Direct Action by John Weisman

West, although it was more popularly referred to as Coppermine. What civilians saw as they drove past was a six-story opaque glass-and-steel structure that bore a (bogus) corporate logo that looked little different from the logos of the scores of dot-com slash telecom slash info-com companies that inhabited Northern Virginia’s Tyson’s-to-Dulles corridor.
    It was, so the security types at CIA pronounced, a perfect work of camouflage. A few wags from the DO would from time to time mention that the pneumatic Pentagon-grade traffic barrier at the gate, the triple row of Jersey barriers, and the twenty-four-hour shifts of armed guards toting submachine guns in the parking lot might raise an eyebrow or two. But then, given the public’s wide acceptance of the Patriot Act and the fact that Capitol Hill tours now included a drive-by of the five Army Patriot missile batteries ringing the complex, perhaps not.
    Anyway, just like Ronald Malcolm, Condor’s central character, MJ couldn’t tell a soul what she actually did for a living.
And just like Malcolm/Condor, MJ had no idea why CIA considered what she did so highly, highly classified. Sensitive? Sure. But MJ’s new boss, a covertly retired Very Senior Operative who’d been rehired at CIA in the months following 9/11 as the counterterrorist analysis coordinator, had actually insisted that the members of the C-PIG conduct themselves as if they were stationed on foreign soil. “Hostile territory” were the exact words she used.
Which is why when MJ was on the job, she and her colleagues called one another by pseudonyms. Mark Olshaker, the good-looking, tall, prematurely gray guy in the cubicle across the way, was known as Julian C. WEATHERALL. She called him Mr. Julian. MJ’s pseudonym was Hester P. SUTCLIFFE, and Mark called her Miss Hester. It had taken MJ and her coworkers almost three weeks to get used to their new identities. During the transition, which MJ decided early on was a bureaucratic fusion of sublimely ridiculous and painfully agonizing, they were all ordered by their new supervisor to attach convention cocktail party “My Name Is” peeland-stick labels bearing the preposterous pseudonyms on their lapels.
Said boss-lady was a petit, autocratic, blue-haired woman in her early seventies who brooked no back talk and wore ivory silk and navy-blue wool no matter what the season. Her peel-and-stick label read
M Y N AME I S
     
P ORTIA M. ST. J OHN
     
ST. JOHN IS PRONOUNCED SIN-GIN
    “My actual name,” she’d said at her first meeting with the newly formed C-PIG and the six other working groups over which she had control, “is need-to-know, and you lot do not have the need.” She would be called, she said, Portia M. ST. JOHN, or more simply as Mrs. ST. JOHN. She then enunciated “Sin-Gin” twice.
    Mrs. ST. JOHN’s obsession with secrecy was, she insisted at that same meeting, a matter of life and death. The country was now at war and all the rules had changed. She knew war, she said, because she’d been a teenager during World War II and had come of age in the CIA as a secretary to several chiefs of station during the height of the Cold War. She had, she said, watched as one after another of nation’s secrets hemorrhaged through carelessness, neglect, and treason.
    Loose lips sink ships, and there would be no bobbing life rafts on her watch. Corridor gossip was henceforth forbidden. There would be no job talk outside the building at any of Herndon’s myriad bars and restaurants. The on-site pseudonyms, she reiterated, had been instituted in case the offices were bugged. That way, the staff’s real names would remain unknown to the thousands of hostiles intent on stealing America’s crown jewels.
    Despite the warnings—not to mention the security posters that Mrs. ST. JOHN hung in all the corridors, Marilyn Jean O’Connor often wondered about the need for such analog-generation tradecraft as office pseudonyms. After all, the building’s exterior