International Spy Museum -- Part 1

**Note from Brian: So, I’ve been contributing to all of the blog posts from our Washington D.C. trip, and I took most of the photos we’ve shared from the trip, but this post is all me.**

I’ve wanted to go to Washington D.C. for sometime, and you have already seen several of the sites I've always wanted to visit, but there was one site I wanted to see above all others: The International Spy Museum. For anyone who doesn’t know me, I'm something of a spy buff, and have been since I was a little kid. Spy gadgets, sneaky tricks, classified history, I think it’s all fascinating. So when we were planning our trip to D.C. the Spy Museum was my number one place to go.

The Spy Museum is actually two museums in one. The first half of the museum is a straightforward historical museum, delving into the history of the various intelligence services in the US, from the Revolutionary War on up to the present day. The second half is devoted to the most recognizable fictional spy ever, James Bond. Suffice it to say, it was awesome.

Here are just a few of the photos I took during our visit. I took far more (more than 400), and if you would ever like to be bored to tears hearing me discuss the history and details of an endless parade of spy gadgets, I’ll be happy to show them all to you.

Most spying deals with quietly gathering information instead of the shoot ‘em up stuff shown in the movies. For many years, the tool of choice for the CIA was the Minox camera, a tiny film camera that was easily hidden and useful for photographing documents. In the display below, you can see a Minox camera, a small developing canister (for developing film without a dark room), and a brush that has been modified with a hidden compartment for a camera.

Electronic listening devices, or bugs, have been in use for decades, but as technology moves forward, they get smaller, easier to conceal, and more capable.

For shooting long range reconnaissance photos, the KGB would sometimes use a device called a “Fotosnaiper” (or Photo Sniper), a special camera mount which made it easier for an agent to bring up the camera and steady it for a shot, especially when shooting photos from a moving vehicle.

Other cameras were made so small that they could be concealed in everyday objects, like this fountain pen.

American and British intelligence agents used Minox cameras, but the miniature camera of choice for Russian KGB and East German Stasi was the Tessina. Here is a Tessina camera with a special case to disguise the camera as a pack of cigarettes for sneaky snapshots.

Sensitive information is often kept under lock and key. If you can’t get a copy of the key, lock picking is the next option. Here are two approaches to attacking a lock. On the right is a set of lock pick tools concealed in a pen. On the left is a lockpick gun, a spring loaded mechanism that snaps the tumblers within the lock to jostle them into alignment. Pick guns don’t work on every lock, but they require far less training and experience to use than the standard rake and pick method.

Aldrich Ames, a CIA agent who sold secrets to the KGB, would signal to his Russian handler that he had information to drop off by leaving a chalk mark on a this postal box. Eventually, the box was so marked up that people in the neighborhood complained. (An interesting sidenote: This mail box is from the personal collection of Gary Powers, the U2 pilot who was shot down over Soviet Russia.)

Escaping a Communist country, or sneaking someone into a secure area requires some creativity and a lot of flexibility. Shown here is a cut away mock up of a car showing several means of smuggling people. Aside from the driver, you’ll see two people in the trunk, another in the back seat (under a false package) and even someone under the hood, crammed in with the engine.

Hiding in plain sight is a bit harder, but a disguise can help. Shown here is a disguise involving a turban, glasses, and a fake beard and nose. In the upper right corner you can see a photo of someone wearing this disguise, but even up close, it was hard to tell that the person was a woman. Also shown are tubes of spirit gum (the adhesive used to attach false beards and prosthetics), and flesh colored putty, along with brushes and applicators.

Invisible ink has been used by spies since before the Revolutionary War. Shown here is a postcard, which had a typed message hidden between the lines of handwriting. The lettering is made visible with a second chemical, called an indicator.

Reading other people’s mail is a good way to gather information, but you need to do it without it being obvious you did so. Shown here is an old CIA flaps and seals kit, used to carefully open envelopes and sealed messages, and the reseal them without a trace once the contents had been read and photographed.

Sneaking out a roll of film or other small object took some creativity. Here is shown a small canister built into the heel of a shoe. Screw in the lid, put the insole over it, and slip on the shoe, and be along your way.

Passing messages wasn’t always done with invisible ink. Here are two dead drop spikes, used for passing documents. Stick a rolled up message inside, screw on the top, and then stick the spike in the ground for your co-conspirator to come retrieve later.

Sometimes, the best way to keep people from looking too closely at something is to make it smelly and gross. This piece of dog poo is actually a small radio transmitter, used as a beacon to mark a location for aircraft and missiles.

Another clever shoe concealment, this shoe has a radio transmitter in the heel. Romanian spies used this trick, putting a transmitter and microphone into the shoes of a US Diplomat, letting them listen in on all of his conversations.

To make passing information easier, it was often photographed onto a micro-dot, a tiny spec of microfilm that could literally be hidden in the period at the end of a sentence. Micro dot cameras are equally small--this one is smaller than a quarter.

This lethal little gadget is a single shot pistol called “the kiss of death.” Camouflaged as a tube of lipstick, it was used by female KGB operatives during the Cold War.

This umbrella conceals a gas gun, a sort of high-powered BB gun. It was used by the Bulgarian secret police to assassinate Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian author and dissident who had defected to London. Agents used it to shoot him in the back of the leg with a poisoned pellet containing Ricin. He died three days later.

