See inside the top-secret museum you can’t enter
While most museums aim to educate the public, there’s one that most of us won’t be allowed to enter that holds artefacts that have shaped key historical moments - and it’s located in the headquarters of the CIA.
The US intelligence agency has its very own in-house museum at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, with a collection recently renovated to mark its 75th anniversary.
According to the BBC, whose journalists were among a select group given access during a media tour, the 600 artefacts on display include everything from old-school spy gadgets to models of the compound that housed Osama bin Laden.
The Cold War gadgets included the likes of a ‘dead drop rat’, in which messages could be hidden, a covert camera inside a cigarette packet, an exploding martini glass and even a pigeon with its own spy camera.
A pipe radio receiver is among the hundreds of items on display in the museum. Image: Getty Images
Some artefacts have never gone on display before, such as a model of the sunken Soviet K-129 submarine created for the expedition the CIA embarked on with billionaire Howard Hughes to recover the ship.
That mission was only partially successful since the submarine broke apart while a ship called the Gomar Explorer was trying to bring it up from the ocean’s depths.
"Most of what they found aboard that submarine is still classified to this day," Robert Z Byer, the museum’s director, told the BBC.
The mission also marked the creation of an iconic phrase the CIA still uses; after news broke of the mission before the rest of the submarine could be extracted, officials were told to say they could “neither confirm nor deny” what had happened.
A model of the K-129 submarine was created by the CIA during the mission to recover the sunken Soviet vessel and has never been displayed before. Image: Central Intelligence Agency
Others have only been declassified recently, including a model of the compound where al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed earlier this year. The model was used to brief President Joe Biden on the proposed mission.
Though the museum moves chronologically through the CIA’s successes and failures, including the failed Bay of Pigs mission to overthrow Fidel Castro, some of the agency’s more controversial acts are less visible, such as the 1953 joint operation with Mi6 to overthrow a democratically-elected government in Iran, or recent involvement in the torture of terrorist suspects after 9/11.
The museum’s visitors are restricted to CIA staff and official visitors, with Mr Byer saying it serves to educate CIA officers on the agency’s history.
"This museum is not just a museum for history's sake. This is an operational museum,” he explained.
“We are taking CIA officers [through it], exploring our history, both good and bad," says Mr Byer.
"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."
While the public isn’t allowed to visit it currently, officials say some exhibits will be available to view online.
Images of the museum are also expected to be shared on social media, with the aim being that members of the public are given the chance to unscramble the various coded messages displayed on the museum’s ceilings.
Image: Getty Images