--- title: "Clause 9 Takes Away The Landlord's Key. Here Is What A Safe House Costs." dek: "A seven-year lease on two floors of a Washington row house waives the landlord's right of entry, hands the tenant the fit-out, and can be broken in a day. The invoices say what was built." kind: explainer (Explainer) desk: Shadow Governance author: Marcus Oyelaran (fictional) published: 2026-08-21T06:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/clause-nine-takes-the-key tags: leases, MKUltra, Washington, safe houses, acoustics, estate papers genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # Clause 9 Takes Away The Landlord's Key. Here Is What A Safe House Costs. *A seven-year lease on two floors of a Washington row house waives the landlord's right of entry, hands the tenant the fit-out, and can be broken in a day. The invoices say what was built.* Clause 9 of a seven-year lease signed in Washington on 24 August 1961 does the thing a landlord almost never does. It gives away the key. "The Lessor covenants that neither he nor his agents shall enter upon the demised premises, for inspection, for repair, or for any other purpose whatsoever, save upon seven days' prior written notice and in the company of a representative of the Lessee." The demised premises are the top two floors of a row house in the 1400 block of Kestrel Street NW: 2,100 square feet, one street door shared with the family below. The tenant of record is the Ashfield Foundation for Human Ecology, a charity whose own filings report four employees and a grant programme in psychology. The lease, eleven contractors' invoices and a utility meter card came out of a strongbox in an attic in March 2026, when the Delahunt family sold the house. > **Figure:** The top two floors as the contractor's invoices describe them — see https://theyburied.com/article/clause-nine-takes-the-key ## The four riders The lease itself is an ordinary Washington form of its period: $3,900 a year, quarterly in advance, seven years to 31 August 1968. The riders are typed on different paper and initialled twice. There are four of them and they do all the work. Clause 9 removes the landlord's right of entry, which is the right every landlord keeps. Clause 11 puts the fit-out at the tenant's cost, to the tenant's design, with no landlord approval of drawings. Clause 14 has the tenant indemnify the landlord against any claim arising from "alterations to interior partitions", and waives reinstatement at the end of the term. The landlord never has to know what came down, and never has to have it put back. Clause 19 lets the tenant end the lease on twenty-four hours' written notice, without penalty, rent apportioned to the day. "Any one of these I have drafted," said Perpetua Manalo-Reisz, who read the file with the parties masked. "Together they are a different instrument. Nine and eleven mean he cannot see the works. Fourteen means he is not liable for what they are. Nineteen means the tenant can be gone by Tuesday and he cannot ask why." ## What the invoices say was built Marchetti & Croom, general contractors, billed the Foundation eleven times between June and November 1961. The total is $19,412, or five years of the rent. Sound-attenuating partitions, two layers of board on staggered studs, four walls of one room: $4,780. A second door at the head of the third-floor stair, solid core, an inch and three quarters, with closer, cylinder and astragal: $214. Acoustic lining to a closet, six surfaces, no shelf or rail or hook: $340. Sixteen duplex outlets on two dedicated circuits in one rear room: $612. One partition taken down and rebuilt thirty inches south of its old line: $1,105. Halvard Ozoemena-Reyes read the schedule with no address, tenant or decade attached. > You do not spend $4,780 in 1961 stopping a neighbour hearing a typewriter. That is a room built not to be heard from its own stairs. > > — Halvard Ozoemena-Reyes ## The meter Electricity account 4-1179 opens in the tenant's name in August 1961 and closes in September 1968. The utility's bound ledgers for the square survive, so we can put it beside its neighbours. It draws 5.6 times the median of the twelve comparable upper-floor accounts on the same square, every year, for seven years. The shape is stranger than the size. The curve has no summer in it. Month to month it varies by under eleven per cent — in a Washington building with no central plant, leased to four people. ## The join Four of Marchetti & Croom's invoice numbers — 1147, 1152, 1163 and 1178 — appear again in the released index to federal voucher series 14-B-129, against four payments in the same amounts to a payee recorded only as a contractor in the District. The index survived a destruction order the substantive files did not, a pattern this desk has [reported before](/article/mkultra-subproject-index). The vouchers behind it are withheld. We have appealed. ## What the trust says Marguerite Lascelles-Obuya, counsel to the Foundation's residual trust, replies below and her reply is the best-argued thing on this page. Every clause has a lawful reading. A charity holding confidential material has an obvious reason to bar a landlord with a plumber in tow. Then she volunteers a sentence nobody asked her for: that no person was ever accommodated overnight on those premises, and that the Foundation held no licence for the care or custody of any person. We had asked about a lease. ## What this desk takes from it Survivors of these programmes have described rooms like this for forty years, and have been asked, every