Читать книгу Information Wars - Richard Stengel - Страница 12

When you walk into the 21st Street entrance of the State Department, you have to show your ID to the uniformed guards standing outside the building. They peer down at your card to check the tiny expiration date in the upper left-hand corner before waving you through, exactly the way they have been doing it since the Korean War.

Once you’re past the guards, you have to pass through two tall, automated metal doors. To get them to open, you step onto a four-by-six-inch magnetic carpet in front of them. Some mornings you just had to touch the carpet and the doors would spring open. Sometimes you had to jump up and down. And sometimes you had to open the doors yourself. On many mornings, you would see diplomats in sensible suits hopping up and down before putting their shoulders to what must have been a two-hundred-fifty-pound door.

Once you were through the double doors and into the lobby, you needed to pass through one of five clunky-looking metal turnstiles that probably didn’t look modern when they were installed 25 years ago. You inserted your card in a horizontal slot in the main part of the turnstile and then entered your PIN on the keypad. The problem was the keypad. It was loose and soggy, and the smudged protective plastic cover made typing hard. About a third of the time when you typed in your number, it didn’t register. When that happened, you moved over to the next turnstile and started all over again.

So, each morning, as you entered what everyone always called “the Building” to do your day’s work for American diplomacy, there were a series of small fraught negotiations that failed about as often as they succeeded.