Fred and I drove through a rural wood where the dappled light fell on high fences topped with barbed wire. At a guard shack straddling the road, we gave our social security numbers to a man with a machine gun, got a badge and parked near a castle of thick green glass, replete with myriad antennae. This, then, was the Central Intelligence Agency.
Inside, a long hallway or atrium reminds one of the old Victoria Station in London-except that down at the far end are more men with more machine guns who eye people passing through turnstiles. There's a plaque honoring Ronald Reagan and a bronze bas-relief of a leering William Casey, the man who ran the CIA during the Reagan years. Some see Casey as a cowboy who nearly destroyed the agency's credibility by discarding its mission to provide dispassionate, closely reasoned assessments of foreign situations in favor of starting covert wars and smuggling cocaine. Others see him as a national hero, like Oliver North, a realist who understood that the ends justify the means.
Once through the turnstile, you walk through a seemingly pointless maze, presumably while being irradiated like a hothouse tomato. At the other end you emerge into what looks like an ordinary office complex-with improvements.
On every floor is a sealed room labeled "Classified Waste"; indeed, except for the bathroom, there does not seem to be any provision for unclassified waste. Even to pee you must have an escort who stands by politely without taking his eyes off you-which is guaranteed to produce, as they say, a chilling effect.
The half-dozen analysts we met there were regular guys, paunchy and middle-aged or young and lanky-computer nerds, mostly. Their job is to be paranoid, and they take their work very seriously. None have last names, and they do not hang cartoons on their office doors. Our host took us to his little room, cluttered with bullets and shell casings, a trench coat someone had worn while crawling around Chernobyl, and sticky notes on every flat surface. He kicked a cardboard box full of CDs and growled, "Gulf War." We nodded. Mesopotamian rock groups, perhaps.
He was a gruff, bland man, inoffensive as a manatee. When you probed, you were told what you'd expect: yes, the CIA used to break U.S. laws, but now it only breaks foreign laws. Yes, it used to kill people, but not any more. Not even foreigners.
I exhaled deeply when we left, and realized I had hardly been breathing the whole time. Fred turned on me, exasperated. "They keep order," he insisted. "They preserve our freedom."
"Okay," I said.
"You don't sound like you mean it."
"Neither do you," I said. "Let's go to the Smithsonian." Truth is, I felt a need to visit a certain painting at the National Gallery.
We recognized Bellini's "Madonna and Child" at once, though there were many similar portraits in the Italian Renaissance wing. This one is different: Mary wears mourning, and her expression attests her suffering, though Jesus is alive and smiling faintly in her lap. There is no landscape background, only a claustrophobic monotone; and while the baby stretches out his chubby hand and with smooth brow gazes off into the distance, yearning toward his peculiar path, Mary looks at the viewer with eyes that have seen and understood too much, her face filled with compassion and hopelessness. One senses fear, sympathy, even frustration-as if she were not so much the mother of a self-assured god as some Cassandra to whose true prophecies no one would attend.
Maybe it was just the juxtaposition, but when I think about the CIA, I cannot shake the image of that Madonna who had seen the future and was helpless in the face of her certainty. She sits there still in her dusky gallery in the center of a city bustling with politicians, tourists and spooks-troubled, listening intently to the cries of the world while her confident child broaches the millennium.
And I am hoping that my hosts, who are government employees like her, will stand transfixed before her at least once.
Paul Baerman, Fuqua '90, is a Durham resident.
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