Despite military budget cuts, the U.S. intelligence community is booming – if you consider their current construction contracts. All 17 of the country’s intelligence organizations are now building multimillion-dollar headquarters buildings and operational facilities all over the greater Washington metropolitan area.
An example is the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) construction of a new headquarters complex on the grounds of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Anacostia. The new headquarters is expected to be completed by 2017 and will help the DHS consolidate 40 offices that are currently dispersed throughout the Washington region.
There are more spies per capita working in and around Washington D.C. than anywhere else in the world, says ForeignPolicy.com. Nearly half of all 200,000 U.S. intelligence community workers are in Washington, as well as several thousand foreign intelligence officers at dozens of embassies and international organizations in the U.S. capital.
The following are a list of some of the top intelligence agencies in the Washington area, as compiled by ForeignPolicy.com:
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), in McLean, Virginia is responsible for managing and coordinating the efforts of all the other 16 agencies and the 200,000 personnel that today comprise the U.S. intelligence community.
Special Collection Service Headquarters, Beltsville, Maryland is a joint CIA-National Security Agency (NSA) clandestine signals intelligence (SIGINT) unit.
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Headquarters, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling is the intelligence arm of the Defense Department, producing tailored foreign military intelligence reporting for the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and American military commanders in the United States and overseas.
FBI Washington Field Office, Washington, D.C. is the FBI’s nerve center is the Washington Field Office, where several hundred FBI special agents and analysts handle all the bureau’s counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations in the region.
Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), Vienna, Virginia maintains the Terrorist Watchlist, which is the U.S. government’s computer database of all known or suspected domestic and international terrorists.
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) Headquarters, Chantilly, Virginia has the largest annual budget of any of the 17 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. About 45 percent of the NRO’s 3,000-person Washington staff comes from the U.S. Air Force, 35 percent from the CIA, 15 percent from the National Security Agency, and the remaining 5 percent from the U.S. Army and Navy.
Aerospace Data Facility — East, Fort Belvoir, Virginia receives all the vast amounts of imagery and intercepted radio traffic being collected every day of the year by the NRO’s constellations of spy satellites in orbit around the Earth.
Navy Mission Ground Station, Blossom Point, Maryland helps maintain constellations of sophisticated electronic intelligence (ELINT) satellites that monitor the deployment patterns and operating characteristics of foreign naval radar systems in conjunction with the NRO and the NSA.
