Declassified: A Spy Museum Opens in Washington

[Dave Monroe]

>From Phil Patton, "Declassified: A Spy Museum Opens in
Washington," NY Times, Wednesday, July 17th, 2002 ...

WASHINGTON — "We were Q," said Jonna Mendez, a former
chief of disguise for the Central Intelligence Agency,
referring to the British technical expert who came up
with whiz-bang weaponry for Agent 007. Mrs. Mendez and
her husband, Antonio J. Mendez, are alumni of the
C.I.A. Office of Technical Affairs. At what they
sometimes call "the Magic Kingdom," they devised spy
gadgets, bogus documents and disguises. 

But unlike Q, who simply handed the gadgets over to
James Bond, "we weren't just going to let James break
some million-dollar device," Mrs. Mendez said. "We
went along with James to be sure he knew how to use
it."

Lately the Mendezes have been playing a new role: they
helped design the $40 million International Spy Museum
in Washington, to open on Friday, at 800 F Street NW,
a few blocks from the Federal Bureau of Investigation
headquarters. 

The museum, a for-profit venture developed by some of
the founders of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
Museum in Cleveland, contains artifacts, many drawn
from the collection of the military historian H. Keith
Melton, along with interactive installations and
multimedia exhibits. The devices include an overcoat
with a camera lens in one of its buttons, tripped with
a pocket shutter. "If you visited Moscow before the
end of the cold war you were probably photographed
with one of these," Mr. Melton said.

Other equipment includes a single-shot pistol housed
in a lipstick tube and known as the kiss of death, an
18th-century code-breaking wheel of the type used by
Thomas Jefferson and an exploding tree stump. There is
also an Aston Martin DB5 resembling the car driven by
James Bond in "Goldfinger." (It does not, however,
have a working ejection seat or generate smoke.)

And though the museum has no official connection with
the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies, the C.I.A.,
seeking to burnish its image, has been informally
helpful. Members of the museum's advisory board
include the Mendezes, Mr. Melton, the former F.B.I.
and C.I.A. director William H. Webster, and Oleg D.
Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general renowned for
organizing the elimination of a Bulgarian dissident
with a poisoned umbrella. (Last month, Mr. Kalugin,
who now works for a counterintelligence research group
in northern Virginia, was convicted of treason in
absentia for revealing Soviet state secrets in his
1994 autobiography. He was sentenced to 15 years in
prison.)

[...]

Mr. Mendez has even designed a disguise kit to be sold
in the museum shop, though it is not likely to be as
elaborate as the disguise technology he helped develop
for the C.I.A. in collaboration with Hollywood makeup
masters. One method — code named Dagger — lets a spy
don a paper-thin mask in minutes, without help. The
method is still classified, but from Mr. Mendez's
accounts it sounds a lot like the peel-off latex mask
used by Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible 2."

[...]

He has a mustache and she is several inches taller.
One can't help thinking of, yes, Boris and Natasha.

During her years with the C.I.A., Mrs. Mendez worked
with pinhole cameras and facial disguises. She once
visited the first President Bush in disguise, then
stripped off her false face right in the Oval Office
to demonstrate the state of the disguise art for the
startled president. "I made myself younger and
considerably prettier and gave myself the hair I
always wanted," she said.

[...]

The museum is housed in five restored buildings with a
core of new construction. One is Le Droit, the oldest
office building in Washington; another is the Atlas
Building, headquarters of the American Communist Party
from 1941 to 1948. Several firms helped shape the
museum: SmithGroup Architects; Adamstein & Demetriou,
the architects for the restaurant and cafe; and
Gallagher & Associates, exhibition designers, which
created displays at several Smithsonian museums and
the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City in
Manhattan....

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/17/arts/design/17SPY.html


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