Why Is the CIA Called Langley? The History Behind the Name

For years, if you drove down the George Washington Parkway looking for CIA headquarters, you wouldn’t find a sign. The exit just read “Bureau of Public Roads.”

That’s the CIA for you. The most powerful intelligence agency in the world, hiding behind a sign for a highway bureaucracy. And even the name “Langley” itself is borrowed from a Virginia governor, an old English estate, and a chapel in Shropshire that hadn’t been properly used since around 1700.

Nothing about this place is what it appears to be.

Where the Name Langley Actually Comes From

Before the CIA, before the Cold War, before anyone had any use for 258 acres of northern Virginia farmland, there was Thomas Lee.

Lee was the Crown Governor of the Colony of Virginia from 1749 to 1750. He owned a massive tract of land in what is now Fairfax County, purchased from the sixth Lord Fairfax, and he named his estate “Langley” after his family’s ancestral home: Langley Hall in Shropshire, England.

The English connection runs deep. Langley Hall sat in Ruckley and Langley, a small civil parish in Salop (the old name for Shropshire). In 1377, the manor passed to the Lee family. Sir Humphrey Lee moved to Langley in 1591 and was likely responsible for re-roofing the old chapel on the grounds in 1601. That chapel, known today as Langley Chapel, has roots going back to around 1313.

By 1700, the chapel had largely fallen out of use. The Lee family had gone to the Colonies. The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, writing about Langley in the 1870s, reported a township of 78 people and 16 houses, with “a small chapel here, but seldom used.”

A sleepy English parish. A Virginia governor. And a name that would eventually become shorthand for the most powerful spy agency on earth.

The Name Crosses the Atlantic

Back in Virginia, the estate changed hands over the years. In 1839, Benjamin Mackall purchased 700 acres from the Lee family. He kept the name.

Langley, Virginia grew up around Georgetown Pike (Route 193) and Chain Bridge Road (Route 123). Historically, Georgetown Pike itself formed along the natural migration routes of buffalo moving between feeding grounds in Maryland and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The community that developed there was quiet, residential, and largely undeveloped well into the 20th century.

Which is exactly why Allen Dulles wanted it.

Why the CIA Picked This Spot

In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA operated out of a cluster of temporary buildings along E Street in Foggy Bottom. Allen Dulles, who ran the agency from 1953 to 1961, pushed hard to relocate to a more secluded and secure location. He wanted the CIA far enough from Washington to maintain secrecy, but close enough to the White House to stay relevant.

What followed was a public fight. The CIA considered multiple sites in the Washington suburbs, and not everyone agreed that Langley made sense. A Washington Post editorial from December 7th, 1955, captured the frustration:

“Approval” by the National Capital Regional Planning Council of the proposed Central Intelligence Agency site at Langley, Va., is typical of the confusion bordering on farce that has surrounded CIA’s efforts to bulldoze into this residential area. Because of the death of an Alexandria member whose vote against the Langley site would have reversed the position of the Council, a Falls Church alternate was enabled to cast an affirmative vote.

Because of a decision attributed to the National Security Council that the CIA cannot locate its new buildings in Washington proper, the CIA is looking for a site that is neither fish nor fowl–neither dispersed nor really convenient. Because CIA officials seemingly are dead-set against use of the Winkler tract in Alexandria–among other reasons because they say the four-lane high-speed Shirley Highway is overloaded–they are doing their utmost to obtain a site bordering on a two-lane road that is far more overloaded and that would require enormous new construction.

Is it not time to end this absurd situation in which the CIA pushes around all sound planning concepts for the estate and park area upstream from Washington? If there is civil defense reason to disperse the CIA headquarters, then let it be really dispersed–to Cumberland or even to Kalamazoo, where it could be a companion piece to the lonely and very much dispersed Civil Defense Administration at Battle Creek. If access to the White House is more important than dispersal, then let the new buildings be located in Alexandria, where they would be welcome and would not violate good planning; or in Washington, which was the first choice of CIA anyhow.

The deciding voter died. A replacement cast the affirmative vote. The Langley site was approved.

That sounds awfully suspicious.

We also wrote separately about the plan to locate CIA headquarters in Alexandria that never came to be.

Building the Campus

The 258-acre plot on the old Langley estate was selected. The firm chosen to design the complex was Harrison and Abramovitz, the same firm that had designed the United Nations Headquarters building in New York City.

President Eisenhower laid the cornerstone on November 3rd, 1959. The original building came in at an estimated $46 million and 1,400,000 square feet. It took four years to complete. A second New Headquarters Building was added in 1991.

WTOP has a great series of photos showing the complex and the construction process.

The Signs That Lied for 15 Years

Here’s where it gets good.

Everyone knew roughly where the CIA was. The debate over the Langley site had played out in the newspapers. The location wasn’t classified. But for years, there was no sign on the George Washington Parkway pointing to it.

If you drove down GW Parkway or Route 123 not knowing exactly where to turn, you were on your own. The exit was labeled “FHWA” at some points, “Bureau of Public Roads” at others, or “Fairbanks Highway Research Station.” All of it polite fiction, and everyone in the area knew it.

That ended in 1973. A Washington Post article announced the change:

For more than a decade, the George Washington Memorial Parkway exit south of Turkey Run has been variously labeled “Bureau of Public Roads,” “Federal Highway Administration,” or “Fairbanks Highway Research Station.” This week parkway workmen finally put up signs showing where it really leads–to the mammoth headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, VA.

Parkway superintendent David A. Ritchie said the request for the new sign “came down some months back from CIA.” A spokesman at CIA said the sign was ordered by James R. Schlesinger when he took over CIA for four months early this year. “He came in here and said ‘Where’s the sign?’ and there wasn’t one so we got one,” the spokesman said. He said the sign was part of a general policy of increased openness that Schlesinger ordered at the nation’s spy agency, where switchboard operators now answer calls with “CIA” instead of just repeating the phone number.

The CIA spokesman said people in quest of the agency get lost all the time. “We get cab drivers who never find us,” he said. “They wind up circling around and around like some sort of Flying Dutchman on the Beltway.” Did Schlesinger ever get lost trying to find CIA? “I don’t think so,” said the agency spokesman. “That’s a piquant thought, but I don’t think that guy gets lost doing anything.” After four months as head of CIA, Schlesinger moved up last May to Secretary of Defense.

A name borrowed from a sleepy English chapel. An estate purchased from a Colonial governor. Fifteen years of fake highway signs. And cab drivers circling the Beltway like the Flying Dutchman.

That’s Langley.