Sabotage is often used during wartime to trip up the enemy. Here are several tools for saboteurs, including a canteen filled with explosives, a 30-day time-delay trigger for explosives, a firestarter, a shaped demolition charge designed to punch holes in the thick steel used in generators and heavy equipment, and several specialized mines that were designed to magnetically latch onto vehicles, to be triggered by nearby movement, and the like.

Some sabotage tools are surprisingly simple, like this coil of plastic used to jam locks. It comes with a simple instruction guide, designed for easy use, even with people who don’t speak English. Cram it into the lock and snap off the end, suddenly a locked door can’t be unlocked.

Listening in on a conversation is good, but recording it is better. Through the years, several concealed tape recorders have been used. Here are shown several compact reel-to-reel designs.

If someone is captured spying, chances are very good that they will be tortured or killed, and often both. In some instances, agents are given cyanide capsules to choose death over torture and prevent the enemy from forcing you to give up information. Here, a pair of glasses have a small capsule hidden in the ear piece. If taken captive, an agent "could casually chew on the earpiece of his glasses without arousing suspicion… until it was too late."

One of the coolest things in the entire museum is the listening device known as “The Thing.” Invented by the same man who invented the Theremin, this listening device doesn’t require an active power source, and doesn’t even have a regular microphone attached. The device itself actually is the microphone--what’s called a resonant cavity microphone. The device is activated by transmitting a specific radio frequency at it. The energy transmitted by those radio waves then causes the device to resonate, putting out its own radio signal. A small acoustic diaphragm inside the device picks up the sounds around it, making it a sort of microphone, and the sound waves alter the radio signal, transmitting the sound back to the people who activated the bug.

Because the device has no moving parts, electrical components, or power source, it is extremely difficult to detect. The Russians hid the bug inside a wooden facsimile of the United States Seal, and it hung in the study of W. Averell Harriman, U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, for seven years before being discovered. But even after it was found, the techs at the CIA initially had no idea what it really was, or how it worked. (Today, similar technology is used in RFID tags.)

Long before surveillance drones, spies used pigeons to gather aerial photography. Train a homing pigeon to return to a specific site outside of a target area, and then train it to fly while wearing a camera with a built in timer…

...go to the other side of the target area, and let the bird go. It flies over the area, the timer in the camera takes the pictures, and the guys on the ground don’t give a second glance to the bird flying overhead.

Several well known names from history had a hand in the spying business. The founding fathers, for example, were organizing and leading an armed revolt, and clever intelligence gathering and counterintelligence was a valuable art of the Revolutionary War. Both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin devised intricate codes and ciphers to help keep secrets safe from prying eyes, and General George Washington oversaw several spy rings. Some of the coding techniques developed by Jefferson were in continuous use by the US Military until WWII.

Several famous authors were also involved in spying, including Edgar Allan Poe and Ian Fleming. Poe had a passion for cryptography, and regularly published code and cipher-based puzzles in magazines. These puzzles, in turn, inspired some of the cryptanalysts that helped crack Japan’s PURPLE code during WWII. Ian Fleming was actually employed by British Naval Intelligence during the war, long before sitting down to write the first James Bond novel.

During the Civil War, telegraph communications made it possible to send information back and forth across the country, proving essential to both the Union and Confederacy. But just like today, wires can be tapped, and messages intercepted.

At Gettysburg, General George Meade relied on information from his chief intelligence officer. Noting that Union forces had captured men from every Confederate brigade but one, they could accurately guess that, because no men had been captured from Pickett’s division, Pickett’s men hadn’t fought yet, but all the others had. Armed with the knowledge that the Confederates had few fresh troops to call on, Meade stayed to fight. Union troops repelled Pickett’s charge, and won the battle.

In the 50's, a whole line of children's toys was made based on the FBI. Toy sets like the “G-Men fingerprint set” had some of the tools of the trade, like tin badges, kits for gathering fingerprints, cipher wheels for sending secret messages, and masks to wear when going undercover. I have to admit, I kind of want one.

Also popular were G-Man toy pistols and machine guns. These brightly colored noise makers were cheaply made toys, but I still think they were awesome!

In WWII and the Cold War, spies used one-time pads. A one time pad is a sheet filled with sets of random numbers, used to encode a message once. The sender and receiver each have the same set of sheets, but because each one is used only once, cracking the code for one message doesn’t help you crack the next, because it uses it’s own distinct code.

During WWII, both the Germans and the Japanese used the mother of all gadgets, the Enigma machine. This complex device would encode a message in such a complicated fashion that it was nearly impossible to decode it without a similar machine on the other end. The technology that eventually broke the code provides some of the basis for all modern computer technology.

Another sneaky trick for saboteurs to use behind enemy lines was explosive coal. Made to look just like any other piece of coal, you could drop one of these in a coal bin, and be far away when it got shoveled into a furnace and exploded. With coal power being used in transportation, weapons manufacturing, and power generators, one chunk of the stuff in the right furnace could do a lot of damage to the enemy.

Sabotage can range from blowing up a factory to flattening a tire, so some tools of the trade are pretty simple. Here is a collection of tools, like knives, firing devices, and timers, plus a few weapons, should the sneaky saboteur need to defend himself or make his escape.

All in all, the first half of the Spy Museum was one of the coolest things I have ever seen. There was stuff on display that I had been reading about for years, along with tons of information about all sorts of espionage history, techniques, and gadgets galore. It was definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me, and one of the coolest things I’ve gotten to do ever. But this was just the first half of the museum. Coming up in the next post, we’ll see the second half of the Spy Museum, the James Bond collection!