ESPIONAGE: It is a cool Washington spring day on the corner of Ninth and F streets, but for Peter Earnest, a veteran CIA field officer with a new lease of life in his 60s, it is "spy central". "People think of Berlin and Vienna in connection to espionage, but if you look at Washington, it's going on around us all the time," he says, the unflappable cool of a veteran operative momentarily disturbed by a flush of civic pride.
What better place then to set up a shrine to the dark arts of espionage. This summer, the International Spy Museum will open in Washington's downtown, brimming with miniature cameras, code machines and innumerable gadgets, such as Soviet lipstick tubes that turn into pistols.
Earnest, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to an American vice-consul, is going to run the show and his former opposite number from the KGB, Oleg Kalugin, is going to be on the board - just as soon as he deals with an ongoing Russian attempt to extradite him on treason charges. Kalugin has laughed off the threat, promising to frame the Russian summons and offer it as an exhibit to the new museum.
Kalugin was a major-general in the KGB, and the former chief of its counterintelligence operations in the US. He is now one of the many professional ex-spies to haunt the rolling suburban lawns of northern Virginia and Maryland. He appears on talk shows and offers his services as a consultant. He thinks the FSB, the KGB's successor, is angry with him because he appeared on a documentary which suggested that Russian intelligence had set off "terrorist" bombs in Moscow, blaming the attacks on the Chechens.
"I believe that the KGB never forgives whoever did harm or damage to the organisation," says the 67-year-old former spymaster. "And now that they are in power, they are trying to take revenge." The Russians have invited him back to "prove his innocence", but he is not buying it. As a KGB veteran, he knows all about being recalled to Moscow. If Russia tries to extradite him, he says he will throw himself on the mercy of his new home.
Earnest was Kalugin's mirror image on the other side of the Iron Curtain: a field officer running agents and infiltrating eastern Europe and the Middle East. He ran the taskforce that organised the defection of Arkady Shevchenko, then the under-secretary general of the United Nations and the highest-ranking Soviet agent to defect.
"He was working for us when he was in New York," Earnest says. "Then he was summoned to Moscow. He took that to be a summons that he didn't want to reply to and so we spirited him out of New York and kept him hidden. We were very concerned about retaliation. We had to keep him pretty much under wraps."
Earnest is ill at ease talking about his own exploits, as befits a man who has been a secret agent for most of his life, and who ended his career as CIA spokesman in a town where the most successful spokesmen and women are those who give the least away.
He is more enthusiastic talking about his future exhibits. The museum, in refurbished buildings near the wartime headquarters of the US Communist party, is going to house a German Enigma machine. The Nazis used it to code their military communications, unaware that the code had been broken by the mathematician, Alan Turing, working at Britain's wartime code-cracking centre, Bletchley Park.
There will be a letter from the first World War spy Mata Hari, a hollowed-out boot used by Second World war British pilots to conceal tools to help them escape if they were shot down and caught behind enemy lines, and the infamous shooting lipstick from Russia.
The museum, Earnest says, will also attempt to transform the popular perception of espionage from that of a curiosity to one of the great constants of history, from the Trojan horse to spy satellites. The US itself was built on a foundation of subterfuge and covert surveillance. "We consider George Washington to be a spymaster and in a sense the father of American intelligence," Earnest says. "He used it very effectively against the British at the time. He recruited agents, ran agents, paid agents. There was even a use of codes. One British general said at the end of the war: 'He didn't outfight us, he outspied us'."
Earnest talks about the modern US capital as if it were a living laboratory for espionage. "Somebody, somewhere is developing somebody for recruitment. Somebody is putting down a dead-drop as we speak," he says.
Earnest and Kalugin have been a double act in the spy-tourist game for some time. They used to take aficionados on espionage tours of Washington, stopping every few hundred yards to point out various scenes of betrayal: the British embassy where Kim Philby gave away just about every secret in the book; the Au Pied de Cochon restaurant where, in 1985, the would-be KGB defector, Vitaly Yurchenko, turned out not to be a defector after all. He left his CIA minder with the bill, and slipped out of the door and back to Moscow, where he claimed to have been abducted by the Americans.
One of the stops on the tour, a postbox used by the CIA mole, Aldrich Ames, to leave messages for his Russian handlers, has been uprooted and will appear as an exhibit at the museum.
There will, of course, be a museum shop, where punters can pick up home spy kits and other memorabilia, including a baby's outfit inscribed: "I'm under constant surveillance" - ideal for young couples in Washington's sizeable "intelligence community". (This is what the home-team spooks are quaintly called in the US, conjuring up the image of a friendly village where the locals wear dark glasses and raincoats).
In the museum's Zola café (tenuously named after Emile Zola for his defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the French officer wrongly accused of spying), the decoration is likely to include pictures of the dead-letter drops in a Virginia park used by Robert Hanssen. Hanssen was Moscow's mole inside the FBI for over 20 years, right up to his dramatic unmasking a year ago - rather proving Earnest's point that in Washington, espionage is living, breathing and omnipresent.
In fact, there has hardly been a better moment to be a spy in Washington. Spooks are getting a better press in the US these days than at any time during the past quarter-century. After Vietnam and Watergate, the popular perception of CIA agents was of venal, ruthless killers as likely to turn on the nation's own democratic ways as on its enemies. The impression was deepened by a string of slightly paranoid Hollywood movies.
"I think that what you saw was a lot of what I'll call, for want of a better term, the Oliver Stone approach to looking for conspiracies and nefarious deeds, not finding them, and so making them up," Earnest says, testily.
Later on, the "intelligence community" acquired an image of incompetence, with the help of turncoats, such as Ames and Hanssen. It turns out that Hanssen's brother-in-law, and even the Russians, warned the FBI about the worm eating away at its heart, but the management blithely ignored the tip-offs.
September 11th seemed at first to underline the problems. It was, after all, a devastating intelligence failure. A few former officers have come to the surface and hit the talk shows, blaming a culture of timidity in the CIA for the fact that it did not see al-Qaida coming.
But the CIA has salvaged its reputation through the work of its special operations squads, who, in the current conflict, were the first US fighters to step foot on Afghan soil. A CIA officer, Mike Spann, was the first US casualty of the war when he was killed in a prison revolt in Mazar-i-Sharif.
Spooks no longer seem seedy, and after its long, complacent doze, the US has woken up to why it employs them in the first place. Recruitment in the CIA booths at university careers fairs is at an all-time high.
It is also a fine time to open a spy museum, in a wide-open country which has painfully re-learned the value of secrets.
The International Spy Museum can be found at www.spymuseum.org