Washington: The CIA Museum covers the intelligence agency’s long history – from spying on the Soviets to the Argo mission in Iran – but the latest addition is practically ripped from the headlines: a model of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s compound in Kabul used weeks earlier to plan the US drone strike that killed the al-Qaeda leader.

The model is part of the newly renovated exhibition hall located deep inside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Like the NSA’s Wall of Spies museum in Bethesda, Maryland, the CIA Museum isn’t open to the public. But it’s not exactly top secret either, welcoming CIA employees, official guests, foreign partners, potential recruits – and, early on a Saturday morning, a handful of carefully observed reporters with old-school notepads and pens (electronics are banned).

There are plenty of fun gadgets to see, like a polygraph machine in a briefcase and a communication device disguised as a tobacco pipe, used in the 1960s. When a user bit down on the pipe, sound travelled through their teeth and jawbone to the ear canal, allowing them to hear messages that no one around them could.

There’s a stack of red, green and yellow containers for a pneumatic tube system – like you might see at a bank drive-through – used for an interoffice message service before the advent of email. Different colours denoted different classification levels. There were “miles and miles” of tubes throughout CIA headquarters, according to Robert Byer, the director of the CIA Museum. The containers were also the perfect size for the transportation of a can of beer, or, with a little manoeuvring, a sandwich, he added.

There’s an early example of the President’s Daily Brief, which used to be called the PICL (president’s intelligence checklist) or “pickle,” essentially a small spiral notepad, because that’s how President John F. Kennedy preferred to receive it. President Biden likes to have both hard copy and electronic tablet options for his daily briefing, Byer said, pointing to a leather-bound binder and tablet case. Reagan apparently preferred briefing by VHS tape.

Even the ceiling conveys the CIA’s mission. As you pass through it, overhead panels are decorated with Morse code, binary code, even a “modified” Kryptos, a code from 1991 that still hasn’t been fully cracked.

One display honours Soviet spies who helped the CIA, like Adolf Tolkachev, who shared weapons information that supposedly saved the US government a billion dollars, earning him the nickname “The Billion Dollar Spy,” and Oleg Penkovskiy, who provided information during the Cuban missile crisis that prevented nuclear war. He got the unbeatable nickname “The Spy Who Saved the World.”

“A lot of these spy stories don’t have happy endings,” one reporter said, noting the frequent mentions of imprisonment and execution. That’s true, Byer responded, but CIA employees need to see how important it is to protect their informants.