new spy museum
Blank Frank
void at mindspring.com
Fri Jan 19 15:44:31 PST 2001
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?"
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAK4J6H0IC.html
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