How often do you get to adopt a cover identity and wander around being Dimitri, a 48-year old Russian fisherman, or Jimmy, a 12-year-old English student, for the afternoon? Happens to you a lot? Well, do you then get to slide through an air conditioning duct and spy on the people below you? It's all in an afternoon's visit to the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.
The Museum is explicitly set up to provide a historical view of spies and spying techniques without judgments, and it does a pretty god job of fulfilling that mission while providing a fun outing. There's no escaping that the International Spy Museum gets mixed reviews from parents, the major criticism being that there's a lot of text. There is a lot of text, but it is interesting stuff and there were enough interactive pieces amongst the text to keep things rolling along. We did get to adopt an identity and were asked questions about it. We crawled through air conditioning ducts (although who knew that those babies are carpeted?) We did some eavesdropping with bugs. There is no escaping, though, that keeping the kids interest high does involve a fair bit of parental involvement.
No spy museum would be complete without a range of ingenious and somewhat hilarious spy equipment. Almost all the equipment is from the 1950s and '60s when, gasp, a spy could fit a camera into a briefcase or a recorder into a shoe. I would dearly love to know what the well-dressed spy is using these days now that the iPhone has made almost their entire traditional arsenal redundant.
The highlight of our