What is the headquarters of an intelligence agency supposed to look like? Should they be far from the prying eyes of terrorists and evil geniuses; or should they be dominant structures proclaiming their existence to the world?

Wired has put together a list of nine ‘secret’ HQs. Although calling them secret is absurd if they are on a list. Let’s just say they are secretive HQs.

United Kingdom: Secret Intelligence Service 

Ah, the british. Looking at MI6’s headquarters one gets the feeling that, tired of feeling inadequate every time they broke into one of their nemeses’ palatial lairs, the spys demanded something that matched up to an evil genius’ hideout. And boy did they get one. Slap bang in the middle of London, designed by architect Terry Farrell, Wired said “the structure has been compared to a cross between a Babylonian ziggurat and a power plant.”

It id a fortress, and has been tested outside of Bond films as well. From Wired: 

In September 2000, militants suspected to be from the Real Irish Republican Army — a splinter faction of the Irish paramilitary group — fired a rocket-propelled grenade round at the building’s eighth floor, causing no injuries. In a demonstration of just how heavily armored the building is, the rocket reportedly bounced off a glass window. 

Germany: Federal Intelligence Service

We cannot be the only ones to look at this aerial image of the German’s chief spy agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and not think, “Swastika, anyone?” 

Oh, right, maybe we are. Currently under construction the building is set to open next year when it will be “set to be one of the most technologically sophisticated buildings in the world,” apparently. The German’s are proud of this building and have been showing of its “natural stone, render, fair-faced concrete, brick or metal” online.

There has been one major hiccup. Wired describes how blueprints for the building were stolen, which is really not ideal for a spy building. Especially as  they contained “the exact function of every single room, the thickness of each wall, the exact position of every toilet and every emergency exit and every security checkpoint.” Not ideal. They didn’t shelve plans, only order an estimated $1.8 billion interior redesign. 

United States: National Security Agency

NSA is the highly secretive agency responsible for the U.S. government’s codebreaking and collecting communications from around the world. These are the likely the most important spies, but the ones you least want to see a film about. Wired says of the NSA:

Completed in 1986, it resembles a collection of stubby, black, reflective monoliths like from 2001: A Space Odyssey. And according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the complex has an estimated 10 acres of underground space.

But like the CIA during the Cold War, the NSA in recent years has outgrown its own building. Fort Meade altogether has grown extremely rapidly as defense agencies relocate there and the NSA boosts its Cyber Command headquarters.

Also situated at the NSA is the amusingly named, Defense Media Activity organization, the Pentagon’s media unit.

China: Ministry of State Security

This is not the HQ of the Chinese MSS. It’s just a regional office in China’s central Hubei Province. Nobody is entirely sure where the HQ is. Continually mistaken for the Ministry of Public Security’s HQ, all there is are grainy Google Earth images and guesses. The Chinese are spying properly.

The MSS is also different from many Western intelligence agencies because it handles both foreign and domestic intelligence, instead of splitting them up like the CIA and FBI. Hence the reason why it has regional offices inside China, in addition to carrying out Chinese espionage overseas. The Hubei office also sends something of a statement, with its imposing columns, wedding cake facade, sensor dishes and observation perch.

Israel: Mossad

Another nation that are getting espionage right are the Israelis. This is supposedly Mossad HQ. A notoriously tricky HQ to locate – notorious to those who spend their hours scouring google maps for images of HQs – it is continuously misidentified.

But there are some indications its location has been figured out. An apparent former Mossad agent claimed to have revealed its location in at a highway intersection called Glilot Junction in 1987. In journalist Patrick Tyler’s 2012 book Fortress Israel, he located Mossad’s headquarters as a “partially hidden campus of low-slung office buildings sandwiched between the Glilot highway junction, a Cineplex, and a shopping center.” The buildings seen above appear to fit the location and description, and the building at top is indeed a Cineplex, but it’s not for certain whether it’s really Mossad.

France: Directorate-General for External Security

The French have given little flair to their Secret Service, in name and in lodgings. It is all in all, a very understated place.

Located on the eastern edge of the Paris city limits is the headquarters for the French Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), the agency responsible for France’s overseas intelligence works. It’s headquarters also nicknamed “the swimming pool” for its proximity to a facility used by the French Swimming Federation, and Google Maps has even blurred its image in satellite photographs.

United States: Central Intelligence Agency

This is more like it. A proper, in your face, American spy building. A place that you can happily call a complex. A sprawling complex even.

Protected from prying eyes by a wooded belt in suburban Langley, Virginia, just northwest of Washington, D.C., the complex is actually two sets of buildings connected to a central core, with each set built at different times. The first half of the building and designed by New York architecture firm Harrison and Abramovitz — who had a role in designing the United Nations headquarters — dates back to 1963. It’s a sign of its times, and built from sterile pre-fabricated concrete . . . By the 1980s, the agency was running out of space. Today, the complex is much larger, with an added west wing of two glass office towers, designed by Detroit architects Smith, Hinchman & Grylls in the 1980s. 

Afghanistan: National Directorate of Security

No, this is not a joke about how everything in Afganistan is buggered. Nor is about the most perfectly hidden Secret Agency HQ. This is an HQ under fire. The image  above shows the scene after an attack just last Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the headquarters compound in central Kabul was assaulted by a suicide bomber in a minivan, who detonated himself and his vehicle at the front gate. The Wall Street Journal‘s Nathan Hodge and Habib Khan Totakhil reported the blast was followed by a team of armed men who “then tried to assault the compound, but were shot dead by security forces.” At least one guard was reportedly killed, and injuries are said by news outlets to number at least 33 people.

Russia: Federal Security Service

This building is just not the same without the KGB.

 Dating to 1897, the building once housed an insurance company before becoming the headquarters for the feared Soviet spy agency KGB. It was remodeled by Stalin. (The basement contained a KGB prison.) The building was then transferred to the KGB’s successor agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), after the collapse of the USSR.

According to cybersecurity analyst Jeffrey Carr’s book Inside Cyberware: Mapping the Cyber Underworld, the building today houses the FSB’s Communications Security Center, which oversees and encrypts Russian government computer security systems; and the Center for Licensing, Certification, and Protection of State Secrets, which handles export licenses for cryptographic and surveillance technology.

[Source: Wired]