Invisible Ink: At the CIA's Creative Writing Group
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
Random employee social group organizing a talk, no budget for speaking fee, "must be escorted at all times", full parking lots, confused officials/security people, getting multiple visitor badges, impossible to find conference rooms, employee gift shop, complex rules about what employees can publish on their own time, long-tenured employee who has no idea how many people work at the company...yep you are at Google.
That said, having worked for “agencies myself”, if people knew home many former 3 letter peeps were running around in high levels and influential positions they would be surprised. Most of them know each other on the tech side (some of us even have get togethers anually) and many of us have relationships with people high up in media and banking…. Crap now I sound conspiratorial.
Truth is most are just employees that did a job and have moved on.
You are absolutely right on. Once any organization gets big, it gets stratified. Nobody has perfect communication and it is impossible for large organizations to perfectly share information across them; so you end up with these left-hand/right-hand disconnects. To make things even more interesting, at Intelligence Agencies very few people stay in the same job for very long as rotation is encouraged for staffers and contractors slide around across contracts and at this organization offices are even more walled off from one another in ways that might be similar to how Apple segments their teams.
I suspect what the author here encountered was one of the many volunteer employee groups/clubs that exist on the inside. There's dozens upon dozens of them like at any big generic corporation. There's a writing club, a new mothers club, a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu club, LGBTQIA+, sport Karate, Asian Pacific Islander advocacy, Yoga, etc. What makes these compelling is that you don't have to answer awkward questions about where you work during socializing as everybody in your "club" is "in the club". But it's also why there wasn't a speaking fee.
Everybody who works for this organization that wants to publish something outside of it really does have to send it in for review. There's a dedicated office full of people who read everybody's memoirs, news editorials, sci-fi novelettes, and so on and try to make sure nothing sensitive ends up in the public sphere.
The description of the parking lot, the feel of the building, and the gift shop is perfect. It's a shame the author also didn't get to see the library, which is very modern, well resourced, and well stocked. here are some pictures https://www.cia.gov/legacy/headquarters/cia-library/
One thing that this organization does very well I think compared to many other Federal Agencies is put real effort into cataloging and making available to people who work there information about the history of the organization. There's mini museums all over their facilities stocked with artifacts and little descriptive plates, paintings of key events, documentaries, periodicals, and all kinds of internal media and information. The good, bad, and ugly are explored and learned from and many problems, mistakes, and other issues are constantly presented so that the people who work there have some sense of the history of the place (the why this is here), and what they're trying to accomplish, and importantly a continuous dialog of where they've screwed up.
A recent review of a major failure that's been in the news 6 or 7 years was recently internally published and more or less names names and embarrassingly called out and shamed an entire directorate. Another review of technology advancements raked a technology provided by a major technology company through the literary coals.
The push for diversity is also extremely real; both geocultural as well as alt-culture. One of the biggest lessons learned after 9/11 was that the Intelligence Community was mostly made of old, white, men who couldn't fathom or reason about how young angry Arabs might be thinking or feeling. Outside of the Presidential appointed senior leadership which still falls largely into the old mold, the generations since 9/11 are as diverse as just about anywhere you can find and maintaining that culture is seen as a critical capability.
>“Didn’t it seem strange to you to get a second badge when you’d just got your first one?”
>“I’ve never been here before,” I said. “Everything seems strange to me.”
>A different cop told him to give it a rest, handed me a third badge
We all love bureaucracy if it didn't happen to ourselves
This has massively different meanings depending on if there are two middle initials missing or one...
>"Google Maps isn’t much use at Langley."
>“If you see a helicopter, you’ve gone too far,”
This is pretty solid advice in a lot of things.
>"I asked Vivian how many people worked at the CIA. “Maybe two million?” "
This might, low key, be the best joke in the whole thing.
>"There was also a Pride Month display"
Did they have anything in lavender? Maybe a Carmel Offie challenge coin?
That was a fun little read.
> “In my other work,” she explained, “I can get movie people attached.”
Is she implying that getting an agent is a possibly waste of time because she is the agent, so to speak, with direct access to industry insiders/plants/assets (albeit in the movie industry)?
The Paris Review? Are they kidding? Do they mention that in the early years the PR was Mathiesson's cover as a CIA agent and a lot of funding came from them, at least indirectly but with full knowledge? I'm not trying to knock it down - it's a fine publication. But that's just funny.
This is part of one of my favorite historical footnotes. There was theoretical debate between the US and USSR about which system fostered the flowering of culture, each side saying theirs was better not just for the economy and government, but under (capitalism / socialism) culture was better because of (the free market of ideas / state support) and so forth. So to have something to point to, the CIA just went out and covertly funded a bunch of cultural outlets. Make of it what you may that the government was secretly subsidizing these and just how capitalist that is or isn't...
Or a footnote to the footnote, Timothy Leary wound up friends with G Gordon Liddy of all people. Many years after they met when Liddy was an FBI agent in the raid on Leary's compound, Leary had faded as a countercultural figure and Liddy had done his time after Watergate. They were apparently chatting and Liddy asked "Tim, you know I always wondered. Were you working with the CIA? That had always been the rumor, but I thought to myself at the time 'you know if that's true it would really destroy any legitimacy he has with the left.' So Tim, is it true? Did you work with the CIA?"
To which Leary's reply was just "...well Gordon who did you expect me to work with? The KGB!?!"
They do mention that in passing indeed.
Was the argument ever about a planned economy versus a government that does nothing but foreign policy? Subsidies in a capitalist system don't make it non-capitalist.
This was a good line
First is books written by former diplomats / intel opporatives. SO many greats!
Second, the intelligence officer's book shelf. In other words, book lists for people studying the various arts of intelligence. Fascinating stuff.
See the text above the filter - "486 Declassified Book Reviews". I assume anything newer than 1995 is still classified.
The magazine was a new discovery for me as well as the annual reading list.
I have found some excellent British authors with roots in GCHQ, but the American ones I have tried reading so far have been all very black-and-white which makes them super boring.
Before working at a large company with a lot of bureaucratic nonsense, I probably would have found a lot of this surprising. That said, it's nice to know the CIA isn't anymore put together than the rest of us.
Also this reminds me of a similar article from shortly after 9/11: https://www.wired.com/2002/10/i-fought-the-future-for-the-ci...
> The dining room was long and mostly empty—apparently a security thing.
That might be a really good idea. If you have a whole lot of money and want to increase security, making it so that lunch groups eat with a lot space between each other is probably a lot of security bang for the buck.
Both CIA and NSA have classified in-house periodicals of general interest. Eventually they get declassified and published openly. Some of those are amusing.
CIA: https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/
NSA: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cyber-vault/2018-12-...
While this summary is perhaps accurate, it isn't always just about what was written, but how it was written. While I enjoyed reading the article, laughing a few times, I can't say the same about your summary.
In fact, it seems like you actually agree with me: how something is written is important, not just what was written. We're like-minded with that!
They know this. The obvious point is the mundane and folksey.