Very true to life article. Very accurately written.

You are absolutely right on. Once any organization gets big, it gets stratified. Nobody has perfect communication and it is impossible for large organizations to perfectly share information across them; so you end up with these left-hand/right-hand disconnects. To make things even more interesting, at Intelligence Agencies very few people stay in the same job for very long as rotation is encouraged for staffers and contractors slide around across contracts and at this organization offices are even more walled off from one another in ways that might be similar to how Apple segments their teams.

I suspect what the author here encountered was one of the many volunteer employee groups/clubs that exist on the inside. There's dozens upon dozens of them like at any big generic corporation. There's a writing club, a new mothers club, a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu club, LGBTQIA+, sport Karate, Asian Pacific Islander advocacy, Yoga, etc. What makes these compelling is that you don't have to answer awkward questions about where you work during socializing as everybody in your "club" is "in the club". But it's also why there wasn't a speaking fee.

Everybody who works for this organization that wants to publish something outside of it really does have to send it in for review. There's a dedicated office full of people who read everybody's memoirs, news editorials, sci-fi novelettes, and so on and try to make sure nothing sensitive ends up in the public sphere.

The description of the parking lot, the feel of the building, and the gift shop is perfect. It's a shame the author also didn't get to see the library, which is very modern, well resourced, and well stocked. here are some pictures https://www.cia.gov/legacy/headquarters/cia-library/

One thing that this organization does very well I think compared to many other Federal Agencies is put real effort into cataloging and making available to people who work there information about the history of the organization. There's mini museums all over their facilities stocked with artifacts and little descriptive plates, paintings of key events, documentaries, periodicals, and all kinds of internal media and information. The good, bad, and ugly are explored and learned from and many problems, mistakes, and other issues are constantly presented so that the people who work there have some sense of the history of the place (the why this is here), and what they're trying to accomplish, and importantly a continuous dialog of where they've screwed up.

A recent review of a major failure that's been in the news 6 or 7 years was recently internally published and more or less names names and embarrassingly called out and shamed an entire directorate. Another review of technology advancements raked a technology provided by a major technology company through the literary coals.

The push for diversity is also extremely real; both geocultural as well as alt-culture. One of the biggest lessons learned after 9/11 was that the Intelligence Community was mostly made of old, white, men who couldn't fathom or reason about how young angry Arabs might be thinking or feeling. Outside of the Presidential appointed senior leadership which still falls largely into the old mold, the generations since 9/11 are as diverse as just about anywhere you can find and maintaining that culture is seen as a critical capability.