The exhibition is on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. It was put together through a collaboration between the CIA, FBI, the National Reconnaissance Office and the Foreign Excellent Trenchcoat Society, a Florida-based non-profit operated by author and collector Keith Melton. www.reaganfoundation.org
Article By Gregory J. Wilcox, Los Angeles Daily News
The current flap about the NSA spying on U.S. allies and enemies alike shouldn’t be a big surprise to those familiar with the history of spycraft.
Governments have secretly been listening to and watching each other for decades and now an exhibit opening Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley exposes the tricks of the spy trade.
Visitors to “SPY: The Secret World of Espionage,” will get a look at many devices and documents that had been kept secret for years. It’s the West Coast premiere of the traveling show so there is a Hollywood hook, too, with a bonus exhibit featuring costumes from the James Bond movie franchise.
The exhibit opens Wednesday and runs through March 9, with a $21 admission fee and discounts for seniors and students.
“We’re very lucky to have it. It’s the first time ever on the West Coast so we think we are going to attract a lot of people,” said John Heubusch, executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.
The 12,000-square-foot interactive exhibition was put together through a collaboration between the CIA, FBI, the National Reconnaissance Office and the Foreign Excellent Trenchcoat Society, a Florida-based non-profit operated by author and collector Keith Melton, who is also a founding member of the International Spy Museum.
The exhibit features nearly 300 spy gadgets and documents, many of which had never been seen outside of classified circles. About 85 percent of them are from Melton’s collection of about 9,000 items associated with the spy trade.
The tour is arranged in chronological order, starting in the World War II era and going through the Cold War. Heubusch thinks it will be popular for student field trips because it shows another aspect of history.
“I think a very strong element of the exhibit is about the Cold War — what the U.S. and the Soviet Union did to collect intelligence on each other. There is a lot of history crammed into a small amount of space,” he said.
One exhibit is a mock-up of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, which was bugged to the high heavens. The headline on a poster reads “We are Always Listening,” which seems just as appropriate today given current headlines about the U.S. government monitoring phone calls of our European allies.
Hidden microphone and antennas are included with the display.
Another device visitors will see is an Enigma machine, a cipher device the Germans used to send coded messages leading up to and during World War II. Allies were able to break the code and obtain some machines, gathering valuable information that help lead to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Another display case contains a skull and the ice ax used in the 1940 assassination in Mexico of Leon Trotsky, the Russian Marxist revolutionary and founder and first leader of the Red Army.
The assassin buried the pointed blade in Trotsky’s skull and the blood eventually turned to rust. But it is still visible on the serrated blade.