'Secret' CIA museum

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

John Makely / NBC News

Not open to the public but displayed inside CIA headquarters are artifacts from decades of intelligence gathering, including drones disguised as insects, a pigeon camera and Osama bin Laden's AK-47.

The “coolest museum you’ll never see” has a new piece de resistance – the gun found next to the body of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan when Navy SEALs killed him in a midnight raid.

The AK-47 is a recent addition to a collection that’s among the toughest tickets in the country for museumgoers. Tucked into various hallways at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., the museum displays the gadgets, artifacts and trophies of 70 years of spycraft, from World War II through the War on Terror.  Closed to the public, it had only been visited by employees and invited guests until NBC News recently became the first news organization allowed to bring in video cameras.
The Russian-made assault rifle, identified on a simple brass plaque as “Osama bin Laden’s AK-47,” shares a glass case with an al Qaeda training manual found in Afghanistan soon after 9/11.

The CIA’s private museum, which was started in the early 1990s, fills three corridors in two buildings at the CIA campus just outside Washington. Agency officials call it “the coolest museum you’ll never see.”

The museum traces the agency’s history, including its origin as the Office of Special Services (OSS), which aided resistance fighters and ran spy networks during World War II, and its years of clandestine operations during the Cold War. Artifacts include the shrapnel that struck a spy plane over North Vietnam, a silver dollar that holds microfilm and an underwater spy drone made to look like a catfish. The museum previously displayed many of the phony Hollywood accoutrements – a movie script, stationery, and company briefcase -- that a team of agents posing as filmmakers used in an audacious operation that rescued six Americans from Iran in 1979. The mission became the basis of the recent Academy Award-winning movie “Argo.”