We have a huge number of fascinating and unique exhibits that capture the imagination, highlighting both the history and future of espionage. There’s no room to list them all, but every visitor has a different favorite. To give you a flavor of what’s on offer we’ve compiled this list of 10 of our highlights!
Baseball Grenade
The WWII T-13 hand grenade was an experimental grenade developed by the American OSS, the precursor of the CIA, toward the end of WWII. Nicknamed the Beano, it emulates the shape and feel of a baseball and was designed with the hope that American soldiers would instinctively be able to throw this seemingly familiar object with great accuracy and distance.
Once thrown, a length of nylon string unwound until it pulled the arming pin, priming the grenade to detonate upon impact with a hard surface. Several thousand Beano Grenades were shipped to Europe during WWII and US soldiers used them during the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. However, the grenades were quickly recalled and taken out of service after several of them prematurely detonated and killed US troops.
At the end of WWII, the US military’s supply of T-13 Beano Grenades was ordered destroyed and files pertaining to the weapon were classified. Today, the Beano Grenade is a rare and highly prized artifact.
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We have a huge number of fascinating and unique exhibits that capture the imagination, highlighting both the history and future of espionage. There’s no room to list them all, but every visitor has a different favorite. To give you a flavor of what’s on offer we’ve compiled this list of 10 of our highlights!
Baseball Grenade
The WWII T-13 hand grenade was an experimental grenade developed by the American OSS, the precursor of the CIA, toward the end of WWII. Nicknamed the Beano, it emulates the shape and feel of a baseball and was designed with the hope that American soldiers would instinctively be able to throw this seemingly familiar object with great accuracy and distance.
Once thrown, a length of nylon string unwound until it pulled the arming pin, priming the grenade to detonate upon impact with a hard surface. Several thousand Beano Grenades were shipped to Europe during WWII and US soldiers used them during the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. However, the grenades were quickly recalled and taken out of service after several of them prematurely detonated and killed US troops.
At the end of WWII, the US military’s supply of T-13 Beano Grenades was ordered destroyed and files pertaining to the weapon were classified. Today, the Beano Grenade is a rare and highly prized artifact.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has used this robot to ‘go places’ outside of Russia. He used the model on display to give a talk at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2016.
The ‘Snowbot’ lets him take physical form anywhere in the world, using his laptop’s arrow keys to move around (at a top speed of two mph). The Snowbot allows him both to see and hear - and also be heard and seen - allowing Snowden to give talks at conferences and exhibitions around the globe. He is careful when using the Snowbot, fearing that governments or hackers will eavesdrop on what it sees and hears, but the device enables him to connect directly with supporters; at a gallery event in New York one fan attempted to hug ‘him’, causing Snowden to lament the Snowbot’s lack of arms.
Stuxnet USB Drive
In 2010, a computer worm called Stuxnet changed the nature of warfare, by becoming the first weapon to cause major damage to physical infrastructure without itself having a physical presence.
Its target was the Iranian nuclear program. The worm attacked Siemens computers that controlled centrifuges - large cylinders that spin at the speed of sound to separate uranium - in Iran’s nuclear facilities. Stuxnet sped up and slowed down these centrifuges until they malfunctioned.
Stuxnet crept into Iran from a simple flash drive like the one above. In fact, this very flash drive contains the virus. The uranium-enrichment facilities were not connected to the Internet (to avoid it being hacked) so the Stuxnet designers had to rely on people using these infected flash drives.
Tensions involving Iran’s nuclear program remain high across the Middle East as Iran has recently started removing surveillance cameras from nuclear sites.
Enigma Machine
This infamous encryption device encoded secret messages so well that German commanders were sure their communications were unbreakable. It was used by all branches of the German military in WWII. Operators would change the settings on their Enigmas every day at midnight, making life virtually impossible for enemy codebreakers. There were so many possible settings that the chance of guessing the right one was 1 in 159 quintillion (159 million, million, million). A tough nut to crack!
To use the Enigma, you press a letter and the internal rotors scramble it into a different letter. You write this letter down then enter your next letter. Eventually you will have a message of the same length as your original, but scrambled or ‘encrypted’ into nonsense. You would then transmit your encrypted message via Morse code. The receiver would need a second Enigma with the same settings to translate the message - unless they had a Bombe machine…
Bombe from The Imitation Game
The "Bombe" machines were designed by Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park to crack each day’s Enigma codes. The Bombe would swiftly narrow down the possible options using automated processes that were thousands of times faster than human calculations, enabling the Allies to break Enigma communications on a daily basis.
