The CIA has renovated its top secret museum located inside in the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia – but the venue’s doors remain closed to the public.
The CIA Museum is dedicated to educating the agency’s workforce and official visitors on CIA’s “history, mission, people, and contributions to national security”, according to a news release.
Designed to “instruct and inform generations of officers”, the museum’s collection has been renovated to mark the Central Intelligence Agency’s 75th anniversary.
“History is absolutely key to understanding intelligence. And if we hope to succeed, we have to learn from it and this new museum will help us do just that,” said CIA director Bill Burns.
The CIA Museum is home to more than 600 artifacts. Among these are objects from Project Azorian, a CIA project to retrieve the wreckage of a sunken K-129 Soviet submarine.
Top secret CIA Museum
Also exhibited are a briefcase used during the Argo operation to exfiltrate six diplomats out of Iran in 1980, and a model of the compound used to brief President Biden on al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s location in Kabul, Afghanistan.
“This museum is not just a museum for history’s sake,” Robert Z Byer, the museum’s director, told the BBC. “This is an operational museum.”
“We are taking CIA officers [through it], exploring our history, both good and bad,” Byer said.
“We make sure that our officers understand their history, so that they can do a better job in the future. We have to learn from our successes, and our failures in order to be better in the future.”
Although the public are not able to visit the museum, CIA has made many artifacts and exhibits available virtually via its website and social media channels.
Images: CIA
