Several years ago, way back in 2017, I visited Washington DC. Among many other sites, I went to the International Spy Museum (I wrote about it here). It seemed like it'd be a bit kitschy but I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the artifacts on display.
Recently, I had the opportunity to spend a day in Washington DC. Since we didn't have much time and because of the requirement that anywhere that we went had to be kid friendly, the International Spy Museum made the list of stops to make.
Having just visited the museum five or six years ago, I didn't think that it'd have that much more to offer me. Well, apparently it moved to a new building in 2019. It is substantially larger than what I remembered before. With the move to a new building, it underwent a major facelift in its entire approach. I have to say that I was very impressed.
One of my old man complaints is that when museums undergo such renovations, the end result is often a Disney-ification of the material. It seems dumbed down and weighted heavily towards children. I understand why it's done and I'm certainly a fan of introducing children to history however you can, but as a now very mature man of years, doing so removes some of the, I don't know, fusty magic of museums.
Well, the International Spy Museum did an excellent job of making its exhibits both kid friendly as well as for adults.
For the kids, there's an ongoing game where you are an undercover agent going on covert missions. Every display had at least one interactive, multi-media component. There were lots of things to feel and touch. The kids seemed to have a fun time.
There was plenty of interest for adults as well. They did an outstanding job of organizing their artifacts. Instead of doing some kind of dry, timeline of history, the artifacts were organized by a facet of spying. For each topic, there would be a number of interesting artifacts about it. Not only that, but every topic had one or two specific events that crystallized the topic.
Even better, most of these events are from semi recent history. Many of the events happened during my life time. Learning about these events again led me to forgotten memories of my own. Even for those events that were before my time, I'm enough of a history geek to really appreciate the way that the material was presented.
To provide some examples, let me list several of the topics and the events that the museum used to highlight them.
Failure: Whenever you read about spies, the narrative usually highlights how successful spy craft is and how lost we'd be without spies. It doesn't always work out like that. There are times where, in hindsight, things that seem blindingly obvious are missed. The two events used to describe intelligence failures were Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
Cyber: This is an area that will only become more critical. There were brief discussions on Edward Snowdon and the 2016 election. The focus event was Stuxnet. I'm not sure how many people remember Stuxnet, but the US and Israel were concerned about Iran's progress on building nuclear weapons. US/Israeli hackers wrote a software worm that was somehow installed and then was propagated on controllers that ended up seriously damaging nuclear centrifuges.
World War II: This was where code breaking really came of age. The museum had both German and the more complex Japanese Enigma machines.
Spies and Spycatchers: The two main characters here are the FBI spy Robert Hanssen and the CIA spy Aldrich Ames. Among the interesting things here is an interview with the women that actually caught Ames. Among other artifacts that are on display here are the actual handcuffs that Hanssen and Ames were arrested in.
Analysis: Gathering data is only part of the job of a spy agency. Much more important is understanding what it means. All of these strands of seemingly random data are collected and some sense must be made of it. The topic highlighted here is the Bay of Pigs and the ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis. This display discussed how the rival spy agencies built up psychological profiles of Kennedy and Krushchev.
Interrogation: Not that surprising, the emphasis on this section is the moral quandary facing modern spies: to torture or not to torture. What is torture? Most interesting is the interviews from people related to the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the US in the aftermath of 9/11. The fact that, nearly twenty years later, the museum was able to get someone to justify these actions was extraordinary.
Covert Action: This is probably the section that most people think of when they think of spying. This is the James Bond stuff of sneaking in and doing damage to the enemy. Here you understand that the gadgets used by James Bond aren't that farfetched. There is a knife hidden inside a glove. There is a gun hidden inside of a cigarette box. The two events highlighted in this section are the assassinations of Georgi Markov and Leon Trotsky. Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, died in London four days after being poked by an umbrella. Leon Trotsky was killed when the assassin hit him on the top of his head with an ice axe. Amazingly enough, the museum has, in its possession, the actual axe used to kill Trotsky.
To top all of that off, it actually has a pretty impressive gift shop!
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