Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  This is the directorate that buys the pencils and paper clips, orders the phones, and processes new employee applications. These are normally prosaic duties. But because it services the CIA, the Directorate of Administration can be as exciting as any James Bond thriller. It has its covert side, its cover stories and cutouts, which often rival those of the operations side of the agency.

  Within the directorate, the Office of Security is responsible for the physical security of the CIA. It conducts background investigations of new CIA employees and CIA contractors, administers polygraph tests to employees and agents, debugs offices at Langley and overseas stations, patrols the buildings and grounds, protects the director and other key CIA officials, and investigates security problems. With the help of the FBI, it also investigates espionage. Some of the CIA’s most serious abuses have been perpetrated by this office.

  Besides administering the finances of the agency, the Office of Financial Management launders money using dummy corporations and multiple bank accounts worldwide in order to further the work of the clandestine side of the agency.

  The Office of Medical Services administers physicals to employees and supplies security-cleared psychiatrists to help them with psychiatric problems. It operates a psychological profiling unit that issues psychological analyses of world leaders such as Saddam Hussein. It also helps out in analyzing specimens—from feces to hair—of world leaders to determine if they have any health problems that might affect their longevity or judgment. Finally, at various times it has gotten involved in such esoteric matters as determining if ESP would help uncover drop sites of the KGB.

  The Office of Training and Education trains CIA employees. It operates Camp Peary, a supposedly still secret CIA compound near Williamsburg, Virginia, that teaches the tools of the spy trade—how to recruit and handle agents, how to avoid surveillance. The office’s courses include instruction in area studies and twenty-five languages. It also manages publication of Studies in Intelligence, a classified CIA quarterly journal.

  The Office of Communications not only orders phones but provides top-secret coded communications by satellite throughout the world. The Office of Information Technology runs the vast array of computers needed to keep each of the directorates functioning. Overseas, it arranges for quick-burn devices to destroy computers in case an embassy is taken over.

  The History Staff within the directorate consists of three historians who obtain recollections of officers who have retired and write a continuing classified history of the CIA. A Freedom of Information Office processes requests for documents under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

  The Office of Personnel keeps the agency staffed by recruiting on college campuses, running ads in newspapers, overseeing hiring, and administering psychological and other tests to applicants. Recently, it began a new program to assist retired CIA officers adjust professionally, economically, and psychologically to life in the private sector.

  The Office of Logistics not only moves employees and offices and provides couriers for delivering top-secret documents but also buys guns and ammunition and runs so-called proprietaries, companies such as Air America that are owned by the CIA. Through Fairways Corporation, a longtime CIA proprietary, the office operates the CIA’s planes, including regular flights to Camp Peary, the training center. The office manages the agency’s procurement system, the printing plant, photographic facility, mail system, motor pool, courier system, and food services. The entire monolith would grind to a halt without the office’s Real Estate and Construction Branch, which runs the CIA’s physical plant and maintains its grounds.

  In this area, as in others, the most important goal is secrecy.

  17

  Langley

  FROM A DISTANCE, THE ONLY UNUSUAL FEATURE ABOUT the CIA’s compound is Virginia Power Company’s 113,000-volt transmission line, which is needed to power the agency’s massive computers. It enters the agency’s property at the left of the main gate on Dolley Madison Boulevard at Georgetown Pike in McLean.

  Originally, highway signs marked the location of the CIA from George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia, but Robert F. Kennedy, who was attorney general at the time and lived nearby at the family’s Hickory Hill estate, asked the CIA to take them down.

  “Bobby Kennedy said, ‘This is the silliest thing I’ve seen. Please take the signs down,’” William Colby, director of Central Intelligence from 1973 to 1976, said.155 “We pretended that the building wasn’t there, even though every pilot uses it as a checkpoint going down [to National Airport].”

  When James R. Schlesinger became director of Central Intelligence in 1973, he asked Colby why the CIA had no signs. Colby told him the story.

