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If you find yourself in Washington DC, I highly recommend a visit to the International Spy Museum. Its one of the few attractions in DC you need to pay for but

If you find yourself in Washington DC, I highly recommend a visit to the International Spy Museum. Its one of the few attractions in DC you need to pay for but worth the ticket price. (Spoiler Alert) At the end, there's mural or placard that says something like: Most exhibits in this museum are here because of failure. The best spies are the ones you never hear of.

underseacables 2y ago
If you're in DC, rather than pay to go to the spy Museum with the tourists, etc. go up 95 just south of Baltimore, Washington international Airport and go to the NSA museum. It's free. Enigma galore. You could also go south of DC about 30 minutes to Warrenton, where the cold war museum is. It's also free and run bY Francis Gary Powers Jr.
- dgacmu 2y ago
  We've made a bit of a family thing of visiting spy museums, and would say: Visit both! (And if you have the opportunity for some reason, the CIA museum is also fantastic, but not open to the public). The Spy Museum has better flashy interactive exhibits for kids, but underneath all of the sound and light has a _very_ impressive collection. The National Cryptologic Museum is, as one might expect, more focused on the cryptography side of things as opposed to the more general spycraft collection in both the Spy Museum and the CIA's museum, and is a better one if you're particularly interested in ciphers and codebreaking. The Spy Museum & CIA museum have more exhibits of hidden microphones, weapons, communication devices, etc. The German Spy Museum (Deutsches Spionage Museum) in Berlin is also quite good and also good for kids. It is, unsurprisingly, particularly deep in Stasi-related materials. They have a fascinating exhibit of a car whose door had been filled with infrared lights for taking covert nighttime photographs, at really mindblowing cost. Also note that the NSA's collection has an online portal: https://5099.sydneyplus.com/final/Portal/Default.aspx?lang=en.US.%20 https://5099.sydneyplus.com/final/Portal/Default.aspx?lang=e.... And the CIA Museum's collection is partly online: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/ https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/ (Sorry. I don't know how we became spy museum fans but the kids adore them. :-)
  - walterbell 2y ago
    > Stasi-related materials These days, online mapping and Streetview snapshots could be exhibited in a museum of street surveillance. https://blog.google/products/maps/street-view-15-new-features/ https://blog.google/products/maps/street-view-15-new-feature...
webdoodle 2y ago
They have a youtube channel that isn't bad either: https://www.youtube.com/user/IntlSpyMuseum https://www.youtube.com/user/IntlSpyMuseum

underseacables 2y ago

If you're in DC, rather than pay to go to the spy Museum with the tourists, etc. go up 95 just south of Baltimore, Washington international Airport and go to the NSA museum. It's free. Enigma galore. You could also go south of DC about 30 minutes to Warrenton, where the cold war museum is. It's also free and run bY Francis Gary Powers Jr.

dgacmu 2y ago
We've made a bit of a family thing of visiting spy museums, and would say: Visit both! (And if you have the opportunity for some reason, the CIA museum is also fantastic, but not open to the public). The Spy Museum has better flashy interactive exhibits for kids, but underneath all of the sound and light has a _very_ impressive collection. The National Cryptologic Museum is, as one might expect, more focused on the cryptography side of things as opposed to the more general spycraft collection in both the Spy Museum and the CIA's museum, and is a better one if you're particularly interested in ciphers and codebreaking. The Spy Museum & CIA museum have more exhibits of hidden microphones, weapons, communication devices, etc. The German Spy Museum (Deutsches Spionage Museum) in Berlin is also quite good and also good for kids. It is, unsurprisingly, particularly deep in Stasi-related materials. They have a fascinating exhibit of a car whose door had been filled with infrared lights for taking covert nighttime photographs, at really mindblowing cost. Also note that the NSA's collection has an online portal: https://5099.sydneyplus.com/final/Portal/Default.aspx?lang=en.US.%20 https://5099.sydneyplus.com/final/Portal/Default.aspx?lang=e.... And the CIA Museum's collection is partly online: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/ https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/ (Sorry. I don't know how we became spy museum fans but the kids adore them. :-)
- walterbell 2y ago
  > Stasi-related materials These days, online mapping and Streetview snapshots could be exhibited in a museum of street surveillance. https://blog.google/products/maps/street-view-15-new-features/ https://blog.google/products/maps/street-view-15-new-feature...

webdoodle 2y ago

They have a youtube channel that isn't bad either: https://www.youtube.com/user/IntlSpyMuseum https://www.youtube.com/user/IntlSpyMuseum