A new museum for lipstick guns, exploding trees

Creating a museum to honor spies can be a tricky business.

First off, it's difficult to create a "Hall of Fame" honoring the biggest stars because unlike, say, baseball players, the whole point of being a skillful spy is to remain unknown. There are no shoe-endorsement contracts for good secret agents. Second, espionage is a dirty and violent business.

That much is apparent pretty quickly at the $40-million International Spy Museum, which opens here Friday. For every exhibit of a listening bug, there's another with a deadly device such as an exploding tree stump.

"In the end, spies are really concerned with trying to gather information," says museum spokeswoman Jennifer Saxon as visitors stare at the "Bulgarian umbrella," a rain shield that fires poison pellets. "But assassinations do happen," she notes.

Spies inhabit a vivid place in the American psyche, part very serious reality (Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames), part pop-culture myth (James Bond, Austin Powers). It's a wonder then, that no one has thought to assemble a collection of spy paraphernalia, gadgetry, and historical information before.

The museum, a privately owned complex dreamed up by some of the people who created Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, comes during a nationwide museum building-boom. Many institutions are springing up to honor many of the people, experiences, and phenomena that have largely been ignored by curators in the past. The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, for example, is set to open in 2004. And an expanded Newseum is slated for 2006. But the Spy Museum seems likely to be the biggest crowd pleaser. Even with its admission charge of $11 per head.

It's not just the lucrative disguise kits in the gift shop or even the building's two restaurants that will encourage visitors to don dark glasses, turn up their collars, and rendezvous at 800 F Street, NW. It's the sheer variety of interactive exhibits.

Ever wanted to have your own alias? You can choose a pre-concocted one and see if you remember enough to make it past the computerized border guard at the end. There is as yet, however, no virtual interrogation in a back room with a bright light aimed at a solitary chair if you fail.

Only 5 percent of the space is devoted to the pop-culture artifacts such as 007's Aston Martin from "Goldfinger." Most of the museum opens the dossier on the real world of cloak and dagger.

An exhibit called "School for Spies" features more than 200 espionage devices including a heel knife, a lipstick gun, and a "through the wall camera" able to snap photos through a pin-sized hole. Fans of "Get Smart" are sure to pause at the shoe heel transmitter, another lovable East German way to keep tabs on suspicious characters. And for sheer adolescent tittering excitement, it's hard to beat the "tiger dung" transmitter, used to mark important ground sites in Vietnam – and presumably great fun at CIA parties.

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