  “I think we should have signs,” Schlesinger said.

  After Schlesinger checked with the White House, the signs went back up.156 Today, highway markers along Dolley Madison Boulevard going northwest say, “CIA Next Right.” But sometimes they temporarily disappear again when souvenir hunters snatch them.

  Closer up, one can see double chain-link fences topped with barbed wire surrounding the compound. The fence is marked with the standard signs: “U.S. Government Property, No Trespassing.” Each segment of fence is fitted with a tiny black plastic box, part of a system that sounds an alarm in the Office of Security’s duty office when the fence vibrates.

  “All nonbadged visitors must keep right,” a sign says along the access drive. Other signs warn that the speed limit is twenty-five miles per hour—speed is checked by radar—explosives are prohibited.

  Visitors turn into a separate lane, where another sign tells them to drive up to a post equipped with an intercom and closed-circuit television camera. Just as in a drive-in hamburger stand, a visitor tells the guard at the other end what he wants. The guard asks for his social security number. If the visitor has an appointment, his social security number will already be registered on a computer list. The guard then instructs the visitor to pull up to the main guard gate, a concrete-and-glass structure twenty-five feet beyond the intercom. There, the visitor must show picture identification. If everything matches, the guard gives him a visitor’s badge, a parking permit with a map of the parking lots, and a form to sign. The form gives the CIA the right to search the visitor.

  If anyone tries to enter the compound without permission, the guard can flip a switch and raise a steel barrier that revolves out of the ground. Just in case, the guards, who wear broad-brimmed hats that make them look like park rangers, have machine guns and guard dogs.

  Just after Webster appointed William M. Baker to be the CIA’s director of public affairs, Baker returned to Washington’s National Airport from a trip. Baker’s wife, Robin, a flight attendant, had just gotten off a plane herself at National. It was ten P.M., and they had to drive back to the CIA’s compound to pick up Baker’s car.

  Robin Baker viewed her husband’s new job with trepidation. Baker had spent his career at the FBI, where he had been Webster’s director of public and congressional affairs. When Webster asked her husband to take the CIA job, Robin Baker was apprehensive. Like most people, she wanted nothing to do with the CIA. This was to be her first encounter with the agency.

  Robin Baker drove to the CIA’s main gate. Mercury-vapor lights blinded her as she drove up to the concrete guard gate. From the passenger side, Baker showed his CIA building pass.

  “Lady,” the guard snarled at Baker’s wife, “you dim your lights when you come up here.”

  Robin Baker had not seen a small sign that said, “Parking Lights Only.”

  “I don’t like this place,” Robin Baker muttered as they drove into the parking lot.

  During the two years that Baker assisted Webster, Robin Baker visited her husband’s place of employment again only once—the day he left.157

  The CIA compound is indeed a spooky place. Even its location—Langley, Virginia—is not what it seems. In fact, it does not exist.

  Langley is the name of an estate that was owned
by a member of the family of Robert E. Lee, who led Confederate forces in the Civil War. Originally, Langley was the name of the Lee family’s estate in Shropshire, England. The estate in Virginia bordered Georgetown Pike, originally an animal trail formed by the hooves of buffalo on their way to feeding grounds in Maryland and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Later, the Susquehannoc Indians used the trail when they brought furs to English traders who anchored their ships in the Potomac River. The Lee estate included part of what is now the CIA compound.158

  Langley later became a village with its own post office inside a country store, an inn with a tavern or ordinary where stagecoaches stopped to rest their horses, a blacksmith, and a weigh station where farmers could weigh their hay before taking it to market in Washington. By 1910, the village had been merged into nearby McLean, named for the then publisher of the Washington Post and the principal stockholder in an electric rail line that linked the area with Washington. Because of the rail line, there was no need for a separate village so close to McLean. The Langley post office was closed. Today, Langley does not exist, yet because the CIA is located in the area once called Langley, it is commonly described as being in Langley. The agency as a whole is often referred to as Langley as well.159

  When the agency was started in 1947, the CIA had its offices in some twenty-five buildings all over Washington, many of them temporary wooden structures around the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The buildings were so rickety that it was not uncommon for safes used to hold classified documents to come crashing down from the upper floors. Headquarters was a brick building with white Ionic columns next to a Navy medical building at 2430 E Street NW in Washington.

