Travel: The Museum of Spies

A homing pigeon outfitted for World War I espionage.

(International Spy Museum, Washington, D.C.)

The International Spy Museum claims that 10,000 members of the intelligence community work within a block of its Washington location. The number seems a little high to me; it would probably implicate everyone from bored security guards to the employees of the local pizzeria. But since the museum also reveals that 40,000 pounds of shredded documents from the National Security Agency are recycled into pizza boxes at a time, maybe we should all be more suspicious of seemingly innocent bystanders and their packages.

It’s a good time for paranoia. The day that I visited the museum, the headlines on the front page of The New York Times were all about spying. Multiple articles detailed the National Security Agency’s practice of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, and elsewhere books and magazines have been warning of the encroaching abilities of e-mail scanning programs and closed-circuit television. Clearly, with communication technologies like e-mail, cell phones, and text messages proliferating, spies have constantly growing masses of conversations to listen to. And with the war on terror, they have a rationale for their intrusions.

Though the museum gives a clear overview of what spies do (pick locks, bug furniture, steal secrets, break codes, and sometimes cause a death or two) and why (political beliefs, money, blackmail), the museum shies away from discussing the ethics of spying. In the lobby a glass display case clearly states the museum’s mission: “Our task is to judge their craft, not their politics—their skill, not their loyalty.”

The first part of the museum is dedicated to that very notion of a spy’s craft. Display cases show enough gadgets to please a James Bond fan, including an entire area devoted to explaining how to make your own miniature photographs (vodka is somehow involved), and there’s also an air-duct tunnel to crawl through and the chance to listen in on your fellow visitors, courtesy of two bugs hidden in another part of the museum. (My spying had a decidedly unexciting outcome. I listened in on two tourists reading a display plaque out loud.)

The rest of the museum is more historically focused and uses mainly video presentation, reproduced photographs, and period furnishings to convey information. Actual artifacts are few. Though the rooms are arranged in a loose chronological order, there’s a tendency to conflate historical periods. One room with a flowered carpet and two video screens set off by fancy gilt frames looks like it is meant to evoke some specific era, but since the video and wall plaques discuss the spying activities of Cardinal Richelieu, Nathan Hale, and Alfred Dreyfus, men who lived in three different centuries, it’s unclear what period the room might represent.

The more focused exhibits are more interesting, particularly a tiny room about carrier pigeons and photography. Its floor is overlaid with a photo of Kronberg, Germany, taken in 1907 by a camera strapped to a pigeon, and this is particularly effective in giving the visitor a bird’s eye view of spying. Interactive elements work well too. A phone booth that rings periodically turns out to tell the story of a pair of German spies, once you step inside and pick up the phone to listen.

There’s a lot to see, and I was a bit tired by the time I hit the World War II area, with exhibits on the Cambridge spies, Enigma, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and Pearl Harbor. I hustled past the replica of the pumpkin that had held Whittaker Chambers’s Pumpkin Papers, and I was relieved by the time I finally reached the section about spies gone bad (the “Wilderness of Mirrors,” a room inlaid with broken mirrors), featuring a video about the capture of Aldrich Ames.

By the end, I began to notice a theme to many of the spies’ life stories. People accustomed to living dual lives were, unsurprisingly, quite well suited to a life of espionage. Fiction writers, used to creating imaginary worlds, were numerous in the spy ranks, including Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Gay spies, among them Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park decoder of Enigma, and a number of the Cambridge spies, were vulnerable because of blackmail, but their closeted identities were an understandable facet of lives led in deceit. And many of the most famous spies became notorious because they betrayed their countries, selling their secrets to the enemy and sometimes betraying the enemy as well. Double agents are an inevitable hazard for intelligence agencies—after all, when you train spies to lie and to deceive their own families and friends, it is far from unimaginable that they might betray their employers too.

But obviously spying is not just about the watchers; it’s also about the watched, a subject that the museum rarely touches on. (It is, I suppose, called the International Spy Museum, and not the International Spied-Upon Museum, for a reason.) Still, the focus on the spies’ side of the story ignores the very real effects on the observed.

Timothy Garton Ash, a young Briton living in East Germany in the late 1970s, was one of the many people watched by that country’s secret police, Stasi, and after German unification he was given a rare glimpse into his life as observed by others. His Stasi file was turned over to him to read, an experience he detailed in his book The File. In one of the most moving parts of the book, he remembers his girlfriend turning on the light and throwing open the curtains before turning to embrace him. Now, facing his file, he is filled with a suspicion that she made her unexpected move to allow Stasi to photograph him from across the street. He finds no proof of her treachery in his file, but he tracks down this former love and asks her why she turned on the light. Shocked at his assumption, she says simply, “I wanted to see your face better.” The poisoning of everyday trust is a reminder of the human cost of spying.

The International Spy Museum is at 800 F Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20004, just blocks from FBI headquarters, and is open daily. Hours vary, depending on the season, and advance tickets are sometimes necessary during the summer. For more information, go to www.spymuseum.org.

—Claire Lui is an editorial assistant at American Heritage magazine.