The International Spy Museum 800 F Street N.W. Metro: Chinatown-Gallery Place (green line) Admission: $15
It seems as if no one has ever gone to the Spy Museum, but everyone knows where it is. Everyone has seen it after leaving the Chinatown-Gallery Place Metro station on the way to get some Chinese food or to check out one of D.C.'s free museums. Perhaps they even took a peek inside to look at the lobby and check out the admission price. So then, is this museum worth shelling out $15?
Spies are doubtlessly cool as hell, and honestly, who can really resist the charm of Big Brother's underbelly? Well, being that most collegiate folks are fairly frugal, they are able to pass it by, but who could resist an after-hours scavenger hunt?
The premise of this scavenger hunt is that the patrons are members of an elite squadron of spies whose job is to collect clues, decode codes, pass polygraph tests, eat edible paper and answer questions about event sponsor MIX 107.3's afternoon personalities, Carson and Chilli. Their brand of humor-lite made the before and after portion of the evening seem more like a family wedding, complete with cheesy anecdotes and people getting loaded at the table.
The squadrons competed for every spy's dream prize: round-trip plane tickets to London, which made the competition fierce. The fellow teammates, who seemed like otherwise normal human beings, were overheard barking expletive-laden orders and interjected, "That bitch!" when another female spy made an assassination attempt.
But even through the whirlwind of commotion, there is a lot of good to be taken out of the museum. There are countless relics from the Cold War, the Golden Age of the Emissary, as well as loads of information from less-publicized eras of espionage. For instance: Albert Einstein was a spy. George Washington paid his favorite revolutionary spy $50 a week. And the Soviets had the capacity to destroy Cleveland in 10 minutes.
The museum is laid out to tell the story of espionage from its inception in Asia to its transformation into a tool of modern statecraft in Elizabethan England and then into its current state and reputation, surviving the Cold War and still invoking the disgust of civil-liberties types and garnering the respect of modern McCarthyites.
This is perhaps the most poignant point the Spy Museum makes: The mania surrounding the ideological battlefield of the Cold War (and similar ideological wars) was largely erratic. Walt Disney's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and all of the patriotic spy-related toys, comic books and propaganda are unsettling parallels to the ignorance created by Soviet propaganda. Discovering to what great degree and in what real ways both blocs operated under conditions of paranoia is a lesson to behold from an unstable era of history.
But the Spy Museum is worth experiencing firsthand. A trip to the Spy Museum is necessary to come away with your own leitmotif. Along with several bits of spy trivia ripe for the picking, patrons have another important lesson to learn: They would make sucky spies. This Eagle writer's spy team came in 12th place.
The Spy Museum runs special events periodically, so check out www.spymuseum.org for more information.
