Spy vs. Spy

[Almost 10 years ago, I posted a report on Rick On Theater about  the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. (see “Spook Museum,” 25 March 2010).  The other day, I read “Revealing Some Spy Secrets, but Not All,” a review in the “Arts” section of the New York Times (6 August ) of an exhibit at London’s Science Museum called Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security, covering (or uncovering, as it were) some of the workings of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, better known as GCHQ (as you’d know if you were a fan, as I was, of the BBC series MI-5, 2002-11, which ran here on some PBS stations). 

[Frequent readers of ROT will know that I was a counterespionage special agent in the army, so this kind of article piques my attention and I have little memory flashes of my spook days in West Berlin.  Some readers will remember that Berlin was still under occupation by the four World War II allies—the British, the French, the Soviets, and us—until 1990, so I had frequent contact with our British counterparts (we were on less intimate terms with the French  forces in Berlin) and occasionally socialized with them.  We Yanks gained a little familiarity with the tradecraft of the British military intelligence methods and jargon.  

[I’ve written frequently on ROT about my life in MI and West Berlin, Spy Central in Europe during the Cold War.  Among the posts touching on or derived from that experience are “Berlin Station,” 19 and 22 July 2009; “Top Secret America,” 17 September 2010; “Berlin Memoir,” 16 December 2016, 20 January, 9 and 19 February, 11 and 29 March, and 13 April 2017; and “Who’s Who in CIA: A Cold War Relic,” 8 May 2018.

[Reading “Revealing Some Spy Secrets,” I was inspired to post two earlier Times reviews, reporting on two new museums here in New York City that cover different aspects of the espionage game.  Following the review of Top Secret are reviews of Spyscape, an immersive museum of spies, spying, and spycraft, and the K.G.B. Espionage Museum, which is exactly what the name implies.  So, don your cloaks and daggers and enjoy a little John Le Carré fantasy with me.]

 “Revealing Some Spy Secrets, but Not All”

by  Farah Nayeri

A British intelligence agency celebrates its centennial with a gadget-filled exhibition.

LONDON — The laptop — or what’s left of it — is a mangled carcass: Its innards have been ripped out, and only a few strips of metal and plastic remain. This was the MacBook Air that The Guardian used to store files leaked by the United States intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. Guardian employees destroyed the computer with power tools in July 2013 after the files on it were deemed a threat to British national security.

The destruction order came from the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, a 100-year-old intelligence and security agency tasked with keeping Britain safe. The organization, which usually prefers to be under the radar, is celebrating its centenary with “Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security,” an exhibition of more than 100 objects at the Science Museum in London that runs through Feb. 23.

In addition to the laptop, the items on show include an encryption key used by Queen Elizabeth II to make sure her phone conversations weren’t tapped and a briefcase containing a clunky brown handset that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used for top-secret calls.

GCHQ is one of Britain’s most secret and secretive organizations: It wasn’t officially acknowledged in law until 1994. So why has it decided to appear in a London museum?

“We needed to tell our story, to be able to show the British people that this is what we do on their behalf,” said Tony Comer, the organization’s official historian. Part of the aim, he added, is to convince “those who really like solving problems that perhaps a career in GCHQ is the right thing for them.”

He said that the agency was “radically” rethinking how it can attract the intelligence operatives of tomorrow.

“It’s up to us to persuade them how cool it would be to work in a place like GCHQ,” Mr. Comer said.

“Top Secret” is cleverly crafted to appeal to audiences of all ages. Adults can learn about the everyday business of communications-based espionage and counterespionage, and children have a play area full of word and number games.

The exhibition’s richest sections, which are devoted to World War I, World War II and the Cold War, showcase the unwieldy contraptions used for espionage that could now be replaced by a desktop computer, a laptop or a smartphone.

One section focuses on the first downing of a German airship over Britain, which killed 16 crewmen, in September 1916. A vitrine displays the cutting-edge technology of the time that was used to spot the airship: a radio device fitted in a wooden, glass-fronted box, with knobs on top. Also on view are pieces of metal and fabric from the skin of the airship; and a cap, badge and boot that belonged to the German airmen.

