True to form, CIA keeps its spy museum hush-hush
LANGLEY, Va. -- When the CIA's gadget gurus need a new piece of technology these days to meet the demands of agents in Iraq, Afghanistan or some other outpost in the war on terror, they often walk into the past.
It's all down the hall in the CIA Museum, where long-abandoned technological fantasies of the Cold War are taking on new relevance in the modern-day fight against terrorists and a whole new crop of hostile states.
A smaller option for remote surveillance? Maybe there's a way to adapt that old "Insectothopter" — a true-to-life robotic dragonfly that was developed in the 1970s to fly tiny listening devices through open windows in heavily guarded buildings. Or perhaps there's something to that tiny pigeon cam, built decades ago to be carried over hostile areas by trained birds.
"We're revisiting technologies all the time … (and) we look back to the lessons learned historically on using these technologies and build on those foundations," says Toni Hiley, the museum's curator and director since 1999.
Several times a week, Hiley says, she gets inquiries from operations officers or agency scientists about artifacts or files in the museum. So what sort of material are they looking at and how will it be used? That, of course, is secret.
Just like the museum itself.
With five galleries spread over 11,000 square feet, the CIA Museum holds artifacts that curators can only dream about at the nearby International Spy Museum in Washington, where about 700,000 people a year pony up for $20 tickets. But the only way for the public to see the CIA's exhibits is an online tour via the CIA's website. And nobody knows what the average taxpayer is paying for that virtual visit: The museum falls within the CIA's classified budget.
The CIA's permanent exhibits include all the classic, James Bond-style gadgets — stealthy pistols and fighting knives, cameras disguised as cigarette packs, even a pipe designed to receive radio messages and relay them silently to the user's ear by sending vibrations up his jawbone. There's also the desk of Gen. "Wild Bill" Donovan, who led the CIA's World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. And down the hall sits a two-man, semi-submersible boat developed to secretly drop CIA agents along hostile coasts.
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