CIA OCCUPANCY OF NEW BUILDING IN MCLEAN, VIRGINIA (RECOMMENDATION BY PRESIDENT'S FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE ADVISORY BOARD OF 18 JULY, 19

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP66B00560R000100060171-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 28, 2003
• Sequence Number: 171
• Publication Date: August 21, 1961
• Content Type: MF

P
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21 August 1961
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MEMORANDUM FOR: The Honorable McGeorge Bundy
Special Assistant to the President
for National Security Affairs
SUBJECT
CIA Occupancy of the New Building
in McLean, Virginia (Recommendation
by the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board of 18 July, 1961)
In your memorandum of July 24 you transmitted to me for
comment, before its submission to the President, the following
recommendation of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board in its report to the President of 18 July 1961:
"The Board recommends that action should be
taken at the earliest possible date to assure that the
Central Intelligence Agency's plans for the occupancy of
the new building in McLean, Virginia are. feasible. (We
believe there are valid questions that may be raised about
these plans. In particular, there are questions about
moving all of the clandestine activities into the building.
We recommend accordingly that these plans be reviewed
administratively, and that a feasibility study be made
as to the possibility of housing all of the clandestine
functions, or some part thereof, in another place. We
believe it may be appropriate to house in the new building
some of the non-clandestine functions of the Central
Intelligence Agency which are now scheduled to be
relocated to other buildings in Washington)".
The points which the Board has raised in this recommendation
affect a very important phase of the work of C. 1. A., and I wish, at
the outset, to assure you that the feasibility of our planned occupancy
of the new building has been thoroughly considered and under constant
review since, the building program was initiated more than ten years C
ago. 0
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My comments on the Board's recommendations fall into two
general categories; first, the practical problem with which we are
faced today as regards the relocation of our personnel; second, the
question of tradecraft in the field of our clandestine functions.
Since 1951 the Agency has been planning the construction of a
building which would house the major part of our headquarters
personnel. This project was initiated after careful consideration
of the security and other factors involved in this procedure. The
original decision to proceed was reached by General Walter Bedell
Smith, who was then Director, at a time when, as now, our activities
were scattere for the most part of
temporary construction.
In presenting the matter to the Congress at that time, the
security risks involved in transporting classified documents between
buildings and the physical insecurity of the temporary buildings
themselves were stressed, as well as the economy and efficiency
of operations from a single headquarters building. As a result of
this presentation, the Congress on 28 September 1951, passed an
authorizing measurel
Due to a technicality, the appropriating action failed of passage
and it was not until 1 July 1955, after a site had been selected and
approved by the appropriate authorities, that the President renewed
the request to the Congress for the necessary legislation. On
4 August 1955 the Congress appropriated funds for the preparation of
plans and specifications and in 1956, the Congress appropriated the
funds to complete the building and the access highways.
As the printed hearings before the Senate Appropriations
Committee evidence, the entire question of the security of the Agency's
operations was gone into in great detail. The pros and cons of the
location of our headquarters clandestine services personnel in one
building, which we in the Agency had been studying for many years,
were carefully considered by the members of Congress directly
concerned. It was clearly the understanding of the Congress in
making the appropriation for our headquarters that these personnel
would be included in the new building.
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We know of no building in the Washington area available and
suitable for the occupancy of our headquarters clandestine personnel.
We do not feel that it would now be possible to approach the Congress
for funds for a new building. Certainly there is no structure which
could be made available in the time that remains before the "tempos"
which the clandestine services now occupy must be torn down. Under
the applicable legislation, an equivalent amount of temporary construc-
tion including those now occupied by the clandestine personnel is to
be demolished once our new building is completed. Furthermore,
these particular temporary buildings are fast becoming uninhabitable.
Hence, we are forced to the conclusion that there is really no
practical alternative to follow, initially at least, other than to house
the major part of the headquarters personnel of the clandestine services
in the new building, beginning in about a month from now.
In addition, because of the common services on which the various
divisions of the clandestine services depend such as directing personnel,
files and records, logistics, supporting staff elements, etc., it is not
feasible to fragment the clandestine service's operational headquarters
without serious loss of both efficiency and security. '
Our security office, which we consider highly professional, has
assured me that the protection from disclosure of our clandestine work
and personnel can be far more effectively guarded in the new building
than has been possible in the old buildings the clandestine services have
been occupying. The new building will provide electronic data
processing, a secure telephone system, a specialized signal center,
a pneumatic tube system, classified waste disposal and other modern
facilities which will add both efficiency and security to our work that
no other available building would afford.
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In the light of the Board's recommendation, we will review,
again, before the move takes place, the desirability of excepting
Finally from the viewpoint of security, it should be added
that there would be no' possibility whatever of maintainin for any
length of time the secrecy of a building housing the
persons comprising our clandestine service headquarters personne .
