(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) For years, the CIA has categorically denied the existence of secret prisons—or black sites—on U.S. soil. However, a now-deleted list of government-owned properties suggests that the agency may have indeed owned a facility used for secretive operations.
The list included government properties that the General Services Administration, at the direction of the Trump administration’s DOGE, planned to sell. Among the properties on the list was a highly sensitive complex in Northern Virginia long tied to CIA operations.
The GSA published the list on Thursday but quickly took it down the next day, according to Wired and Bloomberg.
“Obviously, someone did no research about the long and well-documented history of this property,” said Jeff McKay, chair of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. “Normally a site like this wouldn’t be outed, so to speak, but everyone knows it’s here except, apparently, the people who put this list together.”
A GSA source told Wired that DOGE’s inclusion of the building was surprising. “There have been rumors swirling that some of the buildings identified house classified CIA space,” the source said, adding: “the release of ‘non-core properties’ was especially surprising, as this nebulous language has not been historically used.”
The government complex is located at 6810 Loisdale Road in Springfield, Virginia, and includes a U-shaped building tied to the CIA—its specific address is 6801 Springfield Center Drive, according to Wired. The 6810 building was proposed to be put up for sale.
The 6801 building was first exposed in 2012 by the Washington Business Journal, which described the CIA’s presence in the area as “perhaps the worst-kept secret in Springfield.”
The building has allegedly been used for clandestine training operations, according to Catherine Collins and Duglas Frantz, authors of the nonfiction book Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking.
“There were two pick-and-lock specialists from the agency’s secret facility in Springfield, Virginia. In a warehouse-like building there, the CIA trains a cadre of technical officers to bug offices, break into houses, and penetrate computer systems,” Collins and Frantz wrote, according to Wire.
While some critics have characterized the release of this information as a failure of the Trump administration, others have praised it as part of an effort to expose secret government operations that could be used against Americans.
Neither the CIA nor GSA responded to Wired’s questions about the facility.
