Novelist Johannes Lichtman doesn’t write about the CIA, or CIA-adjacent topics. So he found it a bit of a mystery when he was invited to speak to a writing group inside Langley. In this dispatch for The Paris Review, Lichtman recounts the strangeness of the experience, which starts in the parking lot. (Apparently parking at CIA headquarters is a headache, not just for visitors, but for the people who work there.) I do wish this essay went deeper, but given its subject matter, perhaps it can’t. Still, it’s enjoyable: Lichtman includes odd and funny details from the day (did you know, for instance, that Langley has a gift shop?), and captures the odd mundanity of this place on the surface. (It also scratches an itch I have, as I’m in the midst of bingeing shows like Person of Interest and The Diplomat.) Overall, the piece creates more questions than answers, which, after all, seems absolutely appropriate.
At first, we couldn’t find the conference room. Like me, Vivian wasn’t allowed to bring her phone into the main building, but even if she had, I don’t know who she would’ve called for directions. CIA officers generally don’t know their coworkers’ last names. (The Starbucks at Langley is the only Starbucks where baristas aren’t allowed to ask for your name.) So I am without photos or notes, but walking through the main building at Langley, is, in my memory, like walking through an airport terminal in a major metropolis, crossed with a hospital, crossed with an American mall, crossed with an Eastern European university. It’s big and gleaming and cold and brutal, all at once. There was a hall of presidential portraits with notes from commanders in chief to the Secret Service, all of them written in elegant fountain pen, except for Donald Trump’s, which was written in Sharpie and said “I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!”
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