By: Ken Robinson
The real question about the International Spy Museum is not whether it preserves the history of espionage. It does. The deeper question is whether the West is still capable of learning from that history before the next crisis teaches the lesson more violently.
Most visitors arrive at the museum expecting concealed cameras, dead drops, disguise kits, poison umbrellas, encrypted radios, Cold War gadgets, and stories about famous spies.
They leave having encountered something more serious. The International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., is not fundamentally a museum about spies. It is a museum about adaptation, institutional memory, and the recurring requirement for free societies to defend themselves against adversaries who do not fight according to our preferred rules.
That distinction matters now:
Russia is trying to revise borders by force and intimidation.
China is building an integrated system of military, economic, technological, cyber, and influence power.
Iran projects state power through missiles, drones, intelligence networks, and proxy warfare.
North Korea funds itself through cyber theft, expands its missile and nuclear capabilities, and increasingly serves as an arsenal for other revisionist states.
The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community describes a security environment in which adversary states are not merely competing separately, but increasingly reinforcing one another’s ability to challenge the United States and its allies.
NATO has made the same point in more direct alliance language. Its Washington Summit Declaration states that Russia remains the most significant and direct threat to Allied security, while NATO’s 2026 annual reporting and public statements warn that Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China are working more closely together. This is not a formal Warsaw Pact reborn. It is something less tidy and in some ways more difficult: a loose, opportunistic, war-like cabal of authoritarian powers sharing technology, evasion techniques, narratives, sanctions workarounds, drones, ammunition, intelligence support, and political cover.
The West has seen this pattern before. Before the United States created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II, democratic governments were forced to admit that traditional institutions had been overtaken by the character of the threat. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were not merely fighting on conventional battlefields. They were exploiting propaganda, espionage, sabotage, covert political influence, ideological penetration, industrial mobilization, and terror.
Britain responded with the Special Operations Executive.
America responded with the OSS.
Both institutions were imperfect. Both were improvised. Both were essential.
A Museum Built to Preserve More Than Artifacts
The International Spy Museum opened in 2002 in Washington’s Penn Quarter and relocated in 2019 to a larger, purpose-built home at L’Enfant Plaza. The museum describes itself as an independent nonprofit institution dedicated to documenting the tradecraft, history, and contemporary role of espionage. It also holds what it calls the largest collection of international espionage artifacts on public display.
Those facts are important, but they do not fully explain the institution’s civic value.
The museum’s stated mission is to educate the public about espionage and intelligence in an engaging way and to provide context for understanding their role in current and historic events. That mission, stated plainly in the museum’s own twentieth-anniversary materials, is not entertainment dressed up as history. It is public education in a field where public ignorance is dangerous.
The museum was the vision of Milton and Tamar Maltz, whose role is recognized in the museum’s 2024 annual report. Milton Maltz was a Korean War codebreaker who later became a successful media entrepreneur. That combination mattered.
Like my own experience as a Hollywood Producer, he understood both the hidden world of classified service and the public power of communication. He recognized that intelligence history had shaped nearly every major event of the twentieth century while remaining inaccessible to most citizens.
Soldiers get monuments.
Battlefields get plaques.
Aircraft carriers become museums.
Intelligence victories often disappear into vaults, classified files, and the private memoirs of aging officers.
That creates a national blind spot. A society that forgets how intelligence worked in the past is more likely to misunderstand how conflict works in the present.
The Spy Museum exists to narrow that gap. It turns secrecy into civic literacy without compromising operational secrets. It gives the public enough understanding to respect the intelligence profession without romanticizing it, and enough historical grounding to see that deception, covert action, influence, and clandestine collection are not abstractions.
They are permanent instruments of statecraft.
The leadership history reinforces that seriousness. Peter Earnest, the museum’s first executive director, brought decades of Central Intelligence Agency experience to the institution.
The current executive director, Colonel (Ret.) Chris Costa, is not a celebrity curator placed in a themed attraction. The museum’s leadership profile describes him as a thirty-five-year government veteran, including twenty-five years as an intelligence officer serving with Special Operations Forces. A separate museum speaker profile notes his counterintelligence, human intelligence, and special operations experience across Central America, Europe, the Middle East, Iraq, and Afghanistan. That background gives the institution something rare: public accessibility anchored by practitioner credibility.
The museum Historian is not an academic, Marc Jacobson is a lifelong practitioner in the intelligence community, and takes his role as that of preservation, and access of the nations espionage history.
