new spy museum

[Blank Frank]

Jan 15, 2001 - 12:48 PM

            Cleveland Company's Spy Museum
            to Unravel Secrets of Espionage
            World
            By Amy Beth Graves
            Associated Press Writer

            CLEVELAND (AP) - The secret is out: Some of James
            Bond's biggest fans were KGB agents.

            But the Soviets weren't interested in how the fictional
            British spy liked his martinis or seduced femme fatales.
            The KGB thought Bond's goofy weapons were real and
            tried to keep pace by working on new gadgets like a
            lipstick gun.

            That's just one secret of the cloak-and-dagger trade that
            a Cleveland company is revealing as it enters the
            hush-hush world of espionage by opening the
            International Spy Museum in Washington in February
            2002.

            The museum will cost $29 million and showcase
            thousands of years espionage and international trickery,
            dating back to the Trojan horse.

            "The real stories are more interesting than fiction," said
            Dennis Barrie, president of Malrite Co., which focuses
            on starting new museums.

            Barrie, a former Smithsonian curator, was at the center
            of a controversy in 1990 when the Contemporary Arts
            Center in Cincinnati opened an exhibit by photographer
            Robert Mapplethorpe that included homoerotic shots.
            Prosecutors brought obscenity charges against the
            center and Barrie, but a jury acquitted them.

            Malrite founder Milton Maltz, who was on a board of
            directors that helped bring the Rock and Roll Hall of
            Fame and Museum to Cleveland, came up with the idea
            for the for-profit spy museum.

            Maltz worked for the National Security Agency while in
            the Navy. While he described his intelligence work as
            "pretty mundane," Maltz said he has always been
            fascinated by the espionage world. The popularity of
            history-based TV shows and greater willingness by spy
            agencies to reveal secrets of the trade helped convince
            him that a museum would sell.

            Barrie anticipates the museum will draw 500,000
            visitors the first year.

            "The world is mesmerized by spying. We've had even
            more interest in the subject than we anticipated," Maltz
            said.

            Even the Central Intelligence Agency has nice things to
            say about the museum, though it cannot endorse
            commercial projects.

            "We think that it's a good idea to better inform the public
            on the true mission of the CIA and intelligence
            gathering. Most of what's out there is Hollywood's
            perception and what you read in novels. The vast
            majority is not true," agency spokesman Tom Crispell
            said. "I think it will give individuals a more realistic
            understanding of what the intelligence business is all
            about."

            Many ideas for the museum came from an advisory
            board of historians and former spies with the FBI, CIA
            and KGB. A couple of years ago, the ex-spies gathered
            to swap stories, Maltz said.

            "Sometimes they would say, 'Is it still classified?' One
            side would tell their story and the other side's story
            would be different," Maltz said. "It was fabulous because
            it was spy versus spy."

            Malrite has been collecting artifacts for the museum by
            buying items on the Internet and asking former agents
            for souvenirs from their careers.

            Some of the material will come from H. Keith Melton, a
            historian who has a 6,000-piece collection of spy
            material. About 500 of Melton's items are at the CIA's
            headquarters, which has a small museum for
            employees and invited guests.

            The new museum's prized possession is an Enigma
            machine used by the Nazis to encrypt top-secret
            messages.

            Among the other attractions will be a "spy school,"
            where visitors can learn how to bug a room, try on
            disguises and use spy cameras. Another exhibit will
            recreate the Berlin tunnel where agents eavesdropped
            on the Russians during the Cold War, while yet another
            will be a World War II codebreaking room where visitors
            will see the role espionage played in helping the D-Day
            invasion.

            While the museum will address the careers of real-life
            spies such as Mata Hari and Julia Child (she did
            intelligence work in Asia during World War II), there will
            also be a nod to Bond and his colleagues from the
            world of movies and TV. That's because the real world
            influenced the entertainment industry and vice versa.

            Barrie said the director of the CIA in the 1960s often
            watched TV's "Mission Impossible." He said that the
            day after the week's episode, the director would call
            those in charge of coming up with spying gadgets and
            tactics and ask, "Can we do that?"
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