Editor in chief

“Where is the real CIA?” I asked the two Diamondback news editors as we drove around wooded streets in northern Virginia on Friday morning.

We were there as the pilot group of a renewed CIA tour and government official interview program for college journalists. We weren’t really supposed to take notes in the CIA, but rather the tour was supposed to be a little favor (and flavor) for us before we went back to Washington to interview former NSA and CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden on the subject of government surveillance.

We drove into the wrong entrance at first. I don’t like mornings, or being yelled at, or assault rifles, so when a guard with an assault rifle approached the car that morning screaming at us to “roll the window all the way down” before directing us to the proper turnaround lane, I was so frazzled I considered driving home.

I don’t blame them. It’s the Central Intelligence Agency. Of course they don’t want idiot drivers messing up the flow of traffic.

Was that the real CIA?

After more mix-ups, we got to the Original Headquarters Building, with its beautiful white stone interior and 16-foot CIA seal on the lobby floor. As we joined up late with a tour group composed of our college journalist peers and CIA staff members — including CIA Museum curator Toni Hiley — the day started to feel very Smithsonian.

Our tour was more real than the virtual one offered on cia.gov, sure, even though it was mostly restricted to the CIA Museum, three hallways that look and act like most museums in many ways. An important distinction is displayed on many walls: “The information presented in this exhibit is in the public domain and does not represent any official CIA opinion, release, or acknowledgment.”

But in an agency dominated by questions of truth and illusion, it’s hard to know what to trust. A lighter could be a camera. A shaving brush could conceal film. A playing card could be a map of the European Theater. The artifacts confirm the myths: Anything could be anything.

In our meeting with Hayden later, he frequently talked about “the laws of physics” as a way to conceptualize what is and is not possible in the intelligence community, in his overall effort to downplay the evil empire image of the CIA that has cropped up in the media since Edward Snowden’s public revelations of extensive surveillance activities. But intelligence is necessarily more obscure than the laws of physics. Don’t we all wish it was circumscribed by the facts of the universe?

“We are designed to enable action in the face of ambiguity,” Hayden said in his closing remarks.

Ambiguity reigns in everything related to the CIA. At lunch in the cafeteria when I asked one of our handlers,CIA spokesman Ned Price, how many employees work on-campus, he chewed, swallowed and said, “Well, that’s classified.”

Everywhere the history of the CIA is mediated by images, re-creations and blurred faces. Few artifacts are outside the museum’s glass, and the ones that are have plaques that read, “Please Do Not Touch.”

There’s plenty that’s real. Next to a model (created with foam, paint and other hobbyists’ materials) of the Abbottabad compound where Osama bin Laden was killed by a small team of Americans, including CIA members, is a real brick from a pile of building materials near the main house. On the wall next to that is an AK-47 found next to bin Laden’s body.

Reality clashes with presentation and idealization throughout the CIA’s headquarters. A mannequin dons a full CIA operative’s post-9/11 Afghanistan uniform, accurately re-created with actual clothes except for the belt, which belongs to Hiley’s husband. An Aquafina vending machine glows behind a real 1950s short range ballistic missile engine.

Some parts of the museum seem to be transplanted from the for-profit International Spy Museum 10 miles or so to the east. The CIA’s gift shop has Christmas decorations, “Official Hot Sauce,” CIA-branded shot glasses and chocolate-covered sunflower “Seeds of Intelligence” next to real, non-purchasable, CIA-printed signs about ways for shoppers to avoid blowing their cover.

In the museum, under a blacklight, a piece of paper presumably from Ronald Breslow’s 1996 textbook Chemistry Today and Tomorrow has writing on it in invisible ink:

DO NOT TELL ANYONE WHAT YOU SAW HERE TODAY

GOOD LUCK!

The questions of whether that writing was there from a field operative or from someone in the museum team, of whether the belt on the mannequin is actually coated in dust from the mountains of Kandahar, don’t matter in the end.

Where is the real CIA? In the construction crews populating the OHB? In the Starbucks? In the bathrooms? In the portraits of former directors? In the Office of Medical Services? In the long, labyrinthine hallways with drugstore-esque rounded mirrors?

The real CIA is nowhere because the real CIA is everywhere. The campus exists to perpetuate the agency’s greatest illusion: that the entire world is not the CIA campus, when, of course, it is.

The CIA gift shop has a set of oversize coins, one of which has an American flag and “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” on one side. The other side has a covered wagon, a space shuttle, Mount Rushmore, a lighthouse, a bald eagle, the Statue of Liberty, the Hollywood sign, the Space Needle, a hot air balloon and much more surrounding the letters “A M E R I C A.”

Just as the real CIA cannot be found on the CIA campus, this vision of America cannot be found in the physical territory of the country. But still, that’s the America the CIA is supposed to be protecting: the ideals, the images, the patriotism a mint can fit on a coin. After all, somebody has to. Right?

Mike King is the editor in chief of The Diamondback. He can be reached at michaelrkingjr@gmail.com.