malfunctioning. They lower the gate to let the embarrassed employee pass.

  The new building has its own entrance, with sixteen turnstiles at the end of an arched skylight of green-tinted glass. The addition is airy, with escalators and an atrium filled with potted palms. Because the new building is on higher land, the fourth floor of the old building connects to the lobby of the new building.

  Many of the offices in the new building—and the director’s offices in the old building—are so-called vaulted areas, where less sensitive classified documents can be left on desks overnight. When the last person leaves, he or she calls security flips a switch, and locks the door.

  For all the high-tech gadgets, employees who want to place calls between the old and the new buildings on nonsecure lines must dial a seven-digit number, just as if they were calling outside the CIA. However, practically everyone uses the secure, green touch-tone phones to make calls within the agency, even when making lunch dates. The secure phones require five digits when calling within the CIA.

  The corridors inside both old and new buildings are lined with artwork—formal portraits of each of the directors of Central Intelligence, signed photographs of American presidents since the agency was established, and a rotating exhibit of the work of local artists under the auspices of the CIA Fine Arts Commission. Recently, the exhibit featured the Vincent Melzac collection of Washington Color School Painters. Mainly geometries—polka dots and stripes and other repeated patterns—they were by Tom Downing, Howard Mehring, Gene Davis, Alma Thomas, Norman Bluhm.

  Occasionally, employees leave their belongings on the floor as they gaze at the exhibits or bulletin boards listing cars for sale or houses for rent. When one man forgot to take his briefcase after resting it on the floor, the Office of Security confiscated it and took it to a concrete-lined bomb-disposal enclosure on the grounds. Fearing it might be a bomb, the guards blew it up, depriving the man of his lunch and some papers he had been working on.

  The architects who designed the old building wanted it to be state-of-the-art, so they included a conveyer belt in the walls for carrying packages from one office to another. When officials
of the Office of Security saw it, they threw up their hands. The system would make it too easy to distribute bombs throughout the building. The system was never used, and the passageways inside the walls are now used to store backup batteries for the CIA’s vast banks of computers.

  Where the new and old buildings meet is a rectangular courtyard dotted with black plastic picnic tables. In one corner of the courtyard is a part of an installation by Washington artist Jim Sanborn, who was chosen after a competition among two hundred entrants. It took Sanborn two years to build the work, which includes three other pieces within the courtyard and at the entrance to the new building. The cost was $250,000.

  The main piece is a sculpture that stands more than six feet high and looks like a scroll. Constructed over a pool of water, it is made of petrified wood, granite, red slate, green quartz, and copper. The petrified wood symbolizes the trees that once stood on the CIA’s site and the fact they are used to make paper and record language. Letters carved in a curved copper plate at the right of the installation represent a table that can be used to decipher the encoded text cut into the plate at the top left. The text can be deciphered only by using the table and a key word, which is kryptos. Another plate at the bottom left contains more text, which can only be deciphered by computer.

  Sanborn composed the message in the encoded text with the help of a fiction writer. Totaling two thousand words, the combined messages describe the information-gathering role of the CIA. Sanborn entrusted only Webster, as the then director of Central Intelligence, with a deciphered copy of the text at the opening for the artwork in November 1990.167

  Sanborn found the experience of working on CIA grounds unnerving. One day, he showed up to work on the installation only to find that his art material—twenty-five tons of granite—had disappeared. Was the agency checking the stone for bugs? Was it part of some nefarious plot to stifle his creativity? The CIA never explained. It simply issued him a check for $5,000 so he could buy new stone to replace it. Agency officials speculate that maintenance workers, thinking the rock was left over from construction of the new building, simply hauled it away.

  Off the courtyard in the new building is a plum-colored employee cafeteria, separated into two dining areas: one for undercover officers, and the other for everyone else. The old building has another, gray-accented cafeteria where employees can take visitors. The tuna sandwich is just $2.25.

  Also off the courtyard in the old building is the CIA’s National Historical Collection, two rooms enclosed in glass and crammed with memorabilia of a bygone era. Here is the first United States flag to fly over CIA headquarters, the razor that William Donovan used during World War II, Russian railway schedules purloined by the CIA in the late 1940s, a camera the size of a matchbox, a device that detects movement and is disguised as dog feces, and a lantern that was to be used to guide planes landing in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  One of the cases holds a .22-caliber pistol with silencer that Donovan showed to President Roosevelt in the White House. To demonstrate how quiet it was, Donovan shot a round into a sandbag that he’d brought along for the purpose, then handed the hot muzzle to the startled president.

  A day after the United States began the war to liberate Kuwait in January 1991, Linda McCarthy, the CIA exhibits officer, donned a pair of white gloves and carried a Civil War Colt .44 to the ladies’ room to clean it. Around a bend in a corridor came an excited CIA security guard.

  “We had a report of a weapon!” he said.

  “The worst I could do with this is throw it at you,” she said dryly.

  “I was about to call in backup,” he said.