A section about British intelligence services dismantled a Soviet spy network in 1961 recreates a home in suburban London, complete with 1960s-style floral wallpaper. It includes a radio transmitter that two spies from the ring concealed under their kitchen floor, and a cigarette lighter with a secret compartment for encryption codes.

Other sections allude to the use of satellites and online hacking in intelligence gathering.

The exhibition is “not necessarily dealing with a lot of stuff that’s contemporary,” said Elizabeth Bruton, the curator of communications at the Science Museum. GCHQ was “still a secret organization,” she added, “so even though we’ve worked closely with them for this exhibition, there are still things that they do that are kept secret.”

Stuart McKenzie, now a vice president at the Mandiant consulting arm of the cybersecurity company FireEye, worked for the British government for 11 years. He said the business of intelligence had not changed drastically since World War II. “People are still trying to break codes; people are still trying to get in and steal secrets,” he said. “Some of the tools have changed.”

As the world moves toward an “intellectual and thought-based economy, where intellectual property is the key,” Mr. McKenzie said, “protection of state secrets and organizations’ secrets is going to be the most important thing.”

In the modern-day cyber landscape, he said, Britain needs more than “a few people who’ve gone to Oxford and Cambridge,” so it made sense for GCHQ to reach out to a wider pool.

But were the show’s young visitors eager to join the cloak-and-dagger world of GCHQ?

Jake Drexler, 12, visiting from Los Angeles with his father, a gaming-industry executive, was busy solving a scrambled word puzzle on the exhibition’s opening day. He said the show was “fun” and that he liked the wartime displays.

“They had to keep telling each other codes, but without letting the other side know what was happening,” he said. “It was interesting how they figured out how to do that, and how they broke the codes on the other side.”

Did he want to become a spy when he grew up? “A spy, maybe not so much, but a code breaker, that would be cool,” he said. “I mean, it’s less risky.”

Colin Pilat, 11, who was visiting from Vaires-sur-Marne, France, with his parents and three siblings, voiced similar concerns.

There is “action and logic” in espionage, he said, but “it’s pretty dangerous — that’s the problem.” As a spy, he said, one could “get arrested for a long time, and there could be enemies, because you’re spying on someone, and these are dangerous people.”

He greeted the prospect of a future in espionage with a shrug. He said he’d rather be an architect.

[Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security runs through 23 February 2020 at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London, SW7 2DD; www.sciencemuseum.org.uk.]

*  *  *  *

“A Place to Come In From the Cold”

by William L. Hamilton

[This article appeared in the New York Times’ “Weekend Arts II” on 30 March 2018.  Spyscape is a private, for-profit espionage museum at 928 8th Avenue in the Times Square neighborhood of Manhattan (https://spyscape.com).  It opened in 2018. ]

What kind of spy are you? This museum tests your skills.

“Hello Bill Hamilton.” The silver kiosk displayed its welcome when I swiped the black wristband that was my admission ticket.

The days of slipping through the back of a tailor’s shop are long gone.

I was standing before the first of 12 information-gathering sentinels at Spyscape, a $50 million, 60,000-square-foot spying and espionage museum, which opened recently in mid-Manhattan.

With leading questions and embarrassing exercises, the kiosks were assessing me — personality traits, risk tolerance and I.Q. — to construct a profile of the kind of spy I might best be.

Spyscape is the newest unhidden headquarters of our cultural fascination with the art of deception, two levels inside a nondescript glass-box building on 8th Avenue at 55th Street. Its dark, labyrinthine interior landscape was designed by David Adjaye, the architect of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

The kiosk would like me to agree or disagree with a few statements.

“I’ll say anything to get what I want,” it declared in a light tone of conspiracy. I gave that idea a dissembling 3 on a scale of 1 to 5, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

“I’m willing to be unethical if I believe it will help me succeed.” I squashed that with a 1. “I keep others at a distance.” Well, now that you mention it: 4.

“This is like dating,” I said to Aaron Moody, a visitor services associate.

