If anything is unsettling about the International Spy Museum, Washington’s big surprise-hit museum of this summer, it is the ghostly presence of another spy world, the one you are not seeing on display.
Pay your admission, which varies from $8 to $11, and you do see a lot. You see more than 600 artifacts in the privately-owned $40 million museum, artifacts that vary from the age of the Bible to the age of Osama bin Laden.
What you don’t see–and you probably won’t notice it, unless you’re looking for it–is the moral and political ambiguity of what spies do when simple information gathering is not enough.
I looked in vain for some mention of, or CIA’s involvement in, the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Chile and Guatemala, or of our botched attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, or of the CIA’s cozy contracts with drug trafficking pilots in Southeast Asia and, more recently, Central America.
This museum has avoided the hot-button controversies stirred by self-questioning exhibits like the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s proposed display in the mid-1990s of the partly restored Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Curators were forced to withdraw a script that focused heavily on the deaths and destruction caused by the bomb without mentioning the Japanese atrocities that had led up to the bombing.
With that in mind, it is not surprising that the Spy Museum focuses heavily on an us-versus-them view of history. It is an authentic and informative view, thanks in part to an advisory group that includes such espionage veterans as former FBI and CIA director William Webster and former chief of KGB foreign counterintelligence Oleg Kalugin.
With the liveliness of Hollywood, the Spy Museum tends to depict spy work as good guys and bad guys operating with the unflinching moral clarity and certainty of Ian Fleming or Tom Clancy, not the self-doubts, second-guessing or moral gray areas of John le Carre or Graham Greene. Here you are either James Bond or Dr. No, Austin Powers or Dr. Evil or Rocky and Bullwinkle.
You’ll see snazzy gadgets like a lipstick pistol produced during the 1960s by the KGB, a World War II German cipher machine commonly known as Enigma and a shoe from the 1960s with a Soviet listening device embedded in the heel.
You see a replica of a plaque in which the Soviets sneaked a bugging device into the U.S. embassy in Moscow and you see the actual mailbox used as a “dead drop” by Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s.
You see an actual 1777 letter from Gen. George Washington promising $50 a month to a New York man “for your care and trouble in this business” of establishing a spy network in the region.
You also see photo tributes to celebrities not usually associated with spycraft, including the famous singer Josephine Baker, who worked for the French Resistance, and the famous chef Julia Child, who processed classified documents for the OSS, the World War II predecessor to the CIA.
On the lighter side, you also see an Aston Martin DB5, outfitted like the James Bond’s roadster in “Goldfinger,” and an impressive collection of Junior G-man toys and movie clips from Orson Wells to Austin Powers.
Although it has been in development for at least six years, the Spy Museum could hardly have opened at a more appropriate time. Now, more than any time since World War II, Americans care about their spies, want to enlist more of them and put them on the longest possible leash to destroy the Al Qaeda terror network and other mischief-makers.
After the traumatizing attacks of Sept. 11, we hungered for information about our new enemies. But information gathering is only part of spycraft. Espionage is also analyzing information and taking action based on it. Such actions sometimes include the nasty work of sabotage, assassination, disinformation, propaganda, psychological operations and other “black bag” warfare conducted entirely in secret.
In our post-Sept. 11 world, Americans appear to be more than ready to stop worrying and love our spies again. The lines of ticket buyers at the Spy Museum have been stretching around the block like a Britney Spears concert. The debates on Capitol Hill have focused not so much on how our spies should behave, but on how we need more of them and better analysis of the information they bring in.
But we also must never forget that other spy world out there, the one immersed in contradictions between the by-any-means-necessary attitude of covert actions and the democratic nation of laws that the spy services are sworn to protect. It is a world in which sometimes agents have to behave in ways that don’t make great family viewing. Yet we Americans cannot afford to pretend it isn’t there.
———-
E-mail: cptime@aol.com