  Not far from the museum on the first floor of the old building is the CIA’s main library. With smaller specialized libraries in each directorate, the CIA has 146,000 volumes, including 25,000 books on intelligence. This is the largest collection of intelligence books in the United States. A lower level of the library has 1,700 newspapers and periodicals on file.168

  Below the first floor in the old building are a gym and a barbershop. When he was director, this is where Webster got his hair cut by one of two barbers. The new building also has a gym.

  When he first came to the CIA, Baker, Webster’s director of public affairs, went to work out in the gym in the old building around lunchtime. He had just finished his routine and was taking a shower when he heard women’s voices. They sounded angry. It turned out the locker room had separate hours for men and women. While Baker was taking a shower, the hours had changed. The women were irate because he was cutting into their time.

  In his FBI career, Baker had arrested armed robbers and had participated in shootouts. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, had commended him for arresting more fugitives in one day than any other special agent. But the locker room situation was a new one.

  As he ran to his locker to get a towel to wrap around himself, Baker identified himself.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said as he scurried into a closet to get dressed.169

  At the rear of the compound, behind the new building, is the CIA’s electrical substation, printing plant, a helipad, a car wash for the agency’s motor pool, and a loading dock for receiving mail and supplies. Looming over the electrical substation is a water tower that helps maintain water pressure in the area. Because of new construction in McLean, the pressure changed one afternoon, sending a geyser of water twenty feet into the air. As the water rained down, CIA workers went scurrying to find the shut-off valve, only to learn to their horror that it was buried underground. Using shovels, they frantically dug holes in the area until they found the valve and shut it off.

  Despite backup generators, the CIA’s power supply has also gone on the fritz. At least twice, electrical components have malfunctioned, shutting off even emergency power to the agency and its computers. Nonetheless, when this happened under Stansfield Turner’s regime, the only complaint the engineers got was that Turner had not been able to eat breakfast.170

  The agency has its own zip code—20505—at the Washington, D.C., post office. Because mail to the CIA is screened at the post office by X-ray equipment, the McLean post office is too small to handle the load. A second X-ray machine at the loading dock checks packages when they arrive.

  These are under the control of the Office of Security, in many ways the most controversial office in the CIA.

  18

  Keystone Cops

  WHEN PEOPLE PICTURE THE OLD CIA, THEY ARE MOST likely thinking of the Office of Security. It was the CIA’s Office of Security, starting in 1967, that illegally infiltrated and spied on dissident groups in Washington, D.C., in order to protect agency buildings. It was the Office of Security that illegally wiretapped the telephones of three newsmen in 1959 and in 1962 in order to determine their sources. It was the Office of Security that illegally incarcerated Soviet defector Yuri I. Nosenko, who defected from the Soviet Union after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for three and a half years beginning in 1964. It was Office of Security that arranged for the Mafia to try to assassinate Fidel Castro and that ordered poison pills for him to take. And while investigating CIA employees, the Office of Security illegally conducted twelve break-ins and installed thirty-two wiretaps and thirty-two bugs.

  Nor has the office’s heavy-handed approach changed appreciably. As recently as 1985, it contributed to the decision of KGB colonel Vitaly Yurchenko to redefect to the Soviet Union by treating him as a prisoner. When Yurchenko’s handlers complained to the Office of Security about the treatment, they were told that was the way things were; there was nothing to be done about it.171

  As director of Central Intelligence, William Webster had more problems with the Office of Security than any other office. He found it to be still operating in the dark ages and most resistant to change. Sometimes, Webster’s aides felt that perhaps the Office of Security considered Webster to be a security risk.

  “Their attitude is, ‘This is the way we do things, and we aren’t going to change,’” a former Of
fice of Security official said.

  Even letters sent out by the Office of Security to notify employees that they had failed polygraph tests were clumsy. The letters said “you have been deemed deceptive” on the issue of providing information to a foreign government. At the suggestion of an assistant, Webster had the office change the letter to say “you evinced physiological reactions” and the matter was resolved “in favor of the national security.” In plain English, that meant, “You’re fired.”

  Of all the office’s functions, none is more important than preventing espionage. While the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center works overseas to thwart opposing intelligence services that try to recruit CIA officers, the Office of Security is charged with protecting CIA facilities and people from penetration.

  It is, to be sure, an impossible task. No one can expect that the KGB and other hostile intelligence services will never have any successes in the silent espionage battle. Nor are statistics meaningful. Since 1975, the Justice Department has prosecuted fifty-six spy cases, of which six involved CIA employees or employees of CIA contractors. A seventh case, that of Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA officer, has never been prosecuted because Howard fled to Moscow, where he now lives. A warrant has been issued for his arrest. Of the fifty-six prosecutions, all but one has brought a conviction.

  The fact that an espionage case has occurred does not automatically mean that the Office of Security has failed. One can always wish that the office had done better, that it might have gotten lucky and caught a spy who decided to sell out his country. But just as the FBI cannot be expected to stop all bank robberies simply because that is the bureau’s job, the Office of Security cannot be expected to stop all espionage against the CIA. What can be expected is that the Office of Security will follow its own procedures and will have enough understanding of the law to preserve suspects’ rights so they can be convicted if guilty. In all too many cases, the Office of Security has failed in these areas.