The museum’s board and advisory ecosystem also matter. Its Board of Directors draws from a who’s who of intelligence, government, media, and business. Its broader expert network has included intelligence historians, former senior officials, collectors, cryptology experts, authors, and practitioners. This is not incidental.
A museum about espionage cannot rely on artifacts alone. It needs context. It needs people who know the difference between tradecraft and myth.
The OSS Lesson: Adaptation Under Existential Pressure
The most important lesson inside the museum is not found in any single gadget. It is found in the story of institutional improvisation under pressure. That story runs directly through the Office of Strategic Services and Britain’s Special Operations Executive.
The CIA’s history of the OSS describes President Franklin Roosevelt’s appointment of William J. Donovan as director of an organization that combined research and analysis, covert operations, counterintelligence, espionage, and technical development. In modern bureaucratic language, that sounds like an org chart. In wartime reality, it was a revolution. Donovan was building an American instrument for strategic competition before the United States had fully developed the institutional habits to manage one.
The National Archives summarizes the OSS mission in stark functional terms: overt and covert intelligence procurement, analysis of raw intelligence, dissemination of finished intelligence, and clandestine operations in support of military plans. That bland language conceals the audacity of the enterprise. The OSS sent officers and agents behind enemy lines, supported resistance movements, developed specialized equipment, conducted psychological and political warfare, studied enemy societies, mapped infrastructure, and helped integrate intelligence into military decision-making.
The OSS was short-lived. The National World War II Museum notes that it lasted only three years and three months, yet became the basis for modern American intelligence. The National Archives now holds descriptions of tens of thousands of OSS personnel files, a documentary reminder that the OSS was not a myth populated only by a few famous names. It was an emergency institution built from an astonishing range of talent.
Donovan recruited lawyers, bankers, academics, linguists, journalists, scientists, engineers, soldiers, filmmakers, athletes, refugees, and people who did not fit easily into conventional military categories. The CIA’s account of the OSS ‘glorious amateurs’ emphasizes that Donovan sought independent thinkers from across American life, including authors, artists, intellectuals, scientists, Japanese-American soldiers, Hollywood actors, and even a future Supreme Court justice. That phrase, ‘glorious amateurs,’ can be misunderstood. It did not mean incompetence. It meant that the problem set had outgrown the old professional boundaries.
Britain’s SOE embodied the same principle. The Imperial War Museums describes SOE as the secret British organization created during the Second World War with the instruction to ‘set Europe ablaze.’ The National Army Museum likewise notes that SOE was set up to wage a secret war through sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines. The spirit was not bureaucratic caution. It was disciplined audacity.
That is the lesson for today. The point is not to romanticize wartime sabotage or pretend that twenty-first-century democracies should imitate every OSS or SOE method. The point is that the West once faced adversaries who used every available instrument to break the democratic order, and the answer was not merely more process. The answer was new institutions, new authorities, new partnerships, new forms of analysis, new technical imagination, and a willingness to take the fight to the enemy’s system rather than wait passively for the next blow.
The Modern Threat: Fifth-Generation Pressure on Democratic Societies
The modern battlefield is not only in Ukraine, the Taiwan Strait, the Persian Gulf, the Korean Peninsula, or the Baltic region. It is in undersea cables, satellites, ports, energy grids, banks, data centers, logistics software, social media feeds, diaspora communities, political parties, universities, think tanks, religious institutions, and the human mind.
That is why the museum’s mission is timely. The adversary campaign against the West is not limited to tanks crossing borders. It includes cyber intrusions, influence operations, assassination plots, sabotage, corruption, economic coercion, sanctions evasion, lawfare, artificial intelligence-enabled deception, and strategic narratives designed to fracture alliance cohesion. The term ‘fifth-generation warfare’ is imprecise and often overused, but it captures one important reality: modern conflict increasingly targets perception, legitimacy, decision speed, and societal trust.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is the central European example. Moscow is not merely attempting to seize territory. It is trying to normalize border revision by force, weaken NATO’s political will, exhaust Ukraine’s support base, and prove that democratic societies cannot sustain long wars against a ruthless authoritarian state. The ODNI assessment warns that Russia’s most dangerous threat to the United States is escalation from an ongoing conflict such as Ukraine or a new conflict that leads to direct hostilities. NATO’s public posture reflects the same concern: Russia is the most significant and direct threat to Allied security.
