Washington: The CIA Museum covers the intelligence company’s lengthy historical past – from spying on the Soviets to the Argo mission in Iran – however the newest addition is virtually ripped from the headlines: a mannequin of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s compound in Kabul used weeks earlier to plan the US drone strike that killed the al-Qaeda chief.
The mannequin is a part of the newly renovated exhibition corridor positioned deep inside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Just like the NSA’s Wall of Spies museum in Bethesda, Maryland, the CIA Museum isn’t open to the general public. But it surely’s not precisely high secret both, welcoming CIA staff, official friends, international companions, potential recruits – and, early on a Saturday morning, a handful of rigorously noticed reporters with old-school notepads and pens (electronics are banned).
Codes adorn a ceiling within the Central Intelligence Company’s refurbished museum.Credit score:AP
There are many enjoyable devices to see, like a polygraph machine in a briefcase and a communication machine disguised as a tobacco pipe, used within the Nineteen Sixties. When a person bit down on the pipe, sound travelled by way of their enamel and jawbone to the ear canal, permitting them to listen to messages that nobody round them may.
There’s a stack of pink, inexperienced and yellow containers for a pneumatic tube system – such as you would possibly see at a financial institution drive-through – used for an interoffice message service earlier than the arrival of e mail. Completely different colors denoted totally different classification ranges. There have been “miles and miles” of tubes all through CIA headquarters, in line with Robert Byer, the director of the CIA Museum. The containers have been additionally the proper dimension for the transportation of a can of beer, or, with a bit manoeuvring, a sandwich, he added.
There’s an early instance of the President’s Each day Transient, which was once known as the PICL (president’s intelligence guidelines) or “pickle,” basically a small spiral notepad, as a result of that’s how President John F. Kennedy most well-liked to obtain it. President Biden likes to have each exhausting copy and digital pill choices for his day by day briefing, Byer stated, pointing to a leather-bound binder and pill case. Reagan apparently most well-liked briefing by VHS tape.
Even the ceiling conveys the CIA’s mission. As you move by way of it, overhead panels are embellished with Morse code, binary code, even a “modified” Kryptos, a code from 1991 that also hasn’t been totally cracked.
Deputy Director for the Museum within the Central Intelligence Company Janelle Neises with a mannequin of the compound the place US forces positioned and killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.Credit score:AP
One show honours Soviet spies who helped the CIA, like Adolf Tolkachev, who shared weapons info that supposedly saved the US authorities a billion {dollars}, incomes him the nickname “The Billion Greenback Spy,” and Oleg Penkovskiy, who offered info through the Cuban missile disaster that prevented nuclear conflict. He obtained the unbeatable nickname “The Spy Who Saved the World.”
“A variety of these spy tales don’t have glad endings,” one reporter stated, noting the frequent mentions of imprisonment and execution. That’s true, Byer responded, however CIA staff have to see how necessary it’s to guard their informants.
