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The CIA has a museum. But you can’t go into it. That would be telling. However, there are signs that the museum, housed within CIA’s headquarters in Virginia, is becoming a little more outward-facing. Recently, it has given a tour to digital media outlets such as Smithsonian and Yahoo. Its director Toni Hiley even has a Linked-In profile. Ordinary mortals not in possession of a friend with a pass card for Langley HQ can enjoy an official virtual tour of some of the most notable of the 26,000 items in the museum’s collection that have been added since it was founded in 1972, on the CIA’s 25th birthday.
Some of the exhibits show the agency’s inventiveness – such as a tiny precursor to the drone, with the size and looks of a dragonfly. It never flew in “theatre” but only in a test flight, and bears the brilliant name of insectothopter. Others are surprisingly basic – one of two pairs of gold cufflinks showing the head of the goddess Athena, each worn by US agent George Kisevalter and his Soviet “asset”, as Homeland has taught us to call them, Petr Semenovich Popov. When they met, they flashed their cufflinks in order to be sure they were speaking to the right person. (This secret code wouldn’t work so well now that you can buy Athena cufflinks on Etsy). At the less hi-tech end of agency devices is the rat carcass. It was once hollowed out to contain messages. Apparently, this device was successful because very few people want to poke around inside a dead rat.
Some of the CIA’s more recent activities are documented here too. The team that raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abottabad, Pakistan, came home with souvenirs that included a brick from the compound (it’s imprinted with an M – perhaps part of some hidden-in-brick code) and the rifle that lay beside Bin Laden’s body. From behind the scenes comes a Grand Designs-style mock-up of his dwelling. Interestingly, the note made by the CIA’s then-director, Leon Panetta, after taking instruction from Barack Obama’s to launch the raid on Abottabad, includes a spelling error. Admiral William McRaven is wrongly spelt as McCraven. Put it down to stress.