Once discovered and advertised in our press, as must be expected,
the security situation of the clandestine services personnel housed
in such a building would be more severely prejudiced and more a
target for publicity than at the proposed new location where they are
co-located with a large number of non-clandestine personnel.
Furthermore the proposed relocation of our personnel is now no
longer "news".
No clandestine service in the world of any size has succeeded
in keeping its main headquarters unknown and unidentified to those
hostile foreign services seriously engaged in trying to locate and
penetrate it. Few have had any success even in maintaining the
anonymity of the personnel in these headquarters.
In this work we have made it a rule not to waste time in trying
to conceal the obvious but to exercise all our ingenuity in concealing
what can and should be concealed, namely clandestine intelligence
operations.
I now turn from the practical problems we face in connection
with the relocation of our clandestine personnel to the question of
tradecraft.
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It is the security of operations which it is essential to preserve.
In the long run, the identity of many of our clandestine services
personnel, as they move to their field duties abroad and then return
to work at headquarters cannot effectively be insured. With care,
however, operations of the most secret character can be and are run
by highly skilled professionals even though their identification with
CIA is known.
Further, much of our overseas work and a great deal of our
domestic work requires meetings between our headquarters a---'---
tine services personnel and the sources of intelligenc
Ito obtain information and develop new contacts. Their
usefulness would be severely curtailed and many of our most valuable
sources w' uld dry up if our headquarters and overseas clandestine
personnel are not permitted such contacts. Though we might have
improved security, we would gather little intelligence. In fact, it is
unwise to bury one's personnel so deeply in order to preserve security
that they are prevented from doing their work. *
* During the three years (1942-1945) I operated in Switzerland in
World War II against the highly sophisticated Nazi and Fascist intelli-
gence services, my functions were quite well known to those services.
However it was entirely feasible to carry on and maintain the secrecy
of operations which penetrated the German Foreign Office, Canaris's
German Abwehr, which aided the resistance movements in France,
Italy, Austria and Germany, and yet keep these operations wholly
unknown to the enemy. In fact the high level German Foreign Office
official who filched over 2, 000 top secret coded messages from the
German Foreign Office and passed them to us in Switzerland without
ever being apprehended, initially made a futile effort to contact an
allied service through certain overt officials. He failed to make contact
because the Allied Secret Service man was so far under ground that
the willing German agent never was able to reach him.
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One of the lessons which experience over the last 20 years
has taught us is the tradecraft of keeping operations secret and
not wasting our energies in the futile effort of preserving the
anonymity of all of our headquarters and overseas personnel engaged
in clandestine work.
We are in the business of collecting intelligence. To do this
a large number of our clandestine service personnel must take the risk
of being known for what they are in order to make the contacts and
establish the social and personal relationships necessary to their work.
Obviously they need not unnecessarily advertise their service
connection.
As regards the headquarters itself, every security precaution
has been taken to insure the security of our communications overseas
and between the various clandestine offices, to provide every protection
for our records and files, and to give us a secure area from which we
can direct the work of our overseas personnel
This is the primary purpose of the headquarters
personnel and I believe it can be efficiently carried out from our new
headquarters.
In conclusion, to summarize our response to the Board's
recommendation, we submit:
a. Ever since the project for a headquarters building
was first initiated, we have been reviewing the feasibility
and the security of our program for its occupancy and the
selection of personnel to occupy it. We consider the plans
which have been made to be feasible. We do not consider. it
feasible to secure quickly an appropriate alternate site for
the clandestine services.
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e. As new personnel come aboard who have had
no prior identification with CIA, we endeavor to determine
at the outset whether or not their anonymity should be
guarded and from the very beginning take the necessary
steps to accomplish this. This existing program will be
followed aggressively.
f. the space in the new building
will not be occupied by the clandestine services. We have
endeavored to assign to this space in the building those
categories of non-members of the clandestine services who
have had the most thorough security checks.
g. In many countries of the world, and to many
secret and security services of the world, CIA has become
a symbol of one important phase of the American initiative
to combat international communism and a rallying point
for those who wish to organize to uncover and thwart
communist intrigues. Adverse publicity, such as attended
the Cuban episode, is obviously harmful. But the image
of a strong, effective and vigilant U. S. intelligence service
is an asset and dignified ublicit to this end is better than
silence./
he image of an American Intelligence
service a is fragmented and "running for cover"
because of recent adverse and passing publicity will not
be encouraging to our friends abroad and will bring
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satisfaction to the Kremlin which for years has made
CIA a major target. This was not the type of
organization the Congress publicly created by the
Security Act of 1947.
/S/
ALLEN W. DULLES
Director
cc: The President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board
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