Usually you’ll have lunch in the café. Some people go to restaurants for lunch, but the Langley compound is pretty isolated. It’s almost impossible eat lunch at a restaurant and make it back during your 30 minute lunch break. So you’d probably have to work late, to make up for the lunch.
The café is large and is pretty nice. There’s a traditional cafeteria, with two or three entrée selections, soup choices, salad bar, sandwiches, and a grille. The food is usually pretty good, healthy, and there are many selections to choose from. However, portion sizes tend to be small and it’s hard to find a good value.
There’s also a fast food section, which at that time had Sbarros, Subway, Burger King, Chinese food, a barbecue place, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Starbucks. You can get more food here for less money, but it’s not the healthiest.
Most CIA analysts eat at their desks. They typically don’t want to take the time away from their work. I was an exception. I found that the time away from the desk helped me think more creatively and clearly, and led me to think of analytic insights that I wouldn’t have come up with, otherwise.
However, plenty of people eat in the café’s large seating areas. When the weather is nice, you can also eat in a gorgeous courtyard, which was my favorite place to eat. It’s not your typical courtyard, however. When you open the door, you’ll see a sign reminding you not to bring classified material outside in to the courtyard.
The reason: foreign satellites have the capability to zoom in close enough to read any documents you bring to the courtyard, intended to read any classified material brought outside by mistake. What this really means is that whenever I ate lunch, foreign spy satellites could see that I was eating Burger King and reading the Economist!
The CIA courtyard. Photo courtesy of CIA.
