The CIA’s attempt to make a clandestine office purchase in Northern Virginia has been uncovered.
The intelligence agency paid $246.6 million to the Peterson Companies for Dulles Discovery 2, an office building part of a larger campus in Chantilly, according to public records reported by the Washington Business Journal. The deal quietly closed at the end of May.
The outlet identified the buyer from the mailing address, which included a three-letter acronym used at the CIA’s Langley campus and a ZIP code reserved for the agency.
The purchase of the 434,000-square-foot office building at 13870 Air and Space Museum Parkway breaks down to $568 per square foot. The CIA also scored an adjacent parking lot out of the deal.
The office property is part of a larger campus. Dulles Discovery includes four buildings on the east side of Route 28, spanning 1.8 million square feet, along with ancillary buildings, parking garages and surface parking. The CIA is the largest leaseholder at the campus, even before its acquisition; it also previously bought a parking lot on Historic Sully Way for $9 million.
There’s a retail center in the middle of the campus, complete with a Wawa, Chick-fil-A, an urgent care and a preschool. The National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is nearby.
The campus is about a 40-minute drive from the nation’s capital.
The George Bush Center for Intelligence, the name for the CIA’s headquarters, is located in Langley, an unincorporated area in Virginia’s Fairfax County. It spans 258 acres and until a few years ago, was believed to be the largest intelligence headquarters in the world.
The federal government is upending its real estate portfolio across the country, particularly in and around Washington, D.C. The General Services Administration — the government’s real estate manager — launched in March what is effectively a space-sharing program for government agencies.
In recent months, the federal government has canceled nearly 500 leases, spanning 5.8 million square feet, according to a tracker created by Avison Young. Approximately a quarter of that space is in Washington, D.C.