Qualla: International Spy Museum

International Spy Museum: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Farragutful, CC BY-SA 4.0. The U-2 came down in pieces. On May 1, 1960, the United States lost Francis Gary Powers and his reconnaissance plane over Sverdlovsk. The Soviets recovered the wreckage. The Cold War's most embarrassing moment for the United States happened seven days after a planned summit with Khrushchev, and the summit collapsed. Powers spent twenty-one months in a Soviet prison before being traded for KGB officer Rudolf Abel on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin. Some of the actual wreckage of his U-2, recovered from Soviet archives after the end of the Cold War, now sits inside a glass case in the International Spy Museum at L'Enfant Plaza in Washington. So does the silver dollar he was given by the CIA. So does the suicide pin hidden in the coin, the device he chose not to use.

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Image: Farragutful | CC BY-SA 4.0

International Spy Museum: Milton Maltz's Idea

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ArtemisiaGentileschiFan, CC0. The International Spy Museum was the project of Milton Maltz, who had served as a Navy code-breaker during the Korean War and went on to found the Malrite Communications Group in 1956. Maltz pitched the idea of a museum devoted to the history of espionage in 1996, when no compara...

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Image: ArtemisiaGentileschiFan | CC0

International Spy Museum: The New Building

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Coolcaesar at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 2015 the Penn Quarter location was too small for the growing collection and audience. The museum's board commissioned the British architectural firm Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners (the firm of Richard Rogers, co-architect of the Pompidou Centre in Paris) to design a new bui...

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Image: Coolcaesar at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

International Spy Museum: Seven Thousand Objects

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carlo Dani, CC BY-SA 4.0. The collection holds about seven thousand artifacts with roughly a thousand on display at any time. The story runs from the Bible's first recorded spies (Joshua's scouts in Jericho) through the Greek and Roman empires, the medieval period, Elizabethan England's Walsingham network...

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Image: Carlo Dani | CC BY-SA 4.0

International Spy Museum: Goldfinger's Aston Martin

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shaun Versey, CC BY-SA 2.0. The single most photographed object in the museum is the Aston Martin DB5 used in the 1964 film Goldfinger. The car, on permanent loan to the museum, was modified by Q Branch for the on-screen role with ejector seat, machine guns, oil slicks, and revolving license plates. The Jam...

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Image: Shaun Versey | CC BY-SA 2.0

International Spy Museum: Operation Gunnerside and Other Real Stories

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Schutz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Among the more solemn objects in the collection is a small vial of heavy water produced at Norway's Vemork hydroelectric plant during World War II. Heavy water is essential for the production of plutonium-based nuclear weapons, and the Vemork plant was the most productive heavy-w...

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Image: Schutz | CC BY-SA 3.0