The CIA Museum at agency headquarters
in Langley, Virginia, which has five
sections filling corridors in two
buildings, is not open to the public.
The museum’s exhibits trace the history
of covert action and intelligence
gathering from the exploits of the OSS,
the World War II intelligence agency
that spawned the CIA, through the Cold
War and the War on Terror to the raid on
Osama bin Laden’s compound.
An al Qaeda training manual recovered
in Afghanistan.
Members of the armed services wounded
in the line of duty as a result of the
attacks on September 11, 2001 received
the Purple Heart. This Purple Heart
belongs to a naval officer severely
burned while on duty at the Pentagon on
9/11. He is now recovered and serving as
an intelligence officer.
The museum contains a replica of a
model of Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad,
Pakistan compound that was used to plan
the May 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed
the al Qaeda leader. It is an exact
scale model of the compound down to the
goats in the courtyard. The replica was
built for the museum by the Geo-Spatial
Intelligence Agency, a support unit of
the Defense Department that built the
original model. A brick recovered from
the real Abbottabad compound sits
nearby.
Newly added to the War on Terror
section of the museum is the AK-47
assault rifle recovered near Osama bin
Laden’s body by SEAL Team 6 during the
2011 raid on Bin Laden's compound in
Abbottabad, Pakistan. Curator Toni Hiley
said it was known to be his weapon
because of its “proximity to him . . .
on the third floor of the compound.” She
would not say how the museum came into
possession of the gun, but said that the
director of the CIA at the time of the
operation, Leon Panetta, “asked that it
come into the museum’s collection.”
A serial number and a Chinese
character can be seen in this close-up
photo of the AK-47 assault rifle found
near Osama bin Laden during the raid on
his compound. Curator Hiley said the gun
is of Russian origin.
Facilities engineers used the
Abbottabad compound scale model to
construct a full scale mock-up of the
compound in early 2011 at a CIA training
site. Navy SEALs trained on the mock-up
for the assault on bin Laden’s compound
in May 2011. The mock-up was destroyed
after the raid. Seen here is a section
of the wall and a photo of Johnny
Micheal Spann, a CIA Officer killed in
combat in Afghanistan in 2001.
The Lockheed A-12 OXCART aircraft was
developed for the CIA as a
reconnaissance aircraft and used to
collect intelligence over North Korea
and North Vietnam. A CIA A-12 was able
to find the USS Pueblo, a Navy
intelligence gathering ship that had
been seized by the North Korea, in a
North Korean port. After 29 missions the
planes were replaced by the U.S. Air
Force's similar SR-71 program. The plane
seen here was recently installed on the
CIA grounds. The two stars on the base
represent two pilots who were killed
during training missions.
When a surface-to-air missile
exploded near a CIA A-12 OXCART
reconnaissance aircraft during a mission
over North Vietnam in 1967, the shrapnel
shown here damaged a section of the
plane's wing.
The Soviet-designed AT-3 Sagger
anti-tank missile and launcher, a
man-portable anti-tank guided missile,
was used by Soviet, Warsaw Pact and
related forces from the 1960s through
the 1980s.
An "Insectothopter" created by the
CIA's Office of Research and Development
during the 1970s was intended to gather
intelligence unobtrusively. Designed to
look like a dragonfly, the
insectothopter’s tiny gas-powered engine
moved its wings up and down. While
flight tests were impressive, it proved
difficult to control when any wind was
present.
The CIA's Office of Research and
Development created a small camera light
enough to be carried by a pigeon. With
the camera strapped to its breast, the
bird would fly over a targeted area,
capturing aerial footage. Pigeon imagery
was taken within hundreds of feet of the
target so it was much more detailed than
imagery from other collection methods.
The camera took a series of still images
at a set interval. A miniature,
battery-powered motor advanced the film
and cocked the shutter. Details of
pigeon missions are still classified.
In the 1990s, the CIA's Office of
Advanced Technologies created "Charlie,"
a robot catfish, to study the
feasibility of unmanned underwater
vehicles for intelligence collection.
Charlie is controlled by a wireless
radio handset.
one Time" pads are used to send
covert messages. They are issued in
matching sets of two: one pad of sheets
for the encoder and a matching pad for
the decoder. Each sheet contains a
random key in the form of five-digit
groups. once a sheet has been used to
encode a message, it is torn off the pad
and destroyed. The pads can be made of
silk, paper or highly flammable film
that can be destroyed quickly, and can
be as small as a postage stamp.
During the Cold War, CIA agents
relied on the microdot camera to
photograph and reduce whole pages of
information onto a single tiny piece of
film. This “microdot” of film could be
embedded into the text of a letter and
take up as little space as the period at
the end of this sentence.
