There are plenty of crowd-pleasing tools and weapons in a London exhibition about espionage. But spying is about more than cool stuff.
A tube of lipstick hiding a miniature camera, issued to female K.G.B. spies during the 1970s. A box of matches containing message-writing tools, used by British double agents in World War II. A Russian-designed cassette player with secret compartments for surveillance equipment. A hollow battery in which an MI6 operative could store reels of miniature film.
In the first room of the exhibition “Spies, Lies, and Deception,” at the Imperial War Museum in London, these items are introduced by a wall panel explaining that, although intelligence officers often need specialist tools and weapons, “the story of spying and deception is about more than gadgets. It is about people who live shadowy lives, and sometimes take on new identities.”
On a recent morning, the message that spying was about more than cool stuff did not appear to have been fully absorbed by the preteen boys marching importantly from exhibit to exhibit, propping hands on hips as they cast appraising glances over surveillance equipment, pencils containing hidden blades and papier-mâché dummy heads used to distract German sniper fire during World War I.
They clustered around a display case holding footprint overshoes created for British spies working in Southeast Asia during World War II. (Strapped over the wearer’s boots, these could disguise both someone’s footprints and the direction they were walking in.) They discussed the merits of invisible ink, and a pair of boys made machine-gun noises as they raced from room to room, easily evading their mother’s attempts to make them sit quietly and watch a short film about Klaus Fuchs, the scientist who passed atomic secrets to the Soviets at Los Alamos and who was described by his former boss at the laboratory as the only physicist who “truly changed history.”
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October 26, 2023 at 09:26PM
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Looking Past the Gadgets, and Into Spies' Minds - The New York Times
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