  Allen Dulles, who became director of Central Intelligence in 1953, wanted a permanent headquarters in the suburbs. For public consumption, he would say he wanted a campuslike atmosphere to symbolize the agency’s scholarly pursuits. But the primary reason was security. The government’s emergency plans called for locating sensitive facilities away from Washington, which would presumably bear the brunt of any atomic attack. A secluded area would be easier to police as well. At the same time, the agency had to be close enough to the White House to make it easy for the CIA director to see the president.160

  Since 1940, what was then known as the federal Public Roads Administration had been assembling 742.9 acres of land off Georgetown Pike for its research facilities. This agency, now known as the Federal Highway Administration, was not using most of it. The land was seven miles northwest of the White House, an ideal compromise between the need to get away from Washington and the need to be near the president.

  “Dulles saw the property and fell in love with it,” Walter N. Elder, an assistant to Dulles at the time, said.161

  The CIA obtained 225.5 acres of the land for its headquarters. The Federal Highway Administration’s Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center, which tests highway barriers and cars for crash worthiness, still occupies a tract that the roads agency retained outside the CIA’s acres.

  On a map, the CIA’s compound looks like a giant weather balloon, with its top jutting toward the northeast just below a crook in the Potomac River. The mouth of the balloon forms the entrance to the compound, which is where Dolley Madison Boulevard and Georgetown Pike come together, forming the apex of a triangle.

  In the records of Fairfax County, the CIA is part of Parcel 22-3-01-00-40, with land assessed at $235,932,200. This parcel extends northeast well beyond the CIA compound to the Potomac River and includes the highway research center, which is northwest of the CIA. Because it is all held in the name of the U.S. government, the assessors do not distinguish between the portion held by the CIA and the portion used by the roads agency.

  In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill authorizing $46 million for the construction of the CIA headquarters complex. On September 20, 1961, the first employees began to move into the new building, a concrete and glass structure that consists of 1.4 million square feet. There was one problem. The Public Roads Administration, in assembling the original land, had been unable to obtain a last 32.5 acres that jutted like an iceberg into the tract where the CIA planned its compound. Moreover, it was right at the mouth of the property, just to the left of the access drive that the CIA wanted as its main entrance off Dolley Madison Boulevard.

  The land had been purchased in 1933 by Margaret Scattergood, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College who had worked for the original American Federation of Labor doing economics research. With Florence C. Thorne, a friend and coworker, she purchased the home, along with a tenant farmer’s house and a maid’s house that sat on the property.

  When the federal government tried to take the property, she got a private law passed allowing her to stay there undisturbed until she died. In the meantime, title passed to the government, and she received $54,189 for the property immediately.162 In the records of the Fairfax County assessor, this parcel is designated as 22-3-01-00-40A and is assessed at $6,492,000.

  When they came to work each day, CIA employees drove past Scattergood’s home with its wide front porch and columns. Few knew anything about her and what she stood for. The daughter of a wealthy dye maker in Philadelphia, Scattergood was a Quaker and a pacifist. The CIA, in her view, meant war and killing—everything she was against. Scattergood helped civil rights organizations and was corresponding clerk of the Langley Hill Friends Meeting in McLean. But she spent most of her time doling out money from a trust fund left by her father to antiwar and other liberal causes. Meanwhile, she wrote letters to members of Congress urging cuts in the military and intelligence budgets. She also gave sanctuary to refugees from Nicaragua and Guatemala—illegal aliens fleeing the turmoil in the two countries where the CIA was heavily involved. Occasionally they ended up at the CIA’s gate as they tried to find Scattergood’s driveway, which was off an access drive to the CIA’s rear entrances.