In fact, espionage may be bigger than courtship on social media right now, with Facebook at the center of a growing controversy over the use of personal data during elections, and the park-bench poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter drawing international censure. Seismic private-information hacks reveal themselves with regularity, in government and business. We accept drone-patrolled, surveillance-prying public space. Cyber warfare has come of age, and the Cold War is back.

“Scary biscuits,” as the English say.

“I thought that spy stories were really a thing of the ’70s,” Mr. Adjaye said in an interview. “And here we are at this time, that actually spying is back.”

Asked how confident he was in the security of his own personal information, on a scale of 1 to 10 — with 10 being most secure — Mr. Adjaye said, “Three.”

What is it about the shadows of deception that excites our participation and not our fear? The International Spy Museum in Washington, with its impressive collection of spy artifacts, will be moving to a greatly expanded facility next year. A new National Museum of Intelligence and Special Operations, under development in Ashburn, Va., is expected to open in 2020.

Conceived as an entertainment attraction, Spyscape’s $39 experience ($32 for children ages 3 to 12 — bring them; you’ll need them) is a cultural chimera: part museum, part ride. It was created by Archimedia, a London-based private investment group that has been a developer in resorts, restaurants, and spy-themed film productions like the television adaptation of John le Carré’s “The Night Manager.”

Spyscape’s immersive experience begins in the outsize elevator, which makes a slow three-minute ascent. The Briefing Lift, as it’s called, delivers the visitor into Spyscape’s realm with a three-walled video created by Territory Studio in London, which worked on “Blade Runner 2049.”

The doors open; you have arrived at the 25-foot-high “city within a city,” as Mr. Adjaye calls the main floor: seven galleries presenting themes like encryption and special ops. In addition to a curated collection of objects, there are 141 live screens, 317 speakers, 113 live cameras and 32 projectors telling Spyscape’s stories. There are also games called “challenges” and the kiosks.

The stories are all real-life — no fictional spies like James Bond. The “Encryption” gallery tells the story of Alan Turing and Joan Clarke, the cryptanalysts of World War II, who cracked the German Enigma code; Virginia Hall in “Special Ops,” the woman with one leg who operated in occupied France and was called “the scourge of the Gestapo”; Edward Snowden in “Surveillance.” There is an actual Enigma machine, and a replica you can code on. “Encryption” closes with a present-day warning.

“The Enigma story shows no code is 100 percent foolproof.” And, “WikiLeaks revealed that the C.I.A. can’t break WhatsApp — yet. Every intelligence service is on the case trying to.”

Scary biscuits.

I am inside a black booth, facing a black-glass monitor. There is a heartbeat playing. Or are my ears pounding? Nick Ryan, a sound artist whose clients have included Tate Britain in London, designed Spyscape’s aural landscape, which is as originally and meticulously rendered as Mr. Adjaye’s architecture.

“Hello Bill Hamilton. Welcome to Deception.”

I am being tested for how well I lie and how well I detect lies. I stare at a grid on the monitor, which registers my face, and begins a live feed of me at the bottom. I put my fingertip on a red sensor, which takes my pulse.

“Have you ever been to space? What did you like about it?”

“Yes. It wasn’t New York,” I lie. The screen replays my face. My eyes are blinking like signal lamps.

“People blink more when lying,” the booth says empathetically. It knows I know I’ve failed.

Spyscape’s experience is mildly paranoiac, but it is never deadly dark. Its affirmative message — on T-shirts and tote bags — is “Question Everything.” Be your own information gatherer. Who would argue with that? There are no rendition programs or extraditions here. (Shelby Prichard, Spyscape’s chief of staff, who previously worked for the 9/11 Museum, said that the information gathered here was not shared externally or sold.)

In a timely way, Spyscape shows us what we know, but choose to ignore: that espionage and spying are not only the stuff of extraordinary tales or specialists’ tools. They are the “enemies among us” — the CCTVs, the closed-circuit tracking systems, the browser cookies. There is a double agent in every pocket. “Mobile phones are the most powerful spy devices of all,” the Briefing Lift explains.

Hakeen Betts, the retail associate who sold me John le Carré’s “The Pigeon Tunnel” in Spyscape’s exhaustive bookshop, told me that on a visit, his 10-year-old son was evaluated and told he was a “spymaster,” based on his performance with the interactivities.

