CIA Fantasies and Lies

Lester Earnest

2013.06.19

I was first exposed to CIA culture when I was invited to visit their Washington headquarters in the late 1960s and learned that they liked to view everything as secret even when that made no sense. I was given driving directions from the airport to their headquarters in the part of Washington called Foggy Bottom but was admonished not to reveal where I was going to anyone. When I climbed in the taxi and gave the driver the directions, however, he replied, “Oh, CIA.”

When I arrived at their “hidden” facility I was greeted by a friendly high-level administrator named Paul Howerton and shown around, including an abandoned roller-skating rink and an old pickle factory next door, both retaining their original exteriors. I was impressed by the fact that Howerton knew everyone by name as well as information about their families and other personal interests. It seemed like a happy family. I was then given credentials that would allow me to visit various other CIA facilities scattered about town but didn’t follow up on that.

In late 1962 I was assigned to work at CIA in their new headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Rather than moving my family I commuted there from Boston on a weekly basis, flying there on Monday morning and returning home Friday afternoon, thus sticking my wife with looking after our three small kids. The new CIA headquarters were just off the George Washington Parkway at an off-ramp marked BPR (Bureau of Public Roads), their new cover. Never mind that anyone could drive into the large parking lot next to their giant new building and hang out as long as they wished. When I got there it struck me that this building with many small windows was close to what I imagined the Ministry of Truth would look like in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four though we still had a dozen years to go before that time. Meanwhile the old CIA buildings in town were replaced with an elegant new office and apartment complex called Watergate that somehow acquired some history of its own.

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

I was assigned to a large office just upstairs from the main foyer of the building, with the large “Central Intelligence Agency” mosaic on the floor that often appears in video introductions to news stories. I was to share that office with other members of the multi-agency committee responsible for integrating two large CIA databases. I was instructed that when answering the phone, if the caller didn’t immediately name a person assigned to that office I was to hang up without further discussion.

That was okay, but I was taken aback when I learned that with the badge I had I could not leave my office without an escort, even to go to the men’s room just down the hall. I learned that I could get around that only by submitting to a polygraph test, often mistakenly called a “lie detector” in the press. I was also told not to say anything in the men’s room, where there were microphones connected to recording devices. On peering down the air duct in the windowsill next to my desk I could see there was also a small microphone down there. Clearly these spooks were seriously spooked.

For convenience I agreed to take the polygraph test even though I knew it had approximately the same scientific validity as reading tea leaves. The only way that a polygraph might detect a lie was if the subject believed that it worked and panicked while lying. I had earlier sent a subordinate named Charlie there to work on another project for a short time and learned that he got through the polygraph test in just two hours, which confirmed my suspicions, given that Charlie seldom told the truth about anything.

As it turned out I was not as skillful as Charlie in getting through it, probably because of my attitude. My response to the first question, “Is your true name Lester D. Earnest” evidently registered as a lie and we went on from there. I was strapped in for seven hours with an hour off for lunch. It probably didn’t help that I soon began experimenting and learned that it was easy to tell the truth and have it register as a lie, but almost as easy to tell a lie and have it register as the truth. In any case I eventually got through it and was given a badge allowing me to go to the men’s room and other places by myself.

As far as I know the intelligence agencies are still using this bit of security theater today even though they have never caught a real spy with a polygraph test, while a number of people who turned out to be spies passed with flying colors, including Bernon Mitchell, a former housemate of mine at Caltech. With my newfound freedom I wandered about and noticed that in the hallway just outside the main computer room there was a string of IBM disk files that were not connected to anything. When I asked about them I learned that they were obsolete but contained Top Secret information and the staff couldn’t figure out how to delete it reliably, so inasmuch as they were on lease from IBM they just kept them in the hall. I assume that they eventually managed to purchase and destroy those disks.

Database disintegration. Our study group promptly made the rounds of a number of other intelligence agencies including NSA Headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the nearby Army Map Service, an Air Force intelligence center and a large facility devoted to reading aerial and satellite image pairs and interpreting the resulting 3D images. However, I observed that we had negligible information about how data screening decisions were made regarding which things were put in the two existing databases, how they were encoded and whether those things had changed over time. After a month I wrote a memo proposing that we start out by collecting that information. The head of our group then informed me that was not in our charter, which he viewed as having arrived on stone tablets. He said our job was to integrate those databases even though they had been created for different purposes and were radically different in their structures and content. In response I said that we would have a better chance of integrating them going forward, provided that we studied the screening and encoding processes a bit, but that integrating the existing databases had little chance of working. In response he walked away shaking his head.

Hiding behind a big lie. As I learned early on, the Headquarters had a rather good cafeteria where most people ate, including me, but I also learned that there was a smaller place for overseas operatives who happened to be in town for a while and, because they were away from their families so much, they were allowed to bring their spouses in for lunch, so that cafeteria had an outside door.

Sometime in 2003 a front-page article appeared in the Washington Post newspaper by a woman reporter who said she had lunch there with a bunch of spies. Apparently, she approached the entry door with a group of operatives and their wives and was admitted. By 10 AM the day the article appeared, orders were issued reassigning me and other “outsiders” to the small cafeteria and telling us to pretend that was where we always ate. Meanwhile they put out the story that this was a public cafeteria and there had been no security breach. Concurrently the overseas operatives were reassigned to the big cafeteria. We all went along with this big lie, but it convinced me that any statements put out by CIA regarding alleged misconduct on their part were likely to be big lies.

It appears that CIA follows this policy consistently and, given that they have substantial “black budget” funding that is not visible to the public and are engaged in various military operations around the world, including the detention and torture of whoever they don’t like as well as assassinations wherever they choose to fly drones, they have become the world’s greatest threat to peace. However, since their operations continue to enrich the military-industrial-political complex there is little likelihood that they will be reined in anytime soon.

Given that CIA was willing to go through a big thrash and lie about it to cover up for a minor security problem, I concluded that none of their public statements should be believed. Sure enough, they lied publicly about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction so as to support President George W. Bush's agenda, then arranged for “black prisons” in various parts of the world where selected people could be tortured, put together airlines to transport victims to and from these facilities and allegedly engaged in drug smuggling as a side business. Having made videos of some of their torturing, when they were officially asked to turn over those videos they instead destroyed them with no consequences. My conclusion is that CIA is so far out of control that there is no way to reform them. The best thing to do will be to shut them down, terminate the black budgets, form a new intelligence agency based on principals of ethical conduct, and conduct systematic reviews of their programs by both Congress (hopefully not including the dimwits on current intelligence committees) and the courts.

On my last day at CIA our supervisor invited me out to lunch and said, “I figured out that you were right, but we couldn't depart from our charter.” I later heard he moved up the administrative ladder at CIA.