Kids Walk on CIA Seal at Headquarters
© 2000 -2006 Richard C. Rhodes
Most everyone has seen, in TV or in a movie, the giant granite CIA seal that is embedded in the floor of the lobby of the main CIA building in Langley, Virgina. At one point in my tenure with the CIA, my children were told that I worked for the Department of Defense at the Pentagon. It was very important that my children not know my real employer. We were scheduled to move overseas and needed to get a bunch of immunizations. I was told to bring my wife and children to CIA headquarters and take them into the section where we could all get our required shots. In those days, the CIA HQ buidling had no sign on the outside to indicate the agency it housed. As we drove up, we told the kids that it was an annex to the Pentagon where we could get our shots before we went overseas. As we walked into the cavernous lobby, I suddenly remembered that there was a huge CIA seal on the floor, 16-feet wide. I distracted the kids and they walked right over the top of the CIA seal without seeing it. On the way out, we managed to keep them in an animated conversation and they walked over it again, never noticing what it said. I guess it is so big that if you looked casually down you might only read a couple of words, and hopefully those would be United States or Of America. It was only after we retired, moved to Dallas, and the seal started showing up on TV shots of the CIA lobby, did we tell the kids of the day they walked on that seal and did not know that they were in the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA Seal in the Lobby of CIA Headquarters
How times have changed. There is now a virtual tour of the Agency on their Web site (www.cia.gov). Several years ago, I put my exercycle up for sale. A lady came to look at it and in the course of the conversation, I mentioned that years back I had served with the Agency. She said that her sister was currently working with the Agency at Langley, Virginia. During a visit there, she bought a CIA water bottle from the gift shop. The gift shop? What is this, CBS? When she came back to pay for the bike, she handed me the CIA water bottle and said that it probably meant more to me than it did to her. What a nice gesture.
A CIA water bottle from the gift shop at Headquaters
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Richard Rhodes
Revised 5/06/2006