All 10-year-olds are spymasters now. At the Encryption challenge, large horizontal touch screens, which look like naval charting tables, test your ability to grasp ciphers quickly. (It reminded me of dealing with an iOS update). A girl wearing a sparkling ballet skirt and sequined cat’s ears explained ciphers to her befuddled father: “Here’s how you do it.”

Swipe. “Hello Bill Hamilton.”

I am at the door of a laser tunnel. I step through. The tunnel is studded with unlighted buttons. I hit the red start button. “Welcome to Special Ops. Avoid the lasers. Good luck.”

The buttons turn bright white. Smoke hisses in. Loud music, with a “There he is — grab him!” mania to it. The tunnel is now a spider’s web of laser beams. I have 90 seconds to punch as many buttons as I can, deactivating them, without hitting a laser beam, which deducts 5 seconds from the running clock. I break into a sweat so hard I can hear it. And that’s the last thing I remember.

Two men rolled out laughing from other tunnels. Competing in side-by-side chambers, they scored a 165 and a 140. I am the spy who came in from the cold, really slowly. 95.

Spyscape’s last chamber is Debrief. On the black-screened walls, streams of information glow. Visitors are given their analyses and told what spy roles they might play.

My screen says some conciliatory things, a kind of ‘‘you were second on the list, really” that I recognize from human resources officers.

“You take risks after careful consideration.” Thank you. “You are mathematical.” Uh, ok. It’s never seen my SATs. “You are very precise in your work.” Nice — tell my editor.

“Bill Hamilton, you are a cryptologist.”

In three tries, over three visits, I am repeatedly a cryptologist, passed over for ‘‘intelligence operative,’’ ‘‘spycatcher’’ and other action roles I coveted. No rooftop motorcycle chases, perfect cocktails or brand placement. A desk job. If I couldn’t crack my own code, how good could I be?

Michael Amendola, an assistant theater producer I met in the gift shop, told me Spyscape had decided he was a “hacker” — a risk-taker. He praised the museum’s immersive nature.

“I loved the code breaking, I loved the laser exhibition,” Mr. Amendola said, adding that he learned a great deal, too. He compared Spyscape to a recent visit to the Museum of Sex on lower Fifth Avenue. “It’s an interesting concept,” Mr. Amendola said of MoSex, “but I thought it felt a little underwhelming.”

If you can beat sex, you’re in like Flint.

[Or Matt Helm, or Maxwell Smart, or Napoleon Solo, or Illya Kuryakin . . . or Special Agent Rick, MI.  Sorry.  Had a little flashback there.  I’m back now.

[“Secret agent man, secret agent man / They’ve given you a number and taken away your name.”]

*  *  *  *

“A Peek Into Soviet Secrets”

by Sopan Deb

[This review was published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times on 22 January 2019.  The K.B.G. Espionage Museum opened in January 2019.]

The K.G.B. Spy Museum opens a door into espionage.

“This is a Bulgarian umbrella; have you heard about this one?” Agne Urbaityte asked, pointing to a blue umbrella behind a glass case. There was a needle peeking out from the top.

“It’s a weapon umbrella,” she said. “You press the button here, you see the needle, the needle goes out and shoots a small shot of ricin poison. It’s still the most harsh poison in the world.”

Thank goodness this was not the real thing. It was the kind of tool famously used to kill the Bulgarian dissident author Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978, roughly a decade after he defected to the West. Many have speculated since that the K.G.B. was involved.

Ms. Urbaityte, 29, was standing against a wall Wednesday at the recently opened K.G.B. Spy Museum in Chelsea, a warehouse-type space housing what Ms. Urbaityte said are thousands of artifacts documenting the rise of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or in plain English: the Committee for State Security. Or more familiarly: the K.G.B., the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency and secret police.

The museum opens at a time when Russian intelligence services have been at the forefront of both pop culture and current events. “The Americans,” the FX show about a married couple who spied for the Soviet Union in Washington, has been a cultural phenomenon. It won a Golden Globe this year for best television drama. (Another popular TV show, “Homeland,” has had Russian antagonists.)

