Kryptos

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) and conducting covert action. As a principal member of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States. Following the dissolution of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Group under the direction of a Director of Central Intelligence by presidential directive on January 22, 1946, and this group was transformed into the Central Intelligence Agency by implementation of the National Security Act of 1947. Unlike the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is a domestic security service, the CIA has no law enforcement function and is mainly focused on overseas intelligence gathering, with only limited domestic intelligence collection. The CIA serves as the national manager for HUMINT, coordinating activities across the IC. It also carries out covert action at the behest of the President. It exerts foreign political influence through its paramilitary operations units, such as the Special Activities Center. The CIA was instrumental in establishing intelligence services in many countries, such as Germany's BND. It has also provided support to several foreign political groups and governments, including planning, coordinating, training in torture, and technical support. It was involved in many regime changes, and carrying out terrorist attacks and planned assassinations of foreign leaders.Since 2004, the CIA is organized under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Despite having had some of its powers transferred to the DNI, the CIA has grown in size as a response to the September 11 attacks. In 2013, The Washington Post reported that in the fiscal year 2010, the CIA had the largest budget of all IC agencies, exceeding previous estimates.The CIA has increasingly expanded its role, including covert paramilitary operations. One of its largest divisions, the Information Operations Center (IOC), has officially shifted focus from counterterrorism to offensive cyber operations.The agency has been the subject of many controversies, including human rights violations, domestic wiretapping, propaganda, and allegations of drug trafficking.

The CIA Museum, administered by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, is a national archive for the collection, preservation, documentation and exhibition of intelligence artifacts, culture, and history. The collection, which in 2005 numbered 3,500 items, consists of artifacts that have been declassified, however since the museum is on the compound of the George Bush Center for Intelligence it is not accessible to the public. Since the museum cannot be visited by the public, the CIA Museum has partnerships with Presidential Libraries and other major museums and institutions to develop public exhibitions dedicated to understanding the craft of intelligence and its role in the broader American experience. The CIA Museum has counterparts at other agencies in the United States Intelligence Community. The National Cryptologic Museum (which is open to the public in Annapolis Junction, Maryland) is the NSA counterpart to the CIA Museum and focuses on cryptology as opposed to human intelligence. The DIA Museum (Defense Intelligence Agency) is not public, is housed at its headquarters and focuses on the history of military intelligence and DIA's role. The FBI Museum housed at its headquarters is also off-limits to the public, and is focused on its history as a federal law enforcement, counterintelligence, and counter-terrorism organization.

The Memorial Wall is a memorial at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It honors 140 CIA employees who died in the line of service.

Operation WASHTUB was a covert operation organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to plant a phony Soviet arms cache in Nicaragua. It was a part of the CIA's effort to portray the administration of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz as having ties to the Soviet Union, prior to the CIA sponsored 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état which overthrew Árbenz later the same year. On 19 February 1954, the CIA, working through the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua, planted a cache of Soviet-made arms on the Nicaraguan coast near the fishing village of Masachapa to be "discovered" weeks later by Rafael Lola, a lieutenant in the Nicaraguan army, and fishermen in the pay of Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza García. The CIA also wished to dispose of the weapons, which were to have been used by Carlos Castillo Armas, and were therefore incriminating to the CIA. On May 7, 1954, President Somoza told reporters at a press conference that a Soviet submarine had been photographed, but that no prints or negatives were available. The story presented to the press was embroidered with the involvement of Guatemalan assassination squads. Somoza was supposed to convince the public that the arms had been intended for Guatemala. The press and the public were skeptical and the story did not get much press. However, the story became part of the Nicaragua local legends until the 1979 revolution.The operation received attention again during the attempts by the U.S. government to exploit the products of Operation PBHistory, the CIA effort to gather intelligence from documents left in Guatemala after the 1954 coup by the government and the communist party. Anti-Communist members of the US Congress, especially Charles J. Kersten and Patrick J. Hillings of the Kersten Committee, began to use PBHistory documents in their reports, provided by the CIA to forestall the possibility that members of Congress, officially ignorant of the CIA's role in the Guatemalan coup, would expose other CIA projects. A subcommittee headed by Hillings produced a final report. In addition to stating without evidence that the Guatemalan government had been acting under orders from the Soviet Union, this report also claimed that Soviet weapons had been brought covertly to Guatemala by submarine. This unintentionally drew attention to Operation WASHTUB.

Project Artichoke (also referred to as Operation Artichoke) was a project developed and enacted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the purpose of researching methods of interrogation. Initially known as Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke officially arose on August 20, 1951, and was operated by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. The primary goal of Project Artichoke was to determine whether a person could be involuntarily made to perform an act of attempted assassination. The project also studied the effects of hypnosis, forced addiction to (and subsequent withdrawal from) morphine, and other chemicals, including LSD, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects. Project Artichoke was succeeded by Project MKUltra, which began in 1953.

