10 miles square: I, spy: an ex-spook visits Washington's espionage museum—and isn't impressed

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Justin Peters

Washington does not lack for shrines to martial sacrifice. There are monuments here to the veterans of almost all of America's major wars: the moving new World War II Memorial on the Mall with its heroic conclave of white columns; the black granite gash of the Vietnam Memorial; the ghostly statues of soldiers on patrol that mark the Korean War Memorial; the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, heralding the heroes of World War I. Each branch of service also has its own monument, including the Marines' Iwo Jima statue near Arlington Cemetery and the U.S. Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue, near the National Archives. There's even an African American Civil War Memorial and a Nuns of the Battlefield Monument.

Conspicuously missing, especially in an age of terror, is any public edifice commemorating the sacrifices--including the ultimate ones--made by the men and women of America's intelligence services. Instead, spooks and spies must make do with the International Spy Museum, a techno-slick for-profit enterprise that opened a few years ago among Washington's downtown tourist warrens, right between a high-class hotel and a brewpub. On a recent Saturday afternoon, I made my first trip to the museum, joined by John Spinelli, a former field officer of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Spinelli was a New York cop for 12 years before making the jump to the CLA ("As a city police officer, never try to arrest the mayor," he explains cryptically). He's sharp, laconic, and difficult to impress. He looks bored when a name-tagged tour guide invites the throng of visitors to choose a "cover"--"that's an identity that spies use to protect their identities," she explains--from examples pasted on the walls. As the tourists scatter, Spinelli looks at me, grinning crookedly. "I wanna be 'Angelina Falcone,'" he says, pointing at the wall. "She's from Italy."

While the tourists surrounding us lose themselves in spy fantasies and ogle gadgets (A pen gun! A lipstick microphone!), Spinelli searches for artifacts that better evoke his own experience. He passes a display case containing the Intelligence Star for Valor, one of the agency's highest awards. "I got one of those--for getting my ass shot in Mogadishu," he states matter-of-factly. "What were you doing in Mogadishu?" I ask. Spinelli gives me the eye. "I can't get into sources and methods," he replies. He was playing up the cloak-and-dagger stuff for my benefit, but his Somali sojourn is a matter of public record. As the CIA'S deputy bureau chief in Mogadishu during the U.S.' Somali misadventure, Spinelli was responsible for ousting Mohamed Farah Aideed, the local warlord who was in cahoots with the nascent al Qaeda organization. En route to North Mogadishu one morning, Spinelli drove into an ambush and caught a bullet in the neck. He spent a harrowing evening in a dirty Somali hospital before getting airlifted out of the country with a Purple Heart and enough bad dreams to haunt him for years.

Such experiences have become more common in the spy services as the war on terror has moved from Somalia to Afghanistan, Iraq and, now the United States. Eager to see this new reality depicted, we wander upstairs to a new exhibit that sounds promising. Entitled "The Enemy Within," the heavily advertised installation is devoted to sabotage and agitation within America's borders.

The exhibit turns out to be a broad historical survey encompassing Klansmen, the Weather Underground, and J. Edgar Hoover's telephone, with no mention made of post-9/11 counter-intelligence work. "This isn't what I was expecting," Spinelli mutters, as we head back downstairs. There we encounter more of the same unsatisfying blend of sharp production values and Hollywood hokum. In the middle of an exhibit about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a bulky gentleman wearing cornrows and a blazer labeled "Special Police" comes up in Spinelli, grinning sheepishly. The name tag on his lapel identifies him as Damon. "Sir, can I ask your identity," he asks, as if reciting from a script. "Why?" Spinelli counters. The cornrows guy blinks. "Well, I need to know your identity," he mumbles. Spinelli acquiesces. "I'm Angelina Falcone; I'm 21, and I'm from Italy But don't ask me on a date--he gets jealous," he says, pointing to me. Damon laughs and moves on.

We come upon a section on disguises, a series of photographs showing a young woman being made up to look like an old lady, a Sikh, and a street person. Spinelli squints at the display. "What's wrong with this disguise?" he asks me. I look more closely at the Sikh getup, noting that the woman's nose looks rather too red. "She looks like an albino Indian," Spinelli spits. When we come upon a silver Aston-Martin--shades of James Bond--mounted on a podium, Spinelli laughs derisively. I ask him if The Company was in the habit of providing its employees with such lavish rides. "More like Hertz," he says.

Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Spy Museum's exhibits are more Barnum & Bailey's than Smithsonian. For starters, there's the niggling fact that the museum is for-profit, run by Cleveland's Malrite Company, a division of a larger organization that owns radio and television stations across the country--and sober, realistic expository tributes have never made for wide profit margins. But more directly, putting together a museum to honor spies and spycraft is difficult precisely because secrecy is such an integral part of the profession. The most successful espionage operations are the ones where the spies in question accomplish their goals and slip back into the shadows with nobody ever having been the wiser. The only real-life spies the public ever hears about are the ones who screw up, or those whose accomplishments are so far into the past as to be rendered innocuous.