Patrick Smyth, in Washington, visits a new museum that mixes spying reality and fiction. This article will self-destruct in five seconds
Eyes only - Surveillance, corner F Street, Friday. Observed huge crowds for opening of Washington's new $40 million International Spy Museum which agent in place successfully penetrated and then exfiltrated, posing improbably as journalist.
Please advise Uncle that if station runs out of equipment, plenty of supplies here, ranging from invisible ink to coding machines and disguise kits. And plenty of ideas for Q - from old Soviet radio in shoe to pipe, umbrella, lipstick, and cigarette guns. So many bugs, would need insecticide. Joke.
Tried out commissariat, disguised as shop. Tempted by hidden cameras in tie ($899). Was examining phone with secret built-in lie detector when approached by bagman posing as sales assistant.
"Are all these really legal?" asked him.
"Yes, of course," replied. Then, "Um. I don't know actually, I was only hired for the day . . ." Understand. Impeccable tradecraft. Strictly "need to know".
Washington's new museum, the first in the world devoted entirely to international espionage, will be a joy, a "honey trap" to all small boys between the ages of seven and 60, a veritable cornucopia of gadgets and interactive video games that test the powers of observation of budding spies.
Here, museum meets all singing and dancing high tech, and the world of intelligence make-belief blends seamlessly with showbiz.
Purists may balk that this is not exactly museum as centre of learning - the bookshop mixes serious history with Tom Clancy - and it makes no pretence to comprehensiveness. Its displays are a largely a string of entertaining anecdotes - a natural history museum without the unsexy insects.
They range from Troy's wooden horse, to Jefferson's code machine, to the simulation of a submarine's sonar, to Mata Hari, to a lifesize mock-up of part of the tunnel dug by US agents from West to East Berlin, to the regular interweaving of the fictional (James Bond's Aston Martin with rotating number plates - I had a Corgi version of the original) with the real. This is pure entertainment.
But the museum has a deeply politically-safe quality to it. Some disquieting truths about American intelligence operations can be admitted, but only some, perhaps in keeping with these deeply patriotic times.
The museum can acknowledge that the great cryptographer, Alan Turing, key to cracking the Enigma machine at Bletchley, was disgracefully hounded from his job for his homosexuality and later committed suicide.
A corner dedicated to the McCarthy witchhunt era admits that the majority of those driven from work as communist sympathisers were entirely innocent.
And in the corridor devoted to the disastrous failure to anticipate Pearl Harbour the museum acknowledges that the US Army and Navy were so bitterly divided about who should be responsible for monitoring Japanese ship dispatches that the two had agreed to do it on alternate days.
Such damaging institutional bickering, reminiscent of the CIA- FBI dialogue of the deaf ahead of September 11th, was compounded by the refusal by the FBI's boss, J. Edgar Hoover, to believe the British master spy Dusko Popov's warnings.
But there is nothing about Hoover's notorious willingness to stray over the civil rights line domestically, or the CIA's deadly role in training and propping up some of the nastiest military dictatorships on the planet.
Indonesia? Chile? . . .
But enough party-pooping. Many of the anecdotes, told by audio tape or short video presentation by participants themselves, are riveting tales of derring do.
A personal favourite is the description given by two CIA agents, Sandy Grimes and Jean Vertefeuille, of the unmasking of one of the CIA's most damaging moles, Aldrich Ames, who had betrayed at least 30 of their agents.
Ames was interrogated along with a number of other agents by the two women in the process of whittling down potential sources of leaks.
All were asked the same questions, including one hypothetical, devised by Vertefeuille, which would be his undoing.
When asked, "If you were going to volunteer to the Soviets to become an agent of theirs, how would you go about doing it?" most responded with enthusiasm to the intellectual challenge.
But Ames, usually confident to the point of cockiness, was suddenly hesitant and almost incoherent.
"Usually he loved the what-if questions," Grimes remembers.
Comparing notes later, the two women thought they had their man and slowly tightened the noose. Ames was bewildered when arrested. "He thought we were two dumb broads," Grimes recalls with a grin. One up for the sisterhood.