China represents a different but related challenge. Beijing’s competition is broader, more patient, and more integrated. It combines military modernization, industrial policy, cyber capability, technological acquisition, economic leverage, maritime pressure, and influence activity. Iran brings proxy warfare, missiles, drones, hostage-taking experience, covert networks, and regional disruption. North Korea adds nuclear coercion, cyber theft, missile technology, and munitions support. The Carnegie Endowment’s study of cooperation among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia rightly cautions against treating them as a single formal alliance, but also makes clear that their cooperation deserves sustained policy and intelligence attention, especially where support to Russia and military technology proliferation are concerned.
This is the environment in which the OSS lesson becomes instructive. The West cannot meet a networked threat with stovepiped habits. It cannot answer strategic deception with press releases. It cannot defend the cognitive domain with bureaucratic language written for no one. It cannot preserve democratic resilience if citizens do not understand how adversaries exploit openness, grievance, fear, corruption, and confusion.
The Museum as Civic Education
The International Spy Museum’s strongest contribution may be its ability to teach intelligence as a civic subject rather than a classified priesthood. That is not a small thing. Democracies require secrecy to defend themselves. They also require public trust to remain democracies. The tension between those truths is permanent.
A museum cannot solve that tension, but it can make it intelligible. It can show why intelligence matters, why tradecraft exists, why deception has always been part of conflict, why analysis fails, why sources matter, why counterintelligence is difficult, why ethics cannot be separated from operations, and why democratic oversight is not the enemy of intelligence but one of the conditions that preserves its legitimacy.
The museum’s educational programming reflects this broader purpose. Its education and programs include resources and events for adults, youth, families, students, and educators. Its SpyCast podcast, which dates to 2006, reaches audiences far beyond Washington and frames intelligence as a living discipline rather than a closed archive. Its newer exhibitions, including Camouflage: Designed to Deceive, explicitly connect deception, concealment, science, nature, military practice, intelligence, and culture.
This matters because the next generation will inherit a more deceptive information environment than any previous American generation. They will live inside artificial intelligence systems that can fabricate imagery, voices, documents, identities, credentials, narratives, and social proof at scale. They will need to distinguish secrecy from conspiracy, tradecraft from fantasy, intelligence from propaganda, and skepticism from cynicism. The museum can help teach that difference.
In that sense, the museum is not only serving the intelligence community. It is serving the larger zeitgeist. It gives citizens a grammar for understanding deception. It gives teachers a way to discuss statecraft without reducing it to slogans. It gives students a reason to see public service as intellectually demanding and morally serious. It gives future officers a bridge between history and vocation.
Hollywood, Verisimilitude, and the Education of a Public
There is another audience the museum is uniquely positioned to reach: Hollywood.
Intelligence professionals sometimes dismiss entertainment as trivial. That is a mistake. Most citizens learn more about espionage from film and television than from official histories, congressional hearings, or declassified documents. James Bond, George Smiley, Jason Bourne, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, Jack Ryan, Carrie Mathison, Jackson Lamb, and the cinematic version of Tony Mendez have shaped the public imagination more powerfully than most public affairs campaigns ever could.
The museum has understood this from the beginning. Its exhibitions have repeatedly examined the overlap between real espionage and fictional espionage. It has featured James Bond vehicles and artifacts while also explaining the real intelligence history that inspired popular culture. Its 2014 exhibit with FX’s The Americans: Fact and Fantasy used a prestige television drama about Soviet illegals to introduce visitors to real Cold War tradecraft, including cached radios, disguises, and clandestine communication methods. The Washington Post’s review of the museum’s 2019 reopening noted that the new museum explored pop culture’s version of spies with clips and commentary by real-life agents.
This is not a gimmick. It is strategic pedagogy.
Hollywood has reach. The intelligence community has experience. The museum has credibility with both. That makes it a potential bridge between public imagination and professional truth. The objective should not be propaganda. Democracies should be careful with that word and even more careful with the practice. The better objective is verisimilitude: stories that feel true because they are grounded in how intelligence work actually functions.
Verisimilitude matters because bad intelligence entertainment teaches bad civic instincts. It tells citizens that torture always works, lone operators save nations without institutions, analysts are obstacles, oversight is weakness, technology is magic, and war is solved by one clever raid. Better storytelling can do something more valuable. It can show patience, ambiguity, moral burden, interagency conflict, alliance management, bureaucratic friction, sources with mixed motives, analysis under uncertainty, and the reality that success often remains invisible.
