Matt Busby?
Now I'm on a danged "Bureau of Public Roads" kick.
First, I used My BlogMap! to surf to 2020hindsight from Susan A. Kitchens. After reading this entry on the Institute for Defense Analysis, I wrote:
And all of the guards were probably trained to say that they worked for the Bureau of Public Roads.
Completely out of context, my comment is mystifying.
I then surfed the link to dangerousmeta and, when replying to that entry on the Institute for Defense Analysis, was a little more specific regarding what was floating through my so-called brain:
Got here via 2020hindsight. This was back in the era when Northern Virginia maps didn’t even show the CIA headquarters; all of the land was supposedly a Bureau of Public Roads facility.
It's true. If you had the early 1970s version of the Alexandria Drafting Company's Northern Virginia street map, there was an entire facility on the Potomac River labeled "Bureau of Public Roads." By the late 1970s, the map admitted that yes, the CIA was there too.
It was all part of a grand design:
As far as the eye can see, the lovely rolling hills of Virginia's Fairfax County surround the CIA building on all four sides. The Pentagon is bigger; but that colossus is easily visible from almost anywhere in the capital.
Appropriately, the CIA's concrete headquarters is invisible, an architectural diadem set in bucolic splendor in the middle of nowhere and modestly veiled by a thick screen of trees. In the State Department, which does not always love its brothers in the intelligence world, the CIA is often referred to as "those people out in the woods." And it is literally true.
Part of the reason for this is that it makes guarding the building much easier. The advantages of a rustic retreat were extolled by Allen Dulles when he went before a House Appropriations Subcommittee in June, 1956, to seek funds for the CIA headquarters. He submitted a report which said:
"Located on a 125-acre tract forming an inconspicuous part of a larger 750-acre government reservation, the Langley site was chosen as the one location, among many sites inspected in detail, most adequate for safeguarding the security of CIA's operations ... This site, with its isolation, topography and heavy forestation, permits both economical construction and an added measure of security safeguards ..."
Three years later guests, in response to engraved invitations from Dulles, attended the cornerstone-laying ceremony. Colonel Stanley Grogan, the CIA's public information man at that time, handed out a press release.
"The entire perimeter of the main part of the site is bounded by trees," it noted, "and very little of the building will be visible from the public highways."
One CIA official summed it up. "It's well hidden," he said with a note of pride.
The fact that the CIA could send out public invitations to lay the cornerstone of its hidden headquarters reflects a basic split personality that plagues the agency and occasionally makes it the butt of unkind jokes. This dichotomy pervades much of what the CIA does. On the one hand it is supersecret; on the other hand it isn't.
When Allen Dulles became the CIA director in February, 1953, the agency was housed in a ragged complex of buildings at 2430 E Street in the Foggy Bottom section of the capital. A sign out front proclaimed: "U.S. Government Printing Office."
Once President Eisenhower and his brother Milton set out to visit Dulles. They were unable to find the place. Dulles investigated the secrecy policy. When he discovered that even guides on sightseeing buses were pointing out the buildings as "the CIA," he had the printing-office sign taken down and one that said "Central Intelligence Agency" put up.
When the CIA moved across the Potomac to its Langley home in 1961, the matter of secrecy still proved bothersome. Large green and white signs pointed the way to the CIA from the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which had been extended to the new headquarters at a cost of $8,500,000. Originally, the signs were erected to guide workmen to the site during construction. After the CIA moved into the building, some of its officials felt there was no need to leave them up. As one put it: "We knew where it was."
But the signs stayed up -- for a while. As he drove to and from work each day, Robert Kennedy, who lived in nearby McLean, Virginia, would pass the signs that trumpeted the way to the CIA. One day they abruptly disappeared. In their place, there was only a small green and white marker reading "Parkway," with an arrow pointing along the highway, and "B.P.R.," with an arrow pointing to the CIA turn-off. *
The lack of signs causes scant inconvenience. No outsiders venture into the CIA anyhow unless they are on official business. No social visiting is allowed. A CIA employee cannot tell his wife or mother-in-law to drop in on him....
* The "B.P.R." stands for Bureau of Public Roads, which really does have two buildings at Langley. One is a research laboratory for testing road materials; the lab also has a wind tunnel to measure the effect of breezes on suspension bridges.
Here's another entry, in the context of a 9/11 article:
The airspace above the CIA and White House is...restricted airspace. So, don't rent a Cessna and try flying over those areas to take pictures. I did fly over CIA HQ once in a small aircraft. In those days, the CIA called its HQ buildings at Langley "The Bureau of Public Roads." As I recall, the charts did not show the airspace as restricted. Why would it be restricted airspace over a place that housed trucks and tractors and road workers? Of course, newspaper reporter would call the Russian Embassy and ask how many people worked for the CIA. The Russians would answer, "You mean at Langley, or all over the District, or in the entire world?" And they would give estimates. I swear to you. This was a long time ago.
P.S. And by the way, he was a football player. Yowza:
Did any of the Beatles ever express an interest in football, in particular whether they favoured Liverpool or Everton," asks Steven Draper, "or did they steer clear of the subject for fear of alienating potential fans?"
The answer, James, is ambiguous at best. The Beatles were never regulars at either Anfield or Goodison Park - so it really depends on which titbit of folklore you choose to swallow.
Donald Philips is among many who think that the Sergeant Pepper cover is the killer giveaway. Standing just on Marlene Dietrich's shoulder grinning madly is Albert Stubbins, the red-haired Liverpool centre forward - and the only player to make the many-faced cover.
While there are those who claim, rather mean-spiritedly, that Stubbins only made the cover because John Lennon liked his name, many more are determined to prove that the Beatles worshiped at the Kop when not hopping across the continents for a visit to the Maharishi.
Karl Coppack comes up with Paul McCartney trying to get the 1977 Liverpool v Man United FA Cup final on the radio while on his boat in the Caribbean, while the words clutching at straws come to mind for both Stephen Pepper - who recalls the Beatles wearing a huge red-and-white scarf in a skiing scene of Help! - and Ian Gresham, who remembers snaps from 1968's Mad Day Out photo session of McCartney wearing a red-and-white rosette.
A number of you with a worrying knowledge of Beatles lyrics also point out that Matt Busby - an ex-Liverpool player - gets a namecheck on Dig It.
But there are equally tenuous claims for a link between McCartney and Everton. Paul has been known to mention that his uncles used to support the Toffees - and that every now and then he would tarry along with them.
And then there was the rumour that warmed Everton hearts a couple of years back that McCartney was about to invest a lot of money with the club. They're still waiting for that investment.
The real answer seems to be that the Beatles did not have any great love of football - unusual in four lads from a footballing city, as Karl Naden points out, but not impossible. Indeed, the only positive sighting of a Beatle at a sporting event comes from Iain Saunders, who sat behind McCartney at a New York Yankees baseball game.
Finally George Harrision's reply to those impertinent enough to ask which club he supported was the obtuse: "There are three teams in Liverpool and I prefer the other one." Which leaves us very much where we started.
[OE 4/30: Added Institute for Defense Analysis information to add context to the following post.]
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