field office (13. 816)

NASA administrator James E Webb (see previously) announcing the day prior that the new Manned Spacecraft Centre, Mission Control for the Apollo and subsequent programmes, would be built on a site southeast of Houston on a land donated to the government by Rice University, the Space Task Group vacating its offices at Langley Field, an air force base in Virginia, and relocating to Texas, the US Central Intelligence Agency began work on this day in 1961 consolidating its staff, scattered across thirty-three buildings spread throughout DC and moving into their new headquarters in Langley, technically with the address of 1000 Colonial Farm Road in the unincorporated community of McLean, Virginia. Both new centres of operations are referred to colloquially by their metonyms, the former as in “Houston, we have a problem” and for the later—despite the address, “the Farm” is the nickname for the CIA training facility on nearby Camp Peary—the designation “Langley,” the building was formally unnamed from its opening until 1999, when the complex was called the George H W Bush Centre for Intelligence in honour of its one time director and later US president. Mission Control was named the Lyndon B Johnson Space Centre in 1973 in honour of the late president and Texas native. In addition to the Kryptos sculpture, the campus of the CIA headquarters (the largest of its kind in the world until 2019 when surpassed by the BND-Zentrale once the Bundesnachrichtendienst was moved from Bonn and consolidated with other federal services in Berlin—see more) also include bronze statues of Nathan Hale, double-agent executed by the British during the Revolutionary War, and Harriet Tubman, whom is considered a model spy by the Agency for her service to the Union Army during the civil war.