MKNAOMI is the code name for a joint Department of Defense/CIA research program from the 1950s through to the 1970s. Unclassified information about the MKNAOMI program and the related Special Operations Division is scarce. It is generally reported to be a successor to the MKULTRA project focusing on biological projects including biological warfare agents—specifically, to store materials that could either incapacitate or kill a test subject and to develop devices for the diffusion of such materials.During its first twenty years, the CIA engaged in projects designed to increase U.S. biological and chemical warfare capabilities. Project MKNAOMI was initiated to provide the CIA with a covert support base to meet its top-secret operational requirements. The goal was to have a robust arsenal of lethal and incapacitating materials within the CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD). This would enable the TSD to serve as a center for supplying biological and chemical materials.Surveillance, testing, upgrading and the evaluation of special materials and items were provided by MKNAOMI to ensure that no defects or unwanted contingencies emerged during operational conditions. The U.S. Army's Special Operations Command (SOC) was assigned to assist the CIA with development, testing and maintenance procedures for the biological agents and delivery systems (1952). Both the CIA and SOC modified guns to fire special darts coated with biological agents and poisonous pills. The darts could incapacitate guard dogs, allowing agents to infiltrate the area that the dogs were guarding, and would then be used to awaken the dogs upon exiting the facility. In addition, the SOC was designated to research the potential to use biological agents against other animals and crops.A 1967 CIA memo which was uncovered by the Church Committee contained evidence of at least three covert techniques for attacking and poisoning crops that had been tested under field conditions. On November 25, 1969, President Richard Nixon banned any military use of biological weapons and Project MKNAOMI was dissolved. On February 14, 1970, a presidential order outlawed all stockpiles of bacteriological weapons and nonliving toxins. However, despite the presidential order, a CIA scientist was able to acquire an estimated 11 grams of deadly shellfish toxin from SOC personnel at Fort Detrick. The toxin was stored in a CIA laboratory where it remained undetected for over five years.

The Office of Technical Service (OTS; formerly known as the Technical Services Division and Technical Services Staff) is a component of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, responsible for supporting CIA's clandestine operations with gadgets, disguises, forgeries, secret writings, and weapons. The OTS traces its history to October 1942, when OSS director William J. Donovan created the OSS Research and Development Branch, a technical group tasked with creating "dirty tricks and deadly weapons" to combat the US's World War II enemies. Donovan named Cornell University-trained chemist and executive Stanley Platt Lovell as the branch's first head, a man whom the CIA remembers as the "founding father" of the OTS. In the 1950s and early 1960s it also researched, investigated, and experimented with the use of drugs, chemicals, hypnosis, and isolation to extract information during interrogation, as well as to make it easier for American captives to resist interrogation. OTS is part of CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. Many film makers have been inspired by OTS, although the information around it is kept highly secret, with only dated projects being revealed and much left it up to interpretation.

Project FUBELT (also known as Track II) is the codename for the secret Central Intelligence Agency operations that were to prevent Salvador Allende's rise to power before his confirmation and to promote a military coup in Chile. This project came after the circumstantial failure of Track I, which involved making president Eduardo Frei Montalva interfere with the 1970 national election in opposition to Allende. The highlights of Project FUBELT are cited in declassified US government documents released by the National Security Archive on September 11, 1998, 25 years after the coup, as well as in papers uncovered by a 1975 congressional inquiry. CIA memoranda and reports on Project FUBELT include meetings between United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA officials, CIA cables to its Santiago station, and summaries of secret action in 1970, detailing decisions and operations to undermine the election of Salvador Allende in September 1970 and to promote a military coup. In November 1970, after the failure of the operation with the killing of general René Schneider, the US National Security Council issued National Security Decision Memorandum 93, which replaced FUBELT.

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. 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. It was the world's largest intelligence headquarters from 1959 until 2019, when it was surpassed by Germany's BND headquarters.

Claude Moore Colonial Farm, originally Turkey Run Farm, was a U.S. park in Virginia re-creating and re-enacting life on a tenant farm circa 1771. The park closed permanently on December 21, 2018. The National Park Service was subsequently said to be in the process of planning the future of the park and its facilities The Friends of Claude Moore Colonial Farm at Turkey Run Inc., a privately funded foundation, paid for all activities on the Farm, while the land it occupied was owned by the National Park Service. It received only certain maintenance services from the Park Service. The Farm was located in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., next to the George Bush Center for Intelligence and the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center. The mission of Claude Moore Colonial Farm was to recreate the life of tenant farmers circa 1771. The majority of Virginians of that time period were tenant farmers who grew tobacco to pay their rent while growing food to eat. By contrast, Colonial Williamsburg mainly demonstrates the life of merchants, landowners, and other members of colonial Virginia's upper crust.

Clemyjontri Park is a 2-acre park in McLean, Virginia, opened in 2006, which boasts a setting for children of all abilities to congregate. It is located in the McLean area of Fairfax County, Virginia at 6317 Georgetown Pike. It includes a carousel, four different playground areas around the carousel, and walking trails. Additional parking is available at Langley Fork Park across Georgetown Pike.The land was donated by Adele Lebowitz in 1997, of Morton’s Department Store and namesake of the "Adele Lebowitz Center for Youth and Family" at the Washington School of Psychiatry, to the Fairfax County Park Authority to build the park.The name Clemyjontri is derived from the donor’s four children: Carolyn (CL), Emily (EMY), John (Jon), and Petrina (Tri).The park has been written about in the fictional book Murder Has a Sweet Tooth.

Langley is an unincorporated community in the census-designated place of McLean in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. The name "Langley" often occurs as a metonym for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as the community is home to the CIA headquarters, the George Bush Center for Intelligence. The land which makes up Langley today once belonged to Thomas Lee, former Crown Governor of the Colony of Virginia from 1749 to 1750. Lee's land was named Langley in honor of Langley Hall, which formed part of the Lee home estate in Shropshire, England. In 1839 Benjamin Mackall purchased 700 acres (283 ha) of land from the Lee family, while keeping the name.The community was essentially absorbed into McLean many years ago, although there is still a Langley High School. In addition to its roles as a bedroom community for Washington, D.C., and as home to the CIA's headquarters, the area is the site of the Federal Highway Administration's Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center and formerly the Claude Moore Colonial Farm of the National Park Service, now permanently closed.