NSA HOSTS ANNUAL SECRET RECIPE POTLUCK

Originally written in June 2015

FORT MEADE, MD — NSA officials and their families gathered in a nearby park this past Father’s Day weekend for their 52nd annual Secret Recipe Potluck. Here, under sunny Maryland skies, everyone from General Keith Alexander down to the newest junior analyst takes some time away from their respective desks and nondescript surveillance vans to enjoy a variety of dishes whose top-secret recipes have been expertly gathered via the best signals intelligence strategies the agency has at its disposal.

Mr. Snowden

The existence of the festival was revealed in new documents unveiled by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. In an article in The Guardian announcing the release, entitled “Surveillance: It’s What’s For Dinner,” Snowden alleged that, “the reach of this rogue agency goes even further than we ever imagined—beyond your emails, beyond your phones, all the way into that hidden drawer in the back of the pantry where you keep the recipe to the most incredible gingersnaps the world has never seen. Except it has: I, Edward Snowden, got to eat those gingersnaps every year, cause Agent Christopher Snead (code name Crisco) always made them for the potluck. Nothing you or your families cook is safe, and this grim reality should shake all Americans to their core.”

But such an ominous perspective is not shared by those within the agency. “A lot of folks think that the NSA is full of people doing shady things in massive buildings without zip codes,” said Senior Culinary Trends Analyst Don Henderson, chomping into a piece of original Chicago-style pizza from Pizzeria Riccardo’s. “However, nothing could be further from—well, no, actually that’s basically true. But regardless, it’s important to remember that we’re also very down-to-earth and genuinely domestic people around here, with a true appreciation for the finer things in life. And thanks to the great work put in by our crack MEALINT [meals intelligence] unit, we’re able to sit back now and again and sample some unbelievable eats from around the globe. What so wrong about that?”

“That’s right,” chimed in Melanie Sills, a senior NSA official sitting next to Henderson at the picnic table, as she helped herself to another plate of North Carolina short ribs with pineapple chipotle sauce. “Besides, everyone knows that you forfeit your right to culinary privacy when you digitize your recipes.”

The disputed strudel.

But the purportedly benign nature of the program has already been questioned by Peter Wittig, the German Ambassador to the United States. Wittig hinted in an interview with Der Spiegel this morning that Chancellor Angela Merkel was greatly surprised to be served some piping hot Bavarian apple strudel at a White House dinner last month. This strudel, stated Wittig knowingly, strongly reminded the Chancellor of an equivalent dish that her own personal chef had assured her was known to no one else “in the eurozone or beyond. Surely my friends in the United States must agree that trust and cooperation cannot be sustained between any two nations when one of them is apparently willing to thieve the other’s most cherished dishes.”

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest declined to answer questions on the matter, though he did confirm that the strudel was “simply scrumptious. Like, you have no idea.”

The annual Secret Recipes Potluck has been a longstanding tradition within the NSA, as outlined by one deck within the leaked slides labeled, “The Secret Ingredient is Subterfuge.” It all started in 1963, when a CIA agent spying on suspected communist sympathizers in Brooklyn discovered a family goulash recipe that had been kept secret for almost twelve generations.

The hero.

The agent (whose profile is now etched in bronze above the Fort Meade facility’s South Gate) hung upside down from a rusty heating pipe in the kitchen for nearly 6 minutes as he extracted the yellow scrap of paper from the bottom of a potato barrel using a pair of ultra-long extendable tweezers. As the recipe made its way around the intelligence community, the head of the NSA’s New York field office eventually got to taste a sample. He was apparently ecstatic, and updated standard Agency surveillance procedures accordingly. Thereafter, NSA operatives across the globe were told to keep an eye out during missions for any notable and appetizing delicacies, particularly those whose chefs seemed reluctant to share the instructions on how to prepare them; this behavior was marked at the time as a “code mustard,” which is to say, “highly suspicious.”