This coin may appear to be an
Eisenhower silver dollar, but it’s
actually hollow and was used to hide
messages or film. Because it looks like
ordinary pocket change, it is almost
undetectable.
A compass hidden inside of a coat
button. According to CIA museum curator
Toni Hiley, during World War II OSS
agents “frequently took common everyday
items and transformed them to serve an
operational mission.”
Located in the CIA’s New Headquarters
Building, the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS) section of the museum
recognizes the work done by the
intelligence service created during
World War II to run spies and support
resistance movements in Axis-controlled
areas of Europe and Asia. The OSS was
the predecessor of the CIA, which was
formed a year after the war.
William J. Donovan, Major Gen. of the
U.S. Army, and former Director of the
Office of Strategic Services, at left,
and in wartime disguise, at right. In
1941, just before the U.S. entered World
War II, President Roosevelt named
Donovan to the newly created position of
Coordinator of Information. After the
U.S. entered the war, Donovan became the
head of the newly created Office of
Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS – the
forerunner to the CIA – had a mandate to
collect and analyze strategic
information.
The desk of OSS chief William J.
Donovan.
Liberator pistols were designed for
widespread distribution to partisan
groups during World War II. Underground
forces could use the .45 caliber
Liberator as a close-range,
antipersonnel weapon to attack an enemy
soldier and relieve him of his more
powerful rifle or handgun. The weapons
were also cost-effective. Each gun cost
only $1.72.
After the Allies formally accepted
the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945,
OSS agent and future CIA Director
Richard Helms wrote a letter to his
young son Dennis on a captured sheet of
Adolf Hitler's personal stationery.
Dated “V-E day,” meaning Victory in
Europe day (May 8), the note begins:
"Dear Dennis, The man who might have
written on this card once controlled
Europe -- three short years ago when you
were born. Today he is dead, his memory
despised, his country in ruins." Helms
became director of the agency in 1966.
Operation Cornflakes was an OSS
mission near the end of World War II
that was meant to fool the German postal
service into delivering anti-Nazi
propaganda to Germans through the mail.
The OSS created forged German stamps, as
well as a subtle reworking of the 12
pfennig Hitler stamp that showed a skull
emerging from Hitler’s face, with the
legend “Deutsches Reich” replaced with
"Futsches (Collapsed) Reich."
CIA Museum Toni Hiley shows NBC Chief
Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel the
Enigma machine displayed in the Office
of Strategic Services wing of the
museum.During World War II, the Germans
used the Enigma cipher machine to
develop nearly unbreakable codes for
sending secret messages. The Enigma's
settings offered 150 sextillion possible
solutions, yet the Allies were
eventually able to crack its code. The
Enigma cipher machine was initially used
for commercial purposes, but the German
Navy began using a version of the
machine in 1926. Prior to World War II
Polish intelligence was able to purchase
an Enigma at a trade fair and procure a
codebook from a French agent. When
Poland was overrun in 1939, the Poles
realized they wouldn't have capabilities
to solve the code and gave the
information and machine to the Allies.
By end of the war, the British were
reading 10 percent of all German Enigma
communications at Bletchley Park, in
England, on the world's first
electromagnetic computers.
Virginia Hall was born in Baltimore
in 1906 and attended Radcliffe and
Barnard Colleges. As a young woman, she
worked at the U.S. embassy in Poland and
traveled extensively in Europe, losing
part of a leg in a shooting accident and
developing the language skills that she
would use on the front lines of
intelligence gathering during World War
II. She first worked for the British
Special Operations Executive developing
a spy network in Vichy France, and then
escaped to Spain in late 1942. In 1944,
Hall joined the Office of Strategic
Services in order to return to France.
Disguised as an elderly farmhand, Hall
organized sabotage operations, supported
resistance groups as a radio operator
and courier, mapped drop zones, and
helped sabotage German military
movements. Despite her wooden leg, which
she called Cuthbert, she helped train
three battalions of Resistance fighters
to wage war on the Germans and kept up a
stream of valuable reporting. The
Gestapo knew her as the “limping lady,”
and called her the most dangerous of all
Allied spies. In 1945, she received the
Distinguished Service Cross - the only
one awarded to a civilian woman in World
War II. Several years later, she made
the transition to the CIA, where she was
one of the first female operations
officers.
An inlaid granite version of the CIA
seal 16 feet in diameter greets visitors
in the lobby of the Original
Headquarters Building
The CIA's Memorial Wall is located in the lobby of the agency’s Original Headquarters building and honors more than 100 CIA personnel killed in the line of duty since the 1940s