No windows/All brick CIA building in VA?

reply to post by DDay


I live in Decherd Tennessee . It's a really small town. There was a building that got redone and was told was suppose to be a bank that was almost 3 yrs ago. There is no name on it. It is in plain site but no-one notices but me it seems.Thu is always occupied by the same people always the same 4 nice vehicles. They are there 7 days a week 24 hours a day. Seen one get out of their car walk to the door and had to wait for someone to unlock it. And doesn't even look nothing similar to a bank. We have done had 4 banks built and operational after 4 months could this be a secret government building

The CIA does have a facility on Sunrise Valley, its between 286 and West Ox. Its the only building in Reston with an iron gate around it- Reston is a planned community and they are outlawed. The agency must've had a mole on the architectural review board...

Remember last year a woman posted the address of part of the CIA Farm. It was a all brick building with no windows in it. Just video cameras on the corners of the building. The building itself almost looked abandoned. Guess it was a CIA school of some kind. They stay in the hotel across the street and go to the school CIA Farm across the street. It was brought up here some where on ATS.

reply to post by JBA2848


"The Farm" is Camp Peary:
Camp Peary

reply to post by gariac


I can't find it. But it was a woman posting a job resume on the internet. She leaked the location of one of the schools for the farm which was not the main Farm but a offsite location. Where people are sent to stay at the hotel across the street from the Brick building with no windows and only one small door and video cameras on the corners of the building.

Come to think of it. It was not a job application but a blog post which was a glad I am about to finish the classes. And she had listed out the Farm and time there and the secondary she did at this other place . And she spoke of being glad to get out of the hotel and brick building. She complained because it was so isolated.

Not to sidetrack this thread, but generally it is hard to build an office building without windows, at least on private land in an urban area. The project would meet severe resistance in the planning department. There are so many energy/environmental laws these days. Now server farms, telephone central offices, etc. can be built without windows. [These are the most common buildings without windows that you find in urban areas.] But if the building is to be occupied by people, it would probably be required to have windows.

What the spooks do for privacy is vibrate the windows with white noise to make monitoring impossible. For classified conversations, the building will have a SCIF in the interior.
SCIF

If you look at CIA HQ, there are plenty of windows.
CIA HQ

Some seriously geeky website has a photo gallery of telephone central offices. Most have one window at most.
central office

There is that fine line between an office building and an industrial building. Industrial buildings don't require windows. I've seen some buildings on the border between office and industrial, mostly laboratories. Often if you have the address of the building or know how to find the building on a plat map, you can find the owner and determine the use. One very strange building I found in Berkeley turned out to be a medical laboratory. It had a few windows, but they had cinder block in front of them a few feet away from the glass. Possibly it had a shadier past.

reply to post by gariac


The Blue Cube was a pretty well known windowless building. I believe you can still see it from the 101 but I haven't been down there in a while.

reply to post by dogshark


The Blue Cube had some windows. OK, OK, only at the entrance. I was in the building in the early 90s. Lots of "meat lockers" inside. [Rooms with combination locks on the door.] But the Blue Cube was on a military installation, so it didn't need city council approval.

I shot KNUQ from a chopper. The page has a shot of the cube.
KNUQ

But my point is try to build a windowless building in the era of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). It certainly would not be a "build to suit" deal because no company would want to be stuck with a windowless office building. Like what do you do with it if the spooks decide to move out? I guess you could add windows.

Taking a "normal" office building and adding a SCIF is no big deal. Besides companies that require them for government work, SCIFs are showing up in anywhere that secrecy is desired. Hedge Fund offices for instance. If you read the SCIF construction standards, they really aren't all that complicated. Rules on the drywall, no outlets in the walls cavity, special disconnect phones, etc.

It's pretty common, really. The NSA building at Fort Gordon is nearly the same, albeit without the façade of fake windows. It stands by itself surrounded by razor wire with keycard access. There are mean looking antennas on the roof, like satellite dishes only a lot more complex. The guys inside serve as translators. They beam transmissions from places like Cyprus to the building where a linguist listens in looking for something "actionable" from cell phone transmissions or whatever from all over the world. It's an open base. Civilians can drive all around the building if they want.

It's not really a big secret. Nobody knows details, of course, but everyone knows generally what happens there. It's kind of like driving by McChord Air Force Base and seeing all the big grey planes on the tarmac. You don't say, "My God! I wonder what they are DOING there!"

Nothing surprising about this.

When I worked in the defense industry I worked for a company that had similar buildings/rooms/areas where the level of classification prevented the use of windows.

If it's the building I'm thinking of it used to be an office for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. A year or two back all of their offices in the area were packed up and moved to the new campus in Springfield. I can't remember who moved in but I think it was a contractor. the building does have windows but the all glass exterior prevents anyone on the outside from knowing where they are.

Xcalibur254
If it's the building I'm thinking of it used to be an office for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. A year or two back all of their offices in the area were packed up and moved to the new campus in Springfield. I can't remember who moved in but I think it was a contractor. the building does have windows but the all glass exterior prevents anyone on the outside from knowing where they are.

So at night, no light leaks out?

reply to post by TheUntoldStory


I have been in that building. I does indeed have brick walls behind the glass. It also has 2 sheets of copper plating in between the glass the outer wall and the inner wall. The buildineg is not owned or operated by the DEA or the CIA. It belongs to the ssssec-retttttt ssser-viceeeee. It's were they develop and test low observable voice and data communication systems for protective detail use. There are also some special operations communications assets there and a very basement armory were they keep a serious complement of whoop-ass on hand. If that building should ever detonate, expe ct a crater about 80 feet deep! If you want to know more about it, google this code name "ARGENT TASK". It will really blow your mind. I was a CTT in the US NAVY. I was assigned to work with other assets to determine if there were ways exploit the low observable comms tech. I had a TOP SECRET SCI clearance. The systems that I was detailed to evaluate were easily exploited by siganl intelligence professionals. Happy to have helped you out.

reply to post by DDay


We had a Crypto training site on Mare Island. It was the same way no windows. Students were not allowed to take anything in or out. Even pencils couldn't be brought in. That was back in the 70s - 80s I expect nothing different today for truly secure sites.

Skibum

Originally posted by CyberSEAL
Yeh, must be a pretty important datacenter, lots of security there. Funny how it is located in a populated and busy area.

Thats what we were told the building was for when I was doing some work at one of the Raytheon buildings.

Often the location of a data center is related to where they run the fiber, and that is often related to where the railroads run or used to run since they have a right of way based on federal law. So a data center in an urban area isn't all that unusual.

I've lost track of where the building that started this thread is located, but the spook location that usually comes to mind for the DC area is Tysons Corner. Most everyone knows the history, but here are some links:
TC microwave
Watch where you dig

There is plenty of dark fiber in the ground wire used on high tension power lines, so in theory you could have a data center in the boonies. Perhaps that is how the NSA facility in Utah is fed. The new power lines run to Groom Lake (and all over Central Nevada) have fiber in the ground wire. But that is par for the course these days since utility companies try to maximize their profits with such services.
dark fiber

a reply to: TheUntoldStory
I've heard from someone that there's and old abandoned CIA building in Warrenton Virginia

a reply to: Samuraidragon

There's Mt. Pony in Culpeper- not CIA but now used for CoG ops, check it out fas.org...

They do have a few windows, with heavy lead shutters that come down over it so they can get some proper sleep.