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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| A prowl through the Spy Museum |
| 2006-12-12 |
| by George Melloan, Wall Street Journal "Do you think you could be a spy?" This provocative question is addressed to visitors to the International Spy Museum here. After I had browsed through all the deadly paraphernalia on display--including the type of umbrella that a KGB assassin used to fire a fatal poison pellet into the right thigh of Bulgarian anticommunist Georgi Markov in London in 1978--I decided, no, I don't think so. The horrible radiation-poisoning death of ex-KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in late November, most likely inflicted by his former Moscow playmates, didn't change my mind. But exploring the shadow world in perfect safety was well within my risk parameters, so last month I became one of the many thousands of visitors who've prowled through the Spy Museum since it opened in July 2002. . . . As any number of ex-spooks have written, a lot of intelligence gathering is the dull, painstaking work of putting pieces of information together to form hypotheses about nefarious enemy goals. But the Spy Museum specializes in the exciting stuff, with lots of interactive displays to test spying skills. My wife, Jody, was better than I at detecting suspicious behavior. School kids lap up this sort of thing, which is why the museum is on the agenda of a lot of student tours. I encountered teenager Brooke Gunter, from Wyomissing, Pa., listening on headphones to a classmate who was being bugged elsewhere in the museum. "Great!" she chortled. Crawling through an air conditioning duct to spy on those below was another favorite of the Pennsylvania youths. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #4 Just give me your credit cards...I'm fine shopping alone! Gawd you'll must be sharing notes.. »:-) |
| Posted by: RD 2006-12-12 16:00 |
| #3 Just give me your credit cards...I'm fine shopping alone! |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2006-12-12 15:21 |
| #2 Very good museum, make sure you budget at least four hours if you're like me and stop to read every freakin' sign. Buy advance tix and if you go with a big group, be prepared to wait in the excellent gift shop for the stragglers to dift out. They have the umbrella (or a model of it???) that the Soviets used to kill Georgi Markov by jabbing a ricin pellet into his thigh on a crowded bridge, a nice section on George Washington, spymaster; and lots of cool spy stuff. sounds way kool Sea, but the intel I picked up from reading your comment is to NEVER go shopping with you! Merry Christmas Happy Hanukkah »:-) |
| Posted by: RD 2006-12-12 12:53 |
| #1 Very good museum, make sure you budget at least four hours if you're like me and stop to read every freakin' sign. Buy advance tix and if you go with a big group, be prepared to wait in the excellent gift shop for the stragglers to dift out. They have the umbrella (or a model of it???) that the Soviets used to kill Georgi Markov by jabbing a ricin pellet into his thigh on a crowded bridge, a nice section on George Washington, spymaster; and lots of cool spy stuff. |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2006-12-12 08:49 |