[Letter to Kevin Klose from Jon Cohen]

Violators are fined $500 a day. The CIA's Langley headquarters is
in Fairfax County. The CIA employs more than 200 people. The CIA
does not recycle white paper. But the CIA--hold on to your jaws--
is not being fined.
The chief of Fairfax County's recycling program, Tanis
Skislak, says last fall one of her deputies met with the CIA's
Design and Engineering Branch officer and did a walk through of
the Agency's non-secure area. The deputy, Ed Harris, was told
that all documents in the building's secure area, regardless of
security classification, were SOMATted. Being that most of the
office space at the CIA is in secure areas, and beinq that Harris
could not determine whether more than 200 people worked in the
non-secure area, Harris decided to see whether another arm of the
County law[ ]could muscle the CIA into recycling. This feature
requires every business that annually disposes of more than 100
tons of waste to recycle. Harris thought it likely that the CIA
might annually toss 100 tons of cardboard boxes, wooden pallets,
scrap metal, and yard debris. Harris, as the CIA might say, was
doing a little too much thinking.
''We were not permitted to analyze their waste stream,''
Skislak says. The CIA did promise to do its own analysis.
Skislak's team also offered some advice about those polystyrene
utensils used in the CIA's kitchen: replace them with reusable
ones. So much for the CIA's nascent recycling program.
Gail Miller Ray, the recently appointed federal recycling
coordinator at the Environmental Protection Agency, oversees the
government's 192 new recycling coordinators (one for each
agency), whose jobs, like hers, were created by Environmental
President George Bush's October 1991 executive order. It is
difficult to describe the shock waves that pulsed throuqh the
phone when Ray heard the news about the Langley folks--because
there were none.
Ray explains that the entire federal government, including the
Congress, has had great difficulty obeying its own recycling
rules and regulations. The new executive order, in fact, merely
fortifies the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1964 and the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976. So while the CIA may be
guilty of recycling inertia, it is no more guilty than anyone
else. Surely a comforting thought to future generations of
Americans seeking their riqhtful share of our Nation's natural
resources.
But it is not Ray's fault that the federal government is such
a thoughtless slob. And already, she sees progress on the
horizon. One of the main recycling problems, she says, is forcing
the government to purchase a percentage of recycled goods, thus
stoking the market incentive and ''closing the loop.'' In June,
the government is staging the Government Buy Recycled Products
Trade Fair at the Washinqton Hilton to further the cause.
Tickets, presumably, are not going fast.