Intelligence decrypted by the Bombe was codenamed ‘Ultra’ for ‘Ultra Secret’. Ultra gave Britain and her allies major advantages in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and North Africa. Indeed, the advantages were so large that the allies were forced to use their information sparingly for fear of alerting the Germans to the fact that Enigma had been cracked.
This exact artifact was used in the filming of The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing and Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke, and is on loan from the Bletchley Park Trust.
Social Security Cameras, Fidia Falaschetti
This installation of nine security cameras expresses a playful and cynical take on the logos of brands including Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook.
These artworks, fashioned from inactive security cameras, explore the role of social media platforms as instruments of surveillance in contemporary culture. They were designed by Fidia Falaschetti, an Italian artist who explores the relationship between commercialism, consumerism, surveillance society, and the globalization of mainstream media and news outlets through the lens of popular culture.
1980s Suitcase Lie Detector
Lie detectors test your pulse, breathing, and blood pressure. The examiner tries to force you to lie about subjects unconnected to their investigation, to establish how your body reacts. Then they watch carefully to see if you react in the same way when probed on the crucial questions.
The CIA and FBI routinely test all staff with lie detectors. They started doing so after catching two of the most damaging spies in their histories: Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Lie detectors are not perfect; an anxious - but innocent - person may have similar bodily reactions to those of an actual liar. Another problem is that many spies are trained in countermeasures, learning how to regulate their bodily responses, while psychopaths tend to have lower anxiety levels, making it easier for them to keep cool and trick the machine.
Dating from the 1980s, models such as the Arther IV on display would have been used on intelligence personnel like Ames and Hanssen.
Spy Plane Camera
During the Cold War, reconnaissance aircraft carrying powerful cameras were an essential intelligence-gathering tool of the US. These premier high-resolution, high-altitude cameras enabled the US to conduct routine reconnaissance in relative safety and to observe global hot spots in astonishing detail. The images taken over Cuba in October 1962 provided positive proof of the existence of Soviet missiles, precipitating the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis which led the world to the brink of nuclear war.
On October 23, 1962, Commander William Ecker flew this model of camera over Cuba. He took a heroic risk, flying his RF-8 Crusader - fighter jet converted for reconnaissance - at just 500 feet over the Caribbean island. His high-resolution images confirmed that the missile launch sites could not be operational for roughly another five days.
Cameras gathering intelligence are still used today over global hotspots, often in the form of drones.
Anonymous Masks
Anonymous is a group of hackers and virtual activists whose members keep their real names a secret. Their ‘hacktivism’ has spread from the virtual to the real world on multiple occasions. When protesting in public, members frequently wear Guy Fawkes masks (which were made famous in the cult graphic novel and movie V for Vendetta).
Anonymous appeared in the news during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict, claiming credit for hacking the Russian Ministry of Defense database. They are believed to have hacked multiple state TV channels to show pro-Ukraine content.
Hackers typically come in three different guises: Black hats, motivated by money or malice, are only one kind of hacker; White hats work for organizations to identify cyber vulnerabilities; and gray hats hack illegally but for causes that they believe are just. These various ‘hats’ sometimes operate alone, sometimes as part of collectives like Anonymous, sometimes for corporations, and occasionally as paid operatives of intelligence agencies, tasked with sabotaging rival nation states. Their hacks range from amusing to inspiring to devastating.
Behind the masks in this display are the handwritten aliases of a number of Anonymous hackers.
English Royal Account Book
This account book - the oldest artifact at the SPYSCAPE museum & experience, dating from 1695 - is a remarkable and highly revealing record of secret government payments from the reign of King William III of England. Known as the Secret Service Funds, the funds recorded in the book were under the direct control of the Secretary of the Treasury. With members of Parliament prohibited from accessing details of the account, it was used for the monarch’s most sensitive payments. Recipients of Royal Bounty recorded in this book include spies and royal mistresses, as well as the King himself.
During the period in which the book was made, William III was in a constant state of war with King Louis XIV of France, driving the king to employ a network of French spies to gather intelligence on France and other powers. Among the records of regular payments are those made to a Marguerite Godet. Godet was in fact the widow of Gideon Godet, a lawyer at the the highest French court of justice!
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