Dark Days at the CIA

By Ken Silverstein

If there's any federal agency that understands how to operate in darkness, it's the CIA. Which is fortunate, because yesterday the central CIA compound in McLean, Virginia, suffered a three-hour power outage that lasted, said spokesman Paul Gimigliano, from approximately 9 A.M. to noon EST (or 5 to 8 P.M. Baghdad time). The outage stemmed from problems at Dominion Virginia Power, the local utility company, and residences and businesses in the McLean area, home to CIA headquarters, also suffered a partial blackout.

The outage, said the CIA, did not leave America vulnerable to attack from our nation's enemies. Backup generators kicked in, and while employees' desktop computers flickered on and off intermittently, mainframe computers and telephones were unaffected, and there was apparently no major disruption of the CIA's ability to communicate with its operatives and assets around the globe.

It might seem surprising that one of the most powerful federal agencies can't keep its lights on, but apparently in McLean power outages are almost as common as power struggles—it's apparently enough of a problem that $800,000 in federal and state funding has been set aside to address the issue. “We're living,” complained Lane Gabeler, chairman of the board of a group charged with fixing the power problem, to a local newspaper last year, “in a third-world country.”

Luckily, the CIA has lots of experience operating in third-world countries.

Note: Christopher Glazek assisted with this story.

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