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A Look Inside the Secret CIA Museum
One of the most interesting (and least accessible) museums in D.C.
Dubbed “the coolest museum you’ll never see,” the CIA Museum features an amazing array of artifacts like “clothing, equipment, weapons, insignia and other memorabilia that serve as tangible testimony to the Agency’s history.” Tucked into various hallways at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., the museum displays the gadgets, artifacts and trophies of 70 years of spycraft, from World War II through the War on Terror.
The museum is closed to the public and is only visited by employees and invited guests. It is rare for cameras to be allowed in.
One of the newest pieces is the gun found next to the body of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan when Navy SEALs killed him in a midnight raid. The Russian-made assault rifle, identified on a simple brass plaque as “Osama bin Laden’s AK-47,” shares a glass case with an al Qaeda training manual found in Afghanistan soon after 9/11.
In addition to bin Laden’s gun, there’s a brick from his compound in Abbottabad; a scale-model of the compound; a section of a wall that was part of the life-size mock-up of…