time, for paper. Here is paper. It does not name them and it does not need them. A controlled setting, in 1961 dollars, cost $19,412 and four riders. The riders are the cheaper half and they are the half that matters: a landlord who cannot come in, a fit-out he never sees, a partition he is indemnified against, and a door out of the whole arrangement that opens in a day. Nobody writes twenty-four hours into a seven-year lease unless somebody has already thought about the morning the rooms have to stop existing. ## Sources (invented) - The Delahunt estate papers, One lease and rider set, eleven contractor invoices, one utility meter card — Handed to this newspaper by the estate's executor after the March 2026 sale; photographed page by page at her kitchen table, originals retained by the family (April 2026) - Perpetua Manalo-Reisz, Commercial property partner, thirty-one years, Chicago — Sent the lease with parties, address and date masked, and asked what the instrument was for; interviewed twice by video call afterwards (May 2026) - Osric Bramwell-Ngata, Property litigator, Baltimore; reads leases for a living in front of judges — Given the identical masked file with no sight of Manalo-Reisz's answer and no contact with her (May 2026) - Halvard Ozoemena-Reyes, Acoustic engineer; forty years of separating wall design — Given the invoice schedule alone — no address, no tenant, no decade — and asked what specification it describes (June 2026) - Bound utility billing ledgers, Square 2841, Monthly consumption for every metered account on the square, 1958–1971 — Held by the Columbia Historical Trust and copied at the counter for 25 cents a page; $71.50 in total (June 2026) ## What we could not confirm - Who was in the rooms. We have a lease, a specification, a meter and a floor plan, and not one name. The Foundation's subject files were destroyed in 1972 under its own dissolution instrument. We have asked the residual trust three times whether an index to them survives anywhere, and three times been told that the question is one the trust does not answer. - Voucher series 14-B-129 itself. What we can show is that four of Marchetti & Croom's invoice numbers, at four matching dollar amounts, appear in a released index to that series. The vouchers behind the index are withheld in full under a statutory exemption. Our appeal is lodged and the archive's answer is due in December. - What drew the electricity. A meter counts kilowatt-hours; it does not name equipment. The invoices itemise conduit, outlets and two dedicated circuits and then stop, because the tenant supplied its own apparatus and did not buy it through the contractor. ## Right of reply **Marguerite Lascelles-Obuya, of Fenner Lascelles, counsel to the Ashfield Residual Trust** (Replied on 22 July 2026. Printed in full and unedited, including the paragraph about us.): > My client is the residual trust of a foundation that was wound up in 1972. It has no staff, no premises and no surviving officer who was alive when this lease was signed. I say that first because your draft repeatedly addresses the trust as though it were the Foundation, and it is not. > > I can tell you what I am able to establish, and I would rather do that than send you two lines and let you print the two lines. > > The lease is genuine. The Foundation took the third and fourth floors of that house in 1961 and gave them up in 1968. It paid for its own fit-out because it had grant funds allocated to premises and the landlord did not. The rider set is unusual, and I will not pretend to you that it is not, but every clause in it is a clause I could find in a commercial lease drawn today, and a foundation that held confidential research material had an obvious and entirely lawful reason to want a landlord who could not let himself in with a plumber. > > On clause 19 you have built a great deal on twenty-four hours. Foundations lose their funding at a sponsor's discretion, sometimes between one quarter day and the next. A break clause of that kind is what a careful trustee asks for when the money can stop without notice. It is not a provision for making rooms disappear, and I would ask you to consider that your own newspaper's lawyers would have insisted on something similar. > > What I cannot do is answer the question your headline actually asks. The Foundation's programme records were destroyed in 1972 in accordance with the dissolution instrument, which was drafted, approved and executed years before anybody had any reason to conceal anything. I have not seen them. Nobody living has seen them. When you print that the trust 'will not say' whether an index survives, you are describing a refusal. It is not a refusal. It is that I do not know, and I decline to guess in a newspaper. > > I will say one thing plainly, because your draft leaves it hanging and a reader is entitled to it. No person was ever accommodated overnight on those premises, and the Foundation held no licence, permission or facility for the care or custody of any person. If your reporting has led you to believe otherwise, it has led you wrong. > > Finally, and personally. You obtained this file from a woman who gave it to you unread because you told her it was of historical interest. She is eighty-one. You have published the contents of her father's strongbox with a floor plan on the front page, and you did not, so far as I can see from your draft, ever put to her the possibility that her family might be asked about it for the rest of her life. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.