From there, the program took on a life of its own, carving out a space in the agency with its own budget, personnel, protocols, clearances, and covert missions. The most far-reaching of these, Operation Open Sesame, attempted to venture into the hitherto unexplored (and, as MEALINT analysts speculated at the time, probably quite tasty) palate delights of East Asia. These efforts even bore fruit in more traditional political arenas as well: in fact, much of the goodwill President Richard Nixon enjoyed during his famous visits to China was attributable to the finely tuned appreciation shown by the president and his senior advisors for the obscure local dishes served them during their stay. According to the files leaked by Snowden, the supporting MEALINT for this crucial diplomatic undertaking had been painstakingly collected over the course of the previous half-decade by NSA’s Division of International Edibles and Treats, or DIET.

The president had not been briefed on how to hold chopsticks, however.

Even beyond the auspices of DIET, recipe collection is a favorite pastime in every department, and intra-agency sharing of the results is encouraged. “We find a lot of useful information while we’re out there just doing our jobs and conducting general surveillance,” says Alison Markham, a long-time NSA employee whose precise responsibilities we are not currently at liberty to divulge. “It used to be that if you happened to find something delicious, you’d keep it to yourself. Nowadays, we can simply drop amazing new concoctions into the agency-wide recipes database, and anyone can try their hand at cooking them. That’s what makes this potluck so fun.”

“Plus, this food is so much better than what they have in the NSA cafeteria,” added Markham, dipping some pita chips into a bowl of hummus whose unique combination of tantalizing herbs and spices had previously been found only within a small tribal community in northern Pakistan. “My friends and I actually call this the No Seasonings Agency.”

Senator Paul called this “the original recipe for a free nation.”

As expected, Senator Rand Paul spoke out strongly against the program on the Senate floor on Friday, punctuating his remarks by brandishing a small jar of his Great-Aunt Pat’s “Practically Perfect Peach Preserves”. “What the NSA is doing cannot be justified under even the most generous interpretations of the government’s search and seizure power under the 4th Amendment. Americans deserve to be secure in their papers, effects, and cookbooks. Worst of all, the NSA has been carrying out this program in the shadows, without Congressional oversight or even knowledge, as is evidenced by the fact that neither I nor any of my fellow senators have ever received an invitation to this potluck. This behavior is more than illegal—it’s just not neighborly.”

Gary Thompson, a privacy defense advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union, is also an outspoken critic of the sweeping nature of the program, which he calls a “knife inserted into the fragile soufflé of citizens’ trust in their government.” Writing for the Boston Globe in an article entitled, “A Watched Pot: How Dragnet Food Surveillance Stifles Liberty and Empowers Our Enemies,” he noted that, “according to these documents, the NSA does focus on secret recipes, to be sure. But it also now collects meal consumption metadata, no matter who you are or what you’re eating.”

Look for these peering into a backyard barbecue near you.

“This is very scary, because the kind of food you eat actually reveals a disturbing amount about your personal habits and beliefs. Personally, I don’t want to live in a country where Big Brother knows what my parents ate, what I eat, and can use sophisticated algorithms to predict what my children will eat. Tomorrow, by the way, that will probably mainly be hot pockets, cause my wife is out of town and I don’t like cooking. And frankly, I’d prefer that that information wasn’t stored in a government database.”

Others, such as Senator Dianne Feinstein, have a much more sanguine view of the controversial program. Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, argues Thompson’s right to privacy is simply not practical or reasonable today. “We must recognize that this is a post-9/11 culinary environment. Gone are the days when we could just bury our heads in the sand, and ignore all the mysterious, powerful and often very spicy dishes being cooked up in secret around the world. Someone has to keep an eye on these things, and I for one am grateful that the dedicated patriots over at the NSA are monitoring sumptuous feasts wherever they’re to be found. In fact, in support of these important efforts, I plan to send them the recipe to my famous apple-nutmeg cinnamon rolls, in case they don’t have it already.”

“Actually, they probably do,” Feinstein added, with a hint of regret in her voice. “Never mind. But still.”

Yes, Agent Crisco snagged that recipe years ago.

Jamie Silva

Eponymous founder & owner of Silva Speech Coaching.

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