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2 —————————— CRISIS IN THE CONGO The gleaming new CIA building in Langley, Virginia, was next to the Potomac and so close to Washington, D.C., that Sam Adams’s new agency colleague Robert Sinclair made the trip to work from his home in Georgetown by canoe, paddling along with beavers and Canada geese as his fellow commuters until arriving at headquarters, ready for another day in the intelligence business. Even for those using more traditional modes of transportation, access to the CIA site was remarkably open. One could drive freely into the parking lot (as Sam Adams did in his black VW Bug) or else get on the public bus that made the CIA campus a regular stop. At the main doorway of the massive white structure, agency employees waved their badges in the general direction of a somnolent sentry; inside the building restricted areas were blocked off by guards manning turnstiles. But the security was never oppressive. At quitting time, for example, intelligence analysts had to clear their desks of sensitive material and lock their safes, yet those who wanted to bring work home with them could do so. Adams was part of the Junior Officer Training (JOT) class that formed in the late spring of 1963. The seventy-five men and women selected for JOT were the agency’s future cadre. With his old-school northeast background Adams represented the exact stereotype of the CIA organizational man: He wore a rumpled gray suit, had impeccable manners, and was the very appearance of a young Ivy League professor. But Adams’s JOT classmate Kirk Balcom remembered that Adams’s kind of blue-blooded background was not actually the norm for their group. According to Balcom the JOT class was “a pretty mixed bag and a really fascinating bunch of people. There were airplane pilots, there were some college kids, and also people who had been out of school for a while and had a little bit of experience.”1 27 Hiam_A MONUMENT TO DECEIT_text_Layout 1 1/28/14 9:43 AM Page 27 28 A MONUMENT TO DECEIT The first months of JOT training were spent at headquarters receiving a detailed orientation to the CIA and the 150,000-person-strong U.S. intelligence community. This was a huge topic that took weeks to cover. Students learned all about the different entities within the agency and how they operated. There was the Directorate of Plans, the Directorate of Intelligence, the Office of Acquisitions, the Office of Strategic Research, the Office of Geographic Intelligence, the Contacts Branch, and — for payroll and sick-leave issues — the Personnel Office. The trainees learned about what a cratologist did (guess the contents of Soviet shipping containers ) and what the duties of a numbers man were (determine Soviet factory output by examining serial numbers on manufactured items). The foreign intelligence roles of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the State Department, and the Treasury Department were also covered in depth. Adams and his classmates got a thorough rundown of what the international issues of the day were, especially ones dealing with the Communist threat. “We got well schooled from an insider’s standpoint on the various Communist parties and philosophies, and so on, and how they operated,” recalled Balcom. Adams was very engaged in this part of the learning process and he was often, according to another JOT classmate, Jerry Jacobson, very vocal in class. Jacobson recalled his classmate making “decisive comments. Usually they were right on the mark; other times not.” Classroom placement was in alphabetical order, and Mr. Adams therefore got a front-row view of his new profession. He liked what he saw. “He was just very happy with his job,” Eleanor Adams remembered. “He thought it was just terrific.” In addition to attending lectures the trainees were tasked to produce work samples on a given subject. Adams virtually consumed these assignments . “Sam had just an incredible mind and he had a terrific ability to grasp, and analyze, and write,” recalled another JOT classmate, Ray McGovern. There were also small-group exercises as part of the course. “I remember doing one with Sam,” said Balcom. “We were to build a nongovernmental agency, and Sam was clearly the brightest and most intellectually interesting star of this group. As part of the exercise we had to come Hiam_A MONUMENT TO DECEIT_text_Layout 1 1/28/14 9:43 AM Page 28...

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