On my last morning in DC I visited the International Spy Museum. It opened in 2002, post 9/11, in a city which had only just escaped devastation by a fourth gang of saboteurs operating behind enemy lines with impunity.
The Museum serves to remind us, Lest We Forget, that the history of espionage is filled with the actions of foolhardy men and women (brave fellows if they work for us, cowardly scum if they work for the opposition), who used deceit, disguise, cunning and forged documents to further their interests. Hero, villain or traitor, it depends which side you’re on. The Museum celebrates espionage in all its glory, gory detail. Espionage (spying) is the practice of obtaining information about an organization or a society that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. It’s a form of warfare waged “unfairlyâ€? since the day the Trojans learned to Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts.
It was spooky (pun intended) to learn that Washington DC has one of the world’s largest populations of spies. I wonder how many have paid their $16 admission to experience this celebration of their chosen lifestyle. I wondered if the couple with the Eastern European accents standing next to me in line were here to learn a thing or two.
There’s a delicious irony in visiting an institution which puts on an exhibit aspects of a clandestine world.
I remembered the decommissioned Regional Seats of Government in the UK which are now identified by a tourist information sign:
If it’s ‘Secret’ why, err, have a sign on the highway showing you where it is? Of course, a grammatically accurate sign would read “Formerly-Secret-Nuclear-Bunker-Now-Open-To-The-Public”.
So it is with the International Spy Museum, which has items on open display that people, literally, once died to protect from view.
The Museum does a great job entertaining visitors with a stage-managed entrance routine. We’re marshaled into an elevator and asked to choose a ‘cover’ for our visit. The make-believe is that we are being groomed to become spies:
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take an unforgettable hands-on tour of the all-but-invisible profession that has shaped history and continues to impact world events every day.
The driving directions for the Museum warn Beware. You may be followed. The ticket proclaims ACCESS GRANTED.
All familiar stuff to anyone who rents a DVD of the excellent BBC series MI5 (recommended).
Once inside, there’s a fascinating range of 007 gadgets: tear gas pens and lipstick pistols; decoder rings, invisible ink and Enigma machines – there’s even Bond’s Aston Martin.
This, however, is the real stuff, which caused real people to really die. Example: a Bulgarian Umbrella like the one the KGB used to murder Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978.
The exhibits are well researched and explained.
There’s a broad swath of history and geography covered: the Rosetta Stone; Jefferson’s cypher of 1790; WWI and WWII paraphernalia; Cold War tunnels; fragments of the Berlin Wall and of the cement foundations from the US Embassy in Moscow so riddled with bugs they tore it down.
There’s a very educational video showing how to pick a lock; an eye-opening series of bugs and listening devices which, like everything electronic, have shrunk to pin-head-size over the last 60 years.
There’s a rogues gallery of traitors: from the Rosenberg’s to the CIA mole Aldrich Ames and the FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen. There’s surprising detail on the extensive network of German spies operating in the Eastern US in WWII. But nothing to explain why we placed Japanese civilians in West Coast concentration camps.
Indeed, for a Museum that celebrates the Intelligence Services, there are aspects of the exhibit that are curiously misleading. The plaque discussing the Cambridge Spy Ring wonders if the “4th Man” would ever be found. “Could it have been…Anthony Blunt”? Duh. Is this misinformation deliberate, or just coy? Is the Red Scare video on McCarthyism so hidden inside a blanket of ‘enemy within’ propaganda that all but the carefully observant would realize the enormity of the witch hunt? Or was this more deliberate irony?
And what’s with the propaganda aimed at kids? The website lists a number of special programs which made me wonder.
What’s the purpose behind the upcoming KidSpyâ„¢ Summer Day Camp? Is this designed to get ’em while they’re young? Maybe the Stasi weren’t the only ones to understand how important it is to teach kiddies to betray your parents to the state with a clean conscience?
Weirdly, the NSA also has a Kids Page and the British Secret Nuclear Bunker have a Soviet Spy Mouse Trail for the little ‘uns. Is this fixation on children and spying somewhat odd, or just good clean Boys Own fun?
What’s the motivation behind The Enemy Within Educator Guide? What does it say about contemporary American attitudes to read these suggestions to teachers:
Do your students know that September 11th was not the first time that America has experienced an attack on its own soil? The Enemy Within: Terror in America – 1776 to Today traveling exhibition offers teachers and students an unprecedented perspective on terror in American history.
