George Bush Center for Intelligence | |
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Langley, Virginia | |
Aerial view of the CIA Headquarters
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Coordinates | 38°57′06″N 77°08′48″W / 38.9517°N 77.1467°W |
Type | Office building, headquarters |
Height | Six stories above ground |
Site information | |
Owner | United States federal government |
Controlled by | Director of the Central Intelligence Agency |
Open to the public |
No |
Condition | In service |
Site history | |
Built | November 3, 1959 – March 1961 |
Garrison information | |
Occupants | Central Intelligence Agency |
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.
The headquarters is a conglomeration of the Original Headquarters Building (OHB) and the New Headquarters Building (NHB) that sits on a total of 258 acres (1.04 km2) of land.
Prior to its current name, the CIA headquarters was formally unnamed. On April 26, 1999, the complex was officially named in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999 for George H. W. Bush, who had served as the Director of Central Intelligence for 357 days, between January 30, 1976 and January 20, 1977, and had served as the 41st President of the United States.
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 space. The ground was broken for construction on November 3, 1959, with President Dwight Eisenhower laying the cornerstone, and the building was completed in March 1961.
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. It is a complex that adjoins two six-story office towers and is fully connected via a tunnel to the OHB.
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 US government's policy in the Middle East, "particularly toward the Palestinian people".