Espionage on show: A sneak peek into the new vault at Washington’s International Spy Museum

WASHINGTON – To get into the International Spy Museum’s new fourth-floor vault, you bore a hole in the ceiling, lower yourself using a rope and put a guard to sleep with a drug-tipped dart after taking down the surveillance camera with just two keystrokes.

Okay, they just let you in.

The museum, which opened in the Penn Quarter neighbourhood of Washington in 2002 and moved to a bigger space in L’Enfant Plaza in 2019, has more than 10,000 objects in its collection, including statues, pens, disguises, listening devices and books used all over the world in the service of professional espionage.

As with most museums, a vast majority of those objects are not on display. And until a few weeks ago, they were far away, stored at a location outside the capital – making it a challenge for museum historians to reach the objects for study and preservation.

In 2020, the museum began consolidating its collection in its new building, a project that it completed in 2025.

Many of the artefacts in the vault came from one man: Mr H. Keith Melton, a founding board member of the museum, who became one of the world’s renowned spy collectors.

He is not a former intelligence agent himself. Rather, he made his money as one of the country’s largest McDonald’s franchise owners. A condition of his donation, which he first pledged in 2016, was that the collection would eventually be moved to the museum itself, said Mr Melton.

“To properly care for, maintain, catalogue, access the artefacts, they needed to be on the premises,” he said in an interview. “You can’t deal with it remotely. Artefacts need care and feeding and vigilance, and they need to make sure they’re not deteriorating.”

The collections team at the International Spy Museum recently opened the doors to its den of secrets, offering a reporter and photographer a look at tools of the trade that, like much of spycraft itself, are kept out of public view.

There are roughly 4,000 books in the vault, most of them donated by Mr Melton.

The most treasured of these is a World War II-era briefing book created by MI9, a wartime branch of British intelligence, to get Americans up to speed on its top secret espionage innovations. It includes designs for cameras disguised as cigarette lighters, coat buttons and gold teeth concealing compasses, and maps printed on clothing.

Ms Laura Hicken, the museum’s collections manager, estimated that there were fewer than 20 copies of this book in the world.

Among the museum’s newest acquisitions are original courtroom sketches by William Sharp, an illustrator who died in 1961.

One is of Rudolf Abel, the Soviet spy who operated undercover in the United States for almost a decade and who was portrayed by English actor Mark Rylance in the 2015 Steven Spielberg thriller Bridge Of Spies. In the drawings, Sharp portrayed Abel as looking stressed.

“For us, where so much of our history is told through gadgets and weapons and concealment devices, this is so incredibly personal and such an intimate look into the consequences of the things we cover,” Ms Hicken said, referring to the sketch.

The museum, which is recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest espionage museum, has come under criticism in the past for sanitising the unethical behaviour of spy agencies.

Another set of Sharp-penned sketches is from the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were arrested in 1950 for espionage and executed in 1953. The drawings feature Judge Irving R. Kaufman, who sentenced them to death, and an unguarded Ethel Rosenberg, whose culpability has come under doubt in the last decade.

The museum has also received gifts and loans from international governments.

The South Korean government, for example, lent items said to have been seized from a North Korean spy who crossed into the south. Among these is a pen that, when clicked a certain way, would have been capable of injecting a paralysing agent into an unsuspecting victim, as well as a code sheet that spies could use to communicate with someone equipped with a counter code sheet.

The German government lent an army propaganda rocket from the early 1940s. These were launched over Russian soldiers on the battlefield, where they would eject pamphlets encouraging them to abandon Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

According to a translation, the pamphlets inside the rocket say: “Red Army men! You will not experience peace, you will not return to your home. Stalin will not allow this because he knows that any Red Army soldier who has been in Europe will pose a threat to the Stalinist system.”

Sitting on top of a large shelf is a couch that belonged to Robert P. Hanssen, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who spied for Moscow off and on for decades. Hanssen died in 2023 in his Colorado prison cell. Mr Melton also persuaded Hanssen’s family to donate other items, including a suit and watches.

The museum has no shortage of knives, some of which are hidden in spatulas and boots. But there are less subtle blades, including one developed by the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to be a combat weapon.

“There are a lot of challenging elements to our collection because so much of it was meant to kill or destroy or distract,” Ms Hicken said. “We have powders that were meant to be tipped into gas tanks that would essentially erode the gas tank very quickly, so you could disable somebody’s vehicle.”

Also in the vault are several items that once belonged to Tony Mendez, the celebrated CIA officer who was played by American actor Ben Affleck in the 2012 Academy Award-winning movie Argo.

Mendez was particularly known for disguises, exfiltration and forgery.

One drawer in the vault includes wigs he designed and a pair of shoes with lifts inside to make the wearer appear significantly taller.

In addition, there is a self-portrait of Mendez, a former board member of the museum, depicting several aspects of the Argo story, which involved his plan to rescue American diplomats trapped in Iran in 1980.

“Everything in our collection is two things,” Ms Hicken said. “The purse actually conceals a camera. The pen conceals a microdot viewer. The shoe has a knife in it.” NYTIMES