In a news story that seemed as if it were straight out of “The Americans,” in December, Maria Butina, a 30-year-old Russian, pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiring to act as a foreign agent. As part of a deal with prosecutors, she acknowledged that Russian officials were behind her efforts. Last year a former Russian spy was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent in Salisbury, England, drawing international outrage. Prime Minister Theresa May said it was “highly likely” that Russia was behind the attack.

And a newly released K.G.B. archive has revealed the names of 4,141 Latvians who might have been secret informants for the Soviets.

But this museum, Ms. Urbaityte said, is apolitical.

“It’s historical and about technological progress; you cannot erase facts from history,” she said in an interview, sitting next to her father, Julius Urbaitis, 55. They are the co-curators of the new institution.

The Spy Museum is the culmination of three decades worth of collecting by Mr. Urbaitis, he said. He first had an interest in World War II artifacts, but when he acquired a listening device that belonged to Adolf Hitler, he became fascinated with espionage, he said. The family hails from Lithuania, where they founded a museum in 2014 called Atomic Bunker — which was actually based in an old nuclear bunker.

“My dad has a collector’s spirit,” Ms. Urbaityte said.

Some of the objects from Atomic Bunker have migrated to Chelsea. About half of the items in the collection, a combination of original artifacts and copies, are owned by the father-daughter duo. The other half were acquired separately by the curators. Ms. Urbaityte and Mr. Urbaitis do not own the museum, which is private and for-profit. The owners have chosen to remain anonymous.

The museum doesn’t shy away from depicting the harsh tactics of the K.G.B. Far from it: There are interactive exhibits, like a model of a chair used for interrogations.

“If people want to, we can tie them up,” Ms. Urbaityte deadpanned.

The tour starts with a mock-up of a chief officer’s work space. A mannequin wearing a K.G.B. chief officer’s uniform is at a desk with a flag of Soviet Russia behind him. To the mannequin’s left sits a bronze desk lamp, which, according to the curators, sat in a villa belonging to the former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Nearby, Russian propaganda posters cover a wall. One of the oldest items in the space is a switchboard from 1928. Its operator was almost always recruited by the N.K.V.D., the Russian secret police and a forerunner of the K.G.B., according to a description of the item.

There are also original doors from a K.G.B. prison housed at the back of the museum. The accompanying information reads: “People who did not take psychologically the interrogation process well were put into soft cells. Then people were given various medications to turn from a politically idealistic person into a vegetable.”

Many of the exhibits are dedicated to showing exactly how the K.G.B. carried out business, particularly surveillance. Several glass displays show where K.G.B. agents would embed lenses and bugs: in rings, watches, belt buckles, cuff links, dishes, among other places.

This isn’t the only spy museum in the United States, of course. There is Spyscape, which opened early last year on Eighth Avenue at 55th Street. And Washington has the International Spy Museum. The National Museum of Intelligence and Special Operations is in development and is slated to open next year in Ashburn, Va.

As we finished up our tour, I couldn’t help but ask: Had the curators seen “The Americans?” After all, some of the devices in the museum were likely visible onscreen in the show.

“It is precise and it’s good and we loved it,” Ms. Urbaityte said.

Ms. Urbaityte added that Vitali Baganov, who played the role of Stepan in four episodes of “The Americans,” had stopped by the museum recently to offer his support. Mr. Baganov also appeared in “The Sopranos” as Valery, the Russian who disappears in one of the show’s most famous episodes, “Pine Barrens.” He recorded a one-minute video on behalf of the budding institution, calling it “fantastic.”

“Creates an atmosphere of really unique K.G.B. past,” Mr. Baganov says.

The museum has hired tour guides for the space — a guided walk-through costs $43.99. But if you want to stroll around yourself, it will cost $25 for adults and $20 for students and people age 65 and up. Children under 6 enter for free. The curators want audiences to get their money’s worth: Mr. Urbaitis said he and his daughter want the museum “to blow their minds.”

[K.G.B. Espionage Museum is located at 245 West 14th Street (east of 8th Avenue), Manhattan; it’s open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily; https://kgbspymuseum.org.]