  “She had an income of $100,000 to $125,000 a year perhaps. But she had no mortgage, no taxes. She lived a simple life, she and Miss Thorne. So she gave away between a third and a half of her money each year,” Nancy H. Blanchet, a grandniece and executor of her will, said.163

  When the CIA began widening its front access drive in 1983, Harry E. Fitzwater, the CIA’s deputy director for administration under William Casey, learned that Scattergood was worried that the agency would intrude on her property. For some time, Fitzwater had been concerned about Scattergood’s welfare. Since her home extended into the CIA’s grounds, it was probably more secure than the White House. But Scattergood was advancing in age. Since Thome’s death in 1973, she had lived alone. Fitzwater had had the CIA’s guards patrol her property to make sure she was okay.164

  Fitzwater invited Scattergood and a grandniece, Sylvia Blanchet, to have lunch in the director’s dining room and to tour the CIA. After they sipped sherry, Casey dropped in, and they had lunch with him. When the subject turned to the American Revolution, the subject of Casey’s 1976 book. Where and How the War Was Fought: An Armchair Tour of the American Revolution, Scattergood said, “My relatives were in jail at the time.”

  “What do you mean?” one of the CIA people asked.

  “They were Quakers and were doing civil disobedience. They don’t believe in war and don’t believe in killing other people and would rather go to jail and lose everything rather than participate in war,” Scattergood replied.165

  Scattergood died on November 7, 1986, at the age of ninety-two, after a stroke. She had lived on the property twenty-five years after the CIA occupied its headquarters building—a last show of disobedience.166

  After Scattergood’s death, the CIA extended its chain-link fence to include her property. The house is used for training sessions and will eventually be used for CIA conferences. On part of the property just to the left of the front gate the CIA built a day-care center for 104 of its employees’ offspring. Each child is enrolled by code number. From Soviet satellites, it looks like the CIA is training midgets, or so the joke goes.<
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  To the right of the CIA’s front access ramp stands a massive, nineteen-room brick home. Built in 1988, the home at 1124 Savile Lanes sat unsold for two years. A new broker, Cathie Gill, got a bright idea: Why not sell it to the CIA as the home of the director? She approached both the CIA and members of Congress, who took up the cause with William Webster. But the agency wanted no part of it, and a Saudi diplomat eventually bought it in 1991.

  Besides the main entrance, the CIA has two rear entrances off Georgetown Pike and a side entrance off the George Washington Memorial Parkway that runs along the Potomac River. In 1977, three Marine officers saw the security measures as a challenge. They got drunk in Washington’s Georgetown section and decided to prove their manhood by scaling the CIA’s fence. Well past midnight, they parked their car along the George Washington Memorial Parkway and made a run for the fence near the side entrance.

  Alarms went off in the duty office just behind the CIA’s main lobby, pinpointing the exact location of the intrusion. By the time armed security guards reached the area, one of the Marines was already inside the compound. The guards drew their guns and stopped the Marine. With the help of Fairfax County police, they caught the other two as they ran back toward their car. The CIA reported the incident to Quantico Marine base, where the officers were assigned. Each got two weeks in the brig.

  Organizations opposed to the CIA occasionally station members near the CIA’s entrances so they can write down or photograph employees’ license plates. In the 1970s, these efforts led to publication of some names of CIA employees. Soviets masquerading as picnickers did the same thing. Since then, state motor vehicle departments have made it tougher to obtain the names of owners of motor vehicles.

  The CIA’s rear entrances are off an access drive that leads from Georgetown Pike to the Federal Highway Administration’s Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center. Trucks with deliveries for the CIA use the first entrance. Across the street from the second rear entrance is Claude Moore Colonial Farm at Turkey Run, a 100-acre replica of a Virginia colonial homestead that is open to the public. Occasionally, 250-pound razorback hogs, denizens of the farm that resemble boar, squeeze out of their pens and amble past the CIA’s guard posts onto CIA property.