It’s a neighborhood with Tiffany, Hermès, and Gucci boutiques among hundreds of other stores in several sprawling shopping malls. It is also a neighborhood filled with the offices of firms with large contracts with the national security agencies and departments. Tysons Corner was the nation’s first “edge city,” according to Joel Garreau’s seminal work on self-sufficient minicities in suburbia. It is a place where one can live in a high-rise condo or town house, shop or dine in one of hundreds of choices, exercise in a variety of gyms and health clubs, watch a newly released movie in a multiplex, and work in a high-rise for any one of scores of outsourcing firms. If you live there, you never have to leave. It is, of course, slightly unreal, detached from the nearby nation’s capital, indeed from the lives of most Americans. After 9/11, a huge new office building started to go up on one of the few underdeveloped streets in the edge city. Oddly, there was no sign saying what company the new complex would house.
When the outer structure of the building was complete, designers from the Walt Disney Company arrived. Disney has a large store less than a mile away (I know because I have stood in line there buying presents for a three-year-old). But these designers were not there to create a place for Princess Bride birthday parties; they had come to help build a counterterrorism command center. Jumbotrons now hang above a broad expanse with scores of workstations. It has a Hollywood feel, looking like the set for the command center in movies like Dr. Strangelove and War Games. It is also reminiscent of the network operations center for a major telephone company I visited in New Jersey. There a corporate Vice President had been candid enough to admit to me, “We spent a boatload making this place look like NASA’s Mission Control, but it’s just to wow the customers. It could all be done from a normal office with cubicles.” Counterterrorism could all be done from a normal office, too, but the Disney-designed command room is meant to impress members of Congress and the media that the new National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) is cutting edge. It is also extremely popular with NCTC staff and their guests when they use the Jumbotrons to watch the Super Bowl. In case the command center did not impart its mission statement sufficiently, NCTC renamed the street outside Liberty Crossing.
The hundreds of people working for NCTC come in two flavors: first, government employees, mainly on loan from the CIA and FBI, and second, the equally numerous private contractors. “The only way you can tell the difference is the color of their badge,” one person who frequented Liberty Crossing explained. (Every person in the center is required to have a plastic identification tag hanging around his or her neck or pinned onto his or her lapel.) Much of what the NCTC staff does all day is to talk with people at other terrorism centers around Washington, the largest of which is the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) about a mile away at CIA headquarters. Probably next in size is the FBI’s counterterrorism center in the J. Edgar Hoover Building near the White House. These are not to be confused with the Terrorist Screening Center, for which the FBI is the executive agent, which is housed in a nondescript office tower near National Airport. Nor should one overlook the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center, which is run by the Treasury Department, or the new Intelligence Fusion Centers for counterterrorism in every state capitol, or the Joint Terrorism Task Forces now in one hundred cities, or…
Next to the large NCTC complex, another huge edifice is rising at Liberty Crossing. This one is to house the staff of the burgeoning Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the many contract employees supporting it. Reflecting the suburban sprawl that has defaced northern Virginia outside Washington, the FBI is moving some things a little farther out, to Prince William County, where a building, “nicknamed ‘the Taj Mahal’ by some FBI officials, will feature highly finished terrazzo floors at the entrance, a soaring atrium and a giant fingerprint etched into the elevator doors. The Bureau plans to bring new counter terrorism squads to the new Prince William office and to open a language translation unit there, to help with the chronic problem of attracting Arabic speakers.” No doubt the terrazzo floors and the access to more distant shopping malls will help the FBI overcome its chronic inability to recruit or maintain employees with the needed linguistic capabilities.
Nearby is the first of several buildings in another CIA campus, curiously, called the Discovery Center. The building serves as an “intake center” for polygraphing, interviewing, and assigning the many new CIA employees needed to obtain the goal of doubling the staff of the Agency. Prospective employees sit awaiting their turn to have their bodies strapped to a machine whose results are not admissable in any federal court. If they were applying for a private sector job, the law in most states would prohibit an employer from screening prospective employees with a polygraph, but this is the CIA, which believes in the disproven flutter box. So they sit, perhaps in the nice new Starbucks in the center or in the lounge where all of the new flat-screen televisions are set to FOX News.
I know that good work is done at the National Counterterrorism Center, but I also know how to run counterterrorism operations and they do not require Jumbotrons or the very nice color calendar one can download from NCTC’s web page, which notes for each day of the year what famous terrorist-related events took place on that day in history. “The NCTC for Kids” web page has a nice Disney quality, with a cartoon eagle and a cartoon Lady Liberty, but the command center, calendar, and cartoon characters all bespeak a larger issue: bloat.
