WASHINGTON — The birthplace of modern American espionage has been hiding — as befits a former nest of spies — in plain sight.
Is that ever an in-your-face laugher, 'eh?
You been getting taken for a ride by your media, 'murkn! They are mocking you!
The old headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services is a little cluster of stone and brick buildings clearly visible to anyone walking out of the Kennedy Center or zooming around the E Street Expressway.
But few know that the Beaux Arts campus is where General ‘‘Wild Bill’’ Donovan and his band of OSS agents invented the spycraft that helped win World War II, the pistol pencils, fake passports, and the propaganda broadcasts that led enemy soldiers to doubt their causes.
I've got one right in front of me on the desk.
After the war, the compound became the first home of OSS’s successor agency, the CIA. And yet even to its neighbors, the spot’s remarkable pedigree as the place that bedeviled Hitler and crafted the Cold War might as well be stamped ‘‘top secret.’’
Yeah, used Nazis against the Russians.
‘‘I had no idea about its history,’’ said Patrick Kennedy, a member of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, who lives just three blocks from the site at 2430 E St. NW that is known variously as Navy Hill and Potomac Hill.
But if obscurity was good for the cloak-and-dagger days, it might be bad in an era when public attention can be the best protection from a bulldozer.
Or an Israeli missile or artillery shell.
It was only after the State Department announced plans to redevelop the site for additional office space that OSS veterans learned no one had ever bothered to gain historic status for their home.
Does sound a lot like Palestine's predicament, doesn't it?
Rumors spread that the structures could be demolished, so some aging spooks have come out of retirement to fight one more mission for the old HQ, joining with local preservationists to save at least some of it for posterity.
‘‘I thought it was outrageous,’’ former OSS and CIA agent Hugh Montgomery said of the possible loss of the offices that once directed his secret operations behind enemy lines. ‘‘I think we all assumed it was already protected.’’
The 90-year-old Montgomery, who recently retired from a 63-year career in intelligence, testified at several meetings of the D.C. Preservation League and helped compile information for the league’s application for historic landmark status.
Several other surviving OSS vets and their descendants have also contributed memories, documents, and photographs to the effort.
‘‘I call them the most dangerous band of 98-year-olds in the country,’’ said Charles Pinck, the son of a former agent and president of the OSS Society, an alumni group. ‘‘It kind of caught us all off guard.’’
The General Services Administration, which is directing the building project, says the fears that the building will be torn down are unfounded.
‘‘We are totally dedicated to protecting the sense of history here, which will depend on the successful integration of the old and the new,’’ said Mina Wright, the GSA’s director of planning and design.
The agency has begun its own process of getting the compound on the National Register of Historic places.
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The self-adulating, self-aggrandizing, congratulatory back-slapping of the Criminal Intelligence Agency and its covert skullduggery that has caused and is causing so much suffering, that subverts elections, that carries out assassinations, conducts coups, runs drugs, and directs terrorists groups is shameless, but then again the pre$$ is of and for them.
Yeah, save all the myths and lies I was taught about AmeriKa says my propaganda pre$$.
The self-adulating, self-aggrandizing, congratulatory back-slapping of the Criminal Intelligence Agency and its covert skullduggery that has caused and is causing so much suffering, that subverts elections, that carries out assassinations, conducts coups, runs drugs, and directs terrorists groups is shameless, but then again the pre$$ is of and for them.
Yeah, save all the myths and lies I was taught about AmeriKa says my propaganda pre$$.
