Inside the CIA (26 page)

In effect, the critics were saying that the agency should have known that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait before he knew it. To suggest that the CIA should have known more than the enemy knew is to require clairvoyance, something that no one has yet been able to achieve. Intelligence is nothing more than information, and to insist that the CIA should have it before it exists is unfair. Unless there is reason to believe that an event is going to happen, the CIA has no business saying it might happen. After all, anything might happen.

Three weeks before the military offensive took place, the CIA raised the possibility that Iraq would invade. In doing so, the CIA fulfilled its role, which is to take the first cut at world events, to filter out important developments, to bring them to the attention of the White House, and to sound a warning about the possible outcomes so that policymakers can prepare.

Absent hard evidence, the CIA would have been irresponsible if it had said flatly that Saddam Hussein would invade. Even if the CIA had had hard evidence of Saddam Hussein’s intentions early on, no one—including the Iraqi leader—knew for sure that he would go ahead with the plan until he did. The fact is the CIA did raise the possibility that Iraq would invade Kuwait three weeks before the invasion. It could
not have stated the case more strongly than it did because, even to this day, there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein knew then he would order an invasion. Even when the CIA did sound the alarm, the Bush administration did very little about it.

“People make critical comments about us all the time,” Kerr observed. “A lot of it is out of frustration. We don’t do what they would like us to do, or we are doing something they would just as soon we didn’t do.”
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The fact is the U.S. could not have won the war, with its outflanking maneuvers and precise bombing, as quickly and effectively as it did if it had not had good intelligence. In this case, the intelligence overall was nothing short of spectacular. Yet even when the CIA does well, its success is often portrayed as failure.

Meanwhile, an entire directorate of the CIA goes on about its business largely unaffected by the crisis of the moment. This is the Directorate of Administration, which supports the CIA. Yet in many ways, this is the most fascinating of all the CIA’s directorates. Because it contains the Office of Security, it is also the one with the most problems.

T
HE
D
IRECTORATE OF
A
DMINISTRATION, WHILE ONLY A
support element, is no different from the other directorates in thinking that its job is the most essential. It is this directorate that keeps the other pieces of the agency in place. Without it, no one in the CIA would get paid, no one would be hired, and no one would have any computers, communications, heat, or electricity. Most important, without the directorate’s Office of Security, opposing spy agencies could infiltrate moles into the CIA or bug the office of the CIA director himself. With nine thousand employees, it is the CIA’s largest directorate.

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.

F
ROM 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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.