November 27, 2019 West Bend, WI- Late in 1954, John and Hazel Campbell, Cedar Community independent living residents, were completing coursework at the University of Washington for their bachelor’s degrees—John in geography and Hazel in home economics—when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) came to the university’s geography department in search of cartography students, which happened to be John’s special emphasis.
John accepted the offer of a job when he received his degree in June of 1955, Employment was to begin in Washington D.C. in August that year.
They moved into an apartment in Arlington, Va., and John had settled into his work in the CIA map library. Hazel also applied for a job with the CIA. While she was being cleared for assignment, she was employed in a typing pool, collating employment application data of other people seeking CIA jobs. Her typing was not the fastest, but she was very accurate; and soon was receiving more varied work. Four months later, she was cleared and assigned. At the beginning of both John and Hazel’s employment, they had to undergo lie detector tests. John did not recall anything in particular about his test, but Hazel remembered that the last question was “Have you ever done anything wrong?” The image that popped into her head was throwing a rock at the age of four, and breaking a window! But it had no effect on the outcome of her test.
After a year in the map library, John was moved to the CIA’s cartography lab, where he drew maps illustrating world hot spots. On one occasion he and three other cartographers worked through the night to produce a special map for a presidential briefing the following morning, which plotted the path of a U-2 spy plane over Russia. While they worked, they listened to a White House broadcast, denying the existence of any such plane.
Meanwhile, Hazel was assigned to a covert department of the CIA— specifically to a tunnel project cooperatively run by the CIA and British MI6.
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