Museum Offers a Public Look at a Secret World
The International Spy Museum, a privately funded effort to showcase intelligence-gathering devices and the impact of espionage on history, opens Friday just a block from FBI headquarters in downtown Washington.
The 68,000-square-foot museum, in the works since 1996, touts itself as the largest display of spy-related artifacts--ranging from poison gas guns made by the Soviet KGB in the 1950s to the Enigma cipher machine used by Germany in World War II.
“This is not about celebrating espionage, it’s about understanding it,” E. Peter Earnest, the museum’s director who spent 36 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, said. Spying “can mean the difference between peace and war, between victory and defeat.”
Items on display at the museum include shoes with radio transmitters in the soles, buttons that open to reveal a camera lens and a tube of “lipstick” that can fire a bullet.
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