Will right-wing radio talk-show jock Michael Savage sue for copyrite infringement
?
Convincing kids that we live in a constant state of fear rekindles the paranoia those of us who grew up in the 50’s lived with. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis to keep us awake at night, they have Threat Level Orange.
So, once the School Outing jollies with which the Museum presents itself wore off, I was left wondering about the narrative they’ve chosen to tell the story of espionage. What’s their back-story? How did they select among the reflections in the mirror-world of spying. What choices were made between information and misinformation?
I think, my Dear Watson, two things can be deduced.
One, the ‘secrets’ on display in the Spy Museum are very much yesterday’s secrets. The Cold War is about as recent as it gets. Google Earth in the last room merely hinted at what the NSA (no, not the NSA I belong to, the other one) gets to see and hear down the road at Ft. Meade and over in Britain atGCHQ, Cheltenham.
Two, the Museum maintains a deafening silence on espionage involving today’s villains (or heroes) working in the Middle East. I’m afraid this is a case where no matter how much history we learn, we are destined to repeat it. The difficulty of infiltrating Islam outweighs those of building a cover to fool fellow-Caucasians in East Berlin. These are times when other side enjoys the Navajo code talker advantage. Our Farsi speakers are few and farsi between.
Executive Communications Lessons
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
— John Le Carre
So what lessons can a speechwriter take away from a visit to the International Spy Museum? Apart from the opportunity to make bad puns. What, if anything, could the cloak and dagger world of espionage have in common with modern business? I can’t possibly begin to imagine.
OK, OK, I’ll try.
- Speechwriters often have to tell a nuanced story. After all, if things were cut n’ dried they’d hire stenographers to write the damn things.
- We practice our tradecraft anonymously, with no expectation of public recognition for our efforts. John le Carre’s novels echo the politics of some Exec Comms departments. Speechwriters do come in from the cold. Some are disappeared. Luckily, very few are tortured, at least physically.
- Corporations can lose key players to the competition. He went over to the Dark Side. The profile on yesterday’s Royal Art Historian needs to be edited out when it’s suddenly found that he (or she) was not to be trusted.
- Employees and customers need to have the past re-scripted in light of new facts. Secrets must be kept. C-Suite executives are well versed in being economical with the truth. You may think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.
- Competitive intelligence must be gathered, legally. High-level candidates recruited from competitors:
Tis the easiest thing in the world to hire people to betray their friends
— Daniel Defoe, author, Robinson Crusoe and creator of England’s first secret service
- Way back yonder staff may’ve used carrier pigeons and dead letter drops to get word back from the field to headquarters. Heck, some companies probably funded improbable, costly projects like the Berlin Tunnel to gather G2. Nowadays, we seed the web with listening devices to monitor traffic (they’re called RSS feeds).
- SIGINT only goes so far. Few speechwriters succeed without running a carefully cultivated network of agents across the company. These informants must be recruited, tested, protected and pampered. The information they supply on the operations of their business unit must be verified, synthesized, stripped of extraneous detail and woven into the seamless story of the final product. At the end of the day the speechwriter is the one whose head is on the block if misinformation has crept in.
- The Moscow Rules work as well for corporate executives at a Trade Show or Conference today as they did for those Cold War CIA case officers in East Berlin. Memorize them:
- Assume nothing
- Never go against your gut (Jack Welch led straight from his)
- Everyone is potentially under opposition control
- Don’t look back, you are never completely alone
- Go with the flow
- Vary your pattern and stay within your profile (PR calls this being on message)
- Lull them into a sense of complacency
- Don’t harass the opposition (some even enshrine this in the Employee Code of Conduct)
- Pick the time and place for action (as Sun-Tzu well knew)
- Keep your options open (just don’t back-date them, OK?)
In one of the 
He quotes the old Japanese adage The nail that sticks up will be hammered down to explain his treatment at the hands of the Japanese bureaucratic establishment, claiming they were resentful of his overnight success in stark contrast to their own measured progress up the ranks. 
Consider Australia. Who would’ve thunk that the same country which produced rugged individualists like 
The hit movie 