WASHINGTON — Two of America’s intelligence agencies have completely renovated their spy museums, displaying dramatic stories of notable American spies and informants, as well as paraphernalia of intelligence work. But one of the museums will remain closed to the public.
In time for its 75th anniversary this year, the Central Intelligence Agency has overhauled and renovated its Museum of Secrets. It features spy gadgets that are both successful (a dead rat covered in Tabasco sauce to hide messages in) and not (a pigeon-mounted camera and a mini spy drone designed to look like a dragonfly). It has fascinating and beautifully arranged artifacts from major spy operations.
However, the CIA museum is on the agency’s heavily guarded campus in Langley, Va., a location that is not open to members of the public – unless they are summoned to its headquarters. The CIA opened the renovated museum to staff families one weekend and to members of the media on Saturday.
Many artifacts are celebrations of the agency’s triumphs. The museum has a model of Osama bin Laden’s compound and a brick taken from the site. There are works of art made by the great comic book artist Jack Kirby, used by the CIA as props for a fake film production company in a diplomat rescue operation in Iran (depicted in the film “Argo” of 2012). And there are disguises worn by people working to save the wreckage of a Soviet submarine carrying nuclear missiles from the ocean floor.
There is a reconstruction of the tunnel under East Berlin which allowed the United States to tap into Soviet communications for about 18 months.
One of the most recent additions to the artifact collection is a model of the building in Kabul where Ayman al-Zawahri, the leader of al-Qaeda, was hiding when he was killed by a US drone strike in July. The CIA placed the model in a wooden box when it was brought to President Biden to discuss the operation, and the bottom of the box can be seen in the CIA display case.
Perhaps in part because it’s closed to the general public, the CIA museum isn’t afraid of agency failures: agents captured by governments, moles who give away informants, the groupthink of the Iraq War, Bay of Pigs.
“Much of this museum is for our officers, and for them to learn from the past,” said Robert Byer, director of the CIA Museum. “For this reason, we cannot simply water down our history or brag about our successes. We really need to make sure this is a complete CIA story so they can understand their story and do a better job of it.
Among the museum’s carefully curated exhibits is the story of Martha Peterson, the first female caseworker sent to work in Moscow. Her mission was to collect and relay information to an agent who was a Soviet diplomat, whom she would also provide with a suicide pill to use if captured. The diplomat was eventually grabbed and killed himself, leading to the arrest of Ms Peterson as she placed a message in a dead drop.
While the CIA gathers intelligence, conducts analysis, and executes covert operations, the National Security Agency focuses on collecting electronic communications and making and breaking codes. That’s the goal of his reimagined display at the National Cryptologic Museum in Annapolis Junction, Maryland.
The NSA Museum, sometimes called “No Such Agency” in a nod to its secretive practices, was designed to be accessible to the public, unlike the CIA Museum.
“It’s a wonderful paradox that ‘No Such Agency’ has the only American intelligence community museum that’s completely open to the public,” said Vince Houghton, director of the museum.
The Cryptological Museum closed in 2020 amid the Covid pandemic and Dr Houghton, a former historian and curator of the popular International Spy Museum in Washington, used the time to renovate the building and meticulously dig through the equipment archives of the National Security Agency.
“There are things that people didn’t know existed, and there are things that people thought had been lost for decades,” Dr Houghton said.
In the museum, which reopens on October 8, Dr. Houghton highlights unique artifacts amid exhibits filled with weirdly fascinating code-making and code-breaking machines. Its collection spans from the early days of the United States to the present day. From World War II, there is the machine that broke Japan’s diplomatic encryption, and another that broke German naval codes. There is also an Enigma machine used by Adolf Hitler, displayed behind glass; there are others that visitors can touch and use.
Dr. Houghton said nearly all of the artifacts he exhibits meet one of three criteria: they are the only remaining object of their kind; they are the first of something; or they were used by a specific person.
“I call it the holy trinity of artifacts,” he said.
The museum sticks to its mission of explaining cryptology to a wide audience. He acknowledges a few losses: There’s a memorial wall and exhibits that tell the stories of cryptologists killed in action. But for the most part, the focus is on the machines and the code breakers that made them work.
There’s not much on defectors, though. An exhibit shows the tools John Walker, Navy Warrant Officer and Soviet spy, used to try to steal American codes for the Russians. But there is no mention of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who leaked many of the agency’s secrets and then fled to Russia. (Because the Snowden case is an ongoing Justice Department investigation, the museum is limited in what it can say.)
The CIA museum, on the other hand, has many examples of spy games ending in failure or tragedy. It highlights the stories of CIA officers wrongly accused of being spies and exposes the damage done by Soviet moles.
Among the collaborators whose work is celebrated is Adolf Tolkachev, an aeronautical electronics engineer. He repeatedly reached out to the CIA to offer help, angry at the persecution of his wife’s parents under Joseph Stalin. In 1978, he became interested in Americans and used miniature cameras to transmit images of Russian secrets.
The value of Mr. Tolkachev’s intelligence, which greatly expanded American knowledge of Soviet missiles and fighter jets, earned him the nickname “the billion-dollar spy”. While he was good at obtaining documents, he was not good at taking pictures. The museum includes a camera the CIA built for Mr Tolkachev, with a fixed focal length to ensure his photos would be less blurry.
But his story also ends badly. Aldrich Ames and Edward Lee Howard, CIA officers working for the Russians, renounced the identity of Mr. Tolkachev. He was arrested in June 1985 and executed in 1986.
“I feel I have a responsibility: this can’t be a rah-rah version of the story,” Mr Byer said. “Museums must tell the truth.”