A now-deleted list containing hundreds of US government properties that the General Services Administration (GSA) plans to sell includes most of a sprawling, highly sensitive federal complex in Springfield, Virginia, that also houses a secretive Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) facility, WIRED has learned.
The GSA’s effort to sell hundreds of US government properties is part of a blunt reshaping of the federal government and its workforce led by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Staffed in part by young engineers with no prior experience in government, DOGE’s efforts have resulted in mass reductions in force, the effective shuttering of entirely independent agencies, and a flurry of lawsuits that seek to mitigate DOGE’s razing of the government over the past six weeks.
The GSA published the list on Tuesday and pulled it down the next day. Before the full list of 443 properties was removed, more than 120 properties had already been quietly scrubbed, including 14 buildings that did not appear to be listed in the Inventory of Owned and Leased Properties, a comprehensive public database of GSA holdings.
Most of these properties, aside from one identified only as “Building A, 6810,” were labeled as either “Butler” or “Franconia.” According to public records, all of them are part of a large federal facility known as the Parr-Franconia Warehouse Complex, or the GSA Warehouse, which sits, fenced in by chain-link topped with barbed wire, at 6810 Loisdale Road in Springfield.
Most of the buildings in the complex, which dates back to the early 1950s and is dominated by a 1,005,602-square-foot warehouse long used as a government supply depot, are believed to be used by various government agencies for mundane purposes. Right in the middle of the complex, though, next to the warehouse and catty-corner to what’s listed as Transportation Security Administration headquarters, is a U-shaped building long notorious for its alleged ties to the CIA.
“Obviously, someone did no research about the long and well-documented history of this property,” says Jeff McKay, chair of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and a longtime advocate of redeveloping the complex, which is near a Metro station and sits in a prosperous area. “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.”
The CIA’s use of the building located at 6801 Springfield Center Drive, not all of which can necessarily be observed from street level, was first reported in 2012 by the Washington Business Journal, which in an article around the same time called the CIA’s presence in the area “perhaps the worst-kept secret in Springfield.” The most specific description of its purpose, as the publication noted, can be found in the 2011 spy-agency-focused nonfiction book Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking, by Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, who write, while describing a clandestine operation: “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.” (Whether it is currently used for these purposes is unknown.)