The International Spy Museum could become the premier convening institution for that conversation. It could host structured engagements among intelligence veterans, historians, screenwriters, showrunners, directors, actors, game designers, documentarians, and educators. It could build fellowships or workshops on intelligence realism in entertainment. It could advise productions on tradecraft without revealing secrets. It could help creators understand the difference between cinematic spectacle and operational truth. It could do for intelligence storytelling what military technical advisers have long done for war films, but with a stronger ethical and historical frame.
The payoff would not be limited to better television. It would be a better-informed public. A young viewer who first encounters intelligence through a compelling series may later read history, visit the museum, study international affairs, join public service, or simply become a harder target for disinformation. In a democratic society, that is not a minor effect.
It is strategic culture.
Recommendations: The Spy Museum as a National Platform
The museum is already important. The question is how to make it indispensable for the next generation.
First, the museum should continue expanding its role as the public classroom for intelligence literacy. That means not only teaching what spies did, but how intelligence professionals think: source evaluation, pattern recognition, deception detection, analytic humility, counterintelligence awareness, and the discipline of separating facts from assumptions.
Second, it should build a formal OSS-SOE innovation program. The program should not be nostalgia. It should use World War II cases to teach modern adaptation: how open societies recruit unconventional talent, integrate civilians into national missions, combine analysis with action, and build temporary structures fast enough to meet urgent threats. A modern version would include cyber operators, artificial intelligence specialists, behavioral scientists, financial investigators, regional experts, linguists, filmmakers, technologists, logisticians, and special operations veterans.
Third, it should become the country’s leading civilian forum for fifth-generation warfare education. The curriculum should cover cyber operations, gray-zone coercion, strategic corruption, sanctions evasion, influence operations, deepfakes, social media manipulation, infrastructure sabotage, diaspora targeting, and adversary use of lawfare. The audience should include students, journalists, congressional staff, local officials, private-sector leaders, and young military and intelligence professionals.
Fourth, it should deepen its Hollywood and entertainment partnerships. A standing ‘Real Spycraft and Storytelling’ forum could bring together practitioners and creators in a setting that values both operational truth and artistic freedom. The museum would not tell artists what to say. It would help them understand what is real, what is myth, what is ethically complicated, and what history has already taught.
Fifth, the museum should strengthen its role as a bridge between generations. The men and women who served in the Cold War, the post-9/11 intelligence campaigns, Iraq, Afghanistan, counterterrorism, cyber defense, and great-power competition should be recorded while they can still tell their stories. Not classified details. Lessons. Judgment. Failure. Adaptation. Human cost. The most valuable intelligence artifact is often not a device. It is the mind of a practitioner who remembers what actually happened.
Sixth, the museum should help restore seriousness to the public vocabulary of intelligence. In recent years, intelligence has too often been dragged into partisan theater. The museum can model a different standard: fact-based, historically grounded, ethically aware, nonpartisan, and candid about both intelligence success and intelligence failure.
Conclusion: The Standard to Carry Forward
The International Spy Museum is often described as a museum about espionage. That is true, but incomplete. It is a museum about how societies learn to see what adversaries are trying to hide. It is a museum about how democracies adapt when threatened by enemies who use deception as a weapon.
It is a museum about memory in a country that too often moves from crisis to crisis without preserving the lessons paid for by earlier generations.
The OSS and SOE were born because the democratic world faced a threat too large for inherited institutions. They were audacious because the emergency required audacity. They were innovative because survival required innovation. They were compartmented because secrecy mattered. They were integrated because no single discipline could solve the problem alone.
That is the lesson for the Department of War, the intelligence community, NATO, and the democratic world today. We do not need to recreate the OSS as a museum piece. We need to recover its spirit: intellectual daring, disciplined risk, unconventional recruitment, rapid adaptation, and the refusal to let bureaucracy become a substitute for strategy.
The next conflict may not announce itself with a formal declaration. It may arrive as a cyberattack on a port, a fabricated video that triggers a riot, a sabotage campaign against undersea infrastructure, a political movement quietly financed by a hostile service, a drone swarm over a NATO border, a corruption network inside a strategic industry, or a deepfake crisis released on the eve of an election.
The adversary will not wait for democratic institutions to finish reorganizing.
That is why the Spy Museum matters.
It reminds us that free societies have faced overwhelming threats before. It reminds us that victory required imagination as much as force. It reminds us that intelligence is not a dark art separate from democracy, but one of the instruments democracies must use wisely if they intend to survive.
The past is not a script. It is a warning system.
The task now is to teach the next generation to read it.