George Bush Center for Intelligence
The George Bush Center for Intelligence is the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, located in the unincorporated community of Langley in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, near Washington, D.C.
George Bush Center for Intelligence
Completed
1000 Colonial Farm Road, Langley, Fairfax County, Virginia
October 1957
1960
September 1961 (Original HQ Building)
November 28, 1961
May 1984 – March 1991 (New HQ Building)
$46 million
Six (New Headquarters Building); Seven (Original Headquarters Building)
2,500,000 sq ft (230,000 m2)[1]
258 acres (104 hectares)
The headquarters is a conglomeration of the Original Headquarters Building (OHB) and the New Headquarters Building (NHB) and sits on a total of 258 acres (1.04 km2) of land.[2] It was the world's largest intelligence headquarters from 1959 until 2019, when it was surpassed by Germany's BND headquarters.
Name[edit]
Before its current name, the CIA headquarters was formally unnamed.[3] On April 26, 1999,[4] the complex was officially named in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999 for George H. W. Bush,[2] who had served as the director of central intelligence for 357 days (between January 30, 1976, and January 20, 1977) and later as the forty-first president of the United States.[5]
Colloquially, it is known by the metonym Langley.[6] "The Farm" is not a reference to the center despite its address, but to the CIA training facility at Camp Peary.[7]
History[edit]
The Original Headquarters Building was designed by the New York firm Harrison & Abramovitz in the 1950s and contains 1,400,000 square feet (130,000 m2) of floor space.[2] The ground was broken for construction on November 3, 1959, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower laying the cornerstone;[8] the building was completed in March 1961.[2][9] It included a pneumatic tube system manufactured by Lamson Corporation of Syracuse, New York. Though the system was replaced by email and shut down in 1989, the thirty miles (50 km) of steel tubes remain in the building.[10]
The New Headquarters Building, designed by Smith, Hinchman and Grylls Associates, was completed in March 1991 after the ground was broken for construction on May 24, 1984.[2][8] It is a complex that adjoins two six-story office towers and is fully connected via a tunnel to the OHB.[2]
On January 25, 1993, Mir Qazi, a Pakistani resident of the United States, killed two CIA employees and wounded three others on the road to the CIA headquarters, claiming that it was revenge for the U.S. government's policy in the Middle East, "particularly toward the Palestinian people".[11] Qazi was sentenced to death for the shooting and executed in 2002.
In May 2021, an armed man tried to drive into the center and was shot following a standoff that lasted several hours. He died the following day.[12]