The White House Situation Room, a space of great mystique and even greater secrecy, has just received a $50 million facelift.

Actually room is a misnomer. It is a 5,500 square meter, highly secured complex of meeting rooms and offices on the ground floor of the West Wing.

These are rooms where history plays out, where the president meets with national security officials to discuss covert operations and sensitive government affairs, speak with foreign leaders, and navigate major national security crises.

Where President Obama and his team watched the attack that brought down al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011. Where President Trump followed the 2019 operation that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Where President Lyndon Johnson discussed plans for the Vietnam War.

The last iteration was no small update: the total bowel renovation took a year.

The White House opened the secret room this week to a group of reporters for a rare visit to check out the new look. President Biden was given a tour on Tuesday and then given an intelligence briefing in space, said Marc Gustafson, director of the Situation Room.

He loved it, he loved the update, Gustafson said.

Folks, the White House’s newly renovated Situation Room is up and running, Biden said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. My thanks to everyone who worked on this incredible facility.

The renovated space has a modern yet vintage feel. Old floors, furniture, computers, and other technology were torn out and replaced with pristine Maryland mahogany paneling, masonry from a Virginia quarry, color-changing LED lighting, and flat-screen panels. Clear glass offices become opaque at the push of a button. The whole place smells like a new car.

But there are still plenty of landline phones: mobile phones are not allowed in the secure area for security reasons. (There are pockets to store phones by a door leading outside, where a bag of cocaine was found earlier this year.)

Access is tightly controlled and generally limited to national security and the president’s military

advisors advisors

. Anyone listening in to secret briefings needs permission. Even the contractors working on the renovation had to get temporary security clearances. Illuminated signs flash green for released and red for classified.

The hush-hush complex was established in 1961 by the Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs invasion. President

John F

Kennedy believed that a special crisis management center should be set up where officials could coordinate intelligence faster and better.

That was definitely an upgrade. But it wasn’t exactly comfortable: the national security of the Nixon administration

advisor advisor

and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described the space as uncomfortable, unaesthetic and essentially oppressive.

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the White House performed a major update to the Situation Room, along with a broader upgrade of presidential communications on Air Force One and the Presidential Helicopter. Presidents used the complex for secure video conferencing before such technology became more portable. The last renovation was in 2007.

The complex is manned 24 hours a day by military and civilian personnel who monitor developments worldwide.

It has a reception room with an American seal in masonry. Behind it is the main conference room, known as the JFK Room. “To the right is a smaller conference room and two soundproofed breakout areas. To the left is the waiting floor”, a 24/7 operations center.

It’s a marriage of traditional and modern, Gustafson said of the new space.

Workers dug five feet underground to make more room and install state-of-the-art technology, allowing White House officials to bring together intelligence from different agencies at the touch of a button.

Now we have all the options, Gustafson said.

For those in the know: reference to the sitting room is over. It is the whizzer, derived from the acronym of complexes: WHSR. (Washington does love a good acronym.)

Gustafson said the goal is to never need a full renovation again. The new space is designed so that panels can be removed and updated and new technology applied, usually with less space. A space once occupied by computer servers has become a smaller conference room.

The JFK room has a long wooden table with six leather chairs on each side and one at the headboard for the president. Leather armchairs line the walls. A gigantic, high-tech screen runs the length of the back wall. On the side of the president’s room is a two-foot-long seal, larger than the old seal.

There aren’t many photos of the Situation Room, but one of the most famous is the image of Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Biden, and others watching bin Laden’s operation.

It took place around the corner from the JFK Hall in a smaller conference room that no longer exists. It was completely clipped from space and sent to Obama’s presidential library, Gustafson said. Instead are two smaller rooms.

Another item preserved for history is an old phone booth that used to be in the complex. It was sent into storage for Biden’s eventual presidential library. Gustafson didn’t know if anything had been sent to Trump.

Gustafson said staff members should be ready to prepare rooms for secret briefings in a pinch, and Biden has been known to show up to meetings unexpectedly, especially when Russia invaded Ukraine.

While the area was closed for renovations, White House officials used other secure areas on campus. Gustafson said the renovated Situation Room has a kind of soft opening: About 60% of the staff are back in the space, with more joining every day.

One cosmetic upgrade that Gustafson pointed out is the ability to swap out the various 24-inch-diameter seals hanging on the wall of the JFK chamber, depending on who’s in the meeting. Stamps for the president, vice president, and executive staff are kept in a nearby cabinet and can be quickly dipped.

Gustafson said visitors were more likely to notice that the room didn’t reflect Hollywood’s grand imagination of space.

He said they are now declaring: This looks like the movie.”