"Everybody talks about `military capability' or `law-enforcement capability,'" former CIA director George Tenet told the Sept. 11 commission in April, three months before his resignation as director. "Well, we sit behind the green door. And for the bang for the buck, the American taxpayer gets a hell of a lot for what we give them."
I knew the origin of one of his allusions: In 1954, Dwight Eisenhower's defense secretary, Charles "Engine Charlie" Wilson, said that the policy of "massive retaliation" enunciated by then secretary of state John Foster Dulles would lead to a "bigger bang for the buck" in the Pentagon budget.
But what is the significance of the green door, and what goes on behind it? I put that question to the long-embattled head of the CIA as he was leaving office.
"That phrase has long been used to refer to intelligence units in the military," Tenet responded, "often housed in spaces with a green door to denote the sensitivity of the unit and to alert individuals who did not hold appropriate clearances not to enter those spaces. I used the reference to illustrate the fact that we in the intelligence community conduct our work in secret, in a manner that is not generally evident to the American people."
Our departing chief spook added, "Over to you to determine the origins of the phrase." Before his note to me self-destructed, I accepted his final etymological assignment.
Tracking it back: The phrase last had a spate of usages in 1988 about the National Security Agency, command center of our global eavesdropping. "Once gathered," wrote Peter Iseman in The New York Times Magazine, "voice and signals intelligence must be analyzed at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, then at a huge underground facility hidden beneath a pineapple field in Kunia, Hawaii, and finally `behind the Green Door' of National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland." (I once got lost going to an interview there and asked a local police officer where NSA was. "You mean No Such Agency?" he said and pointed the way.)
During the Iran-Contra investigation that year, an NSA official testified that General William Odom, then NSA director, had ordered him to get an employee who had assisted Oliver North "out of a public job and put him behind the green door of NSA as quickly as possible," which meant out of contact with outsiders.
Before that, the phrase crashed into the public consciousness in a sense unconnected to espionage. In 1972, Behind the Green Door was the title of one of the first pornographic movies widely released in the United States. (Deep Throat was another, also in 1972.) Shot at a cost of $60,000, the film grossed $25 million and led to what avid fans fondly called "the golden age of porn."
Though the Green Door Tavern became a Chicago fixture as early as 1921, another green door gave the phrase international status. "The Soviet censorship agency Glavlit ... operated until last week," noted The New York Times in 1961, "behind a green-curtained door in Moscow's Central Telegraph Office ... Correspondents never got behind the green door to see Glavlit officials." (Daniel Schorr, a Moscow correspondent then, disputes this.)
In the decade before, another green door was associated with "Reds": Under the subhead Green Door, A.H. Raskin of The New York Times wrote about "the anonymous portal of America's Communist HQ ... No identifying sign flanks the? green, iron-sheathed door that leads into the headquarters."
The espionage usage began in World War II, perhaps in relation to the Enigma code-breaking operation. In his 1995 memoir, My War, the CBS commentator Andy Rooney wrote: "What was called the Green Door Problem was typical of the convoluted workings of spy organizations. The Green Door Problem referred to information the British or Americans had that they didn't release to units whose safety would have been improved by possessing that information ... That would have told the Germans that the Allies had cracked their code."
But before our mysterious phrase was bruited about the No Such Agency in Maryland; before it gained fame depicting the sad story of the abducted girl forced to perform sex acts before a lascivious onscreen audience, watched by bug-eyed moviegoers; before the Commies in Moscow and New York glommed onto it; before the lyricist Marvin Moore wrote the hit song of that title in 1956 with the words "All I want to do is join the happy crowd behind the green door"; before (will this sentence never end?) the code breakers in Britain's Bletchley Park posed the Green Door Problem -- there was the ur-source, the etymological bottom line that I will now reveal to those cleared few with a need to know.
William Sydney Porter, a Texas newspaperman who taught himself to write short stories during a three-year term in prison, later went to New York and wrote under the pseudonym O. Henry. In a 1906 collection of his stories, titled The Four Million, he seizes the reader with this unforgettable opening:
"Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner. Suddenly a hand is laid upon your arm. You turn to look into the thrilling eyes of a beautiful woman, wonderful in diamonds and Russian sables. She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word, `parallelogram!' and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back fearfully over her shoulder. That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it?"
The theme of the O. Henry short story is the need to open the colorful portal to the twin spirits of Romance and Adventure, which a century of novelists idealized in tales of espionage and today's real-life spies have made part of their lingo. Get a copy in your library or read it on the Web at http://www.gutenberg.net/etext01/4milln10.txt. The title of the story is "The Green Door."
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