Deborah Dismuke, a retiring CIA officer, leaves behind two paintings, her name forever gracing the agency’s Langley headquarters.
Deborah Dismuke, 63, works in her home studio in Manassas Park, Va., on a new version of a painting that will hang in CIA headquarters. By Ian Shapira Ian Shapira Enterprise reporter covering the Washington region and beyond Email Bio Follow May 6 at 7:00 AM Deborah Dismuke was never fully satisfied with her painting.
“The original looked bad, and given that it’s the agency, you want to get your facts straight,” said Dismuke, 63. “As an artist, it’s one of those things. I’m a perfectionist.” Dismuke is retiring this summer, but before she goes, she is redoing one of her paintings, which depicts a critical moment during the Cuban missile crisis. “I do have to say, I have really surprised some African Americans within the agency,” she said. “They didn’t know that an African American female did the ‘Argo’ painting and ‘Message from Moscow.
It was the early 1980s and Dismuke, a recent graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, was several months into a backroom computer job at a D.C. bank. A friend from MICA, whose mother worked at the CIA, got hired by the agency. She urged Dismuke to apply. Telling a story Around the same time, Toni Hiley, then the CIA Museum director, wanted to select the first agency artist to make a painting for the growing Intelligence Art Collection. She had seen Dismuke’s portrait of Methlie and was impressed.
All sorts of ideas surfaced: She added in a BBC business card at the employees’ desk and a copy of Pravda, the Soviet broadsheet and official organ of the Communist Party, whose front page featured a photo of rising political figure Mikhail Gorbachev. She also threw in a map of Cuba and a picture of Fidel Castro that sat next to one of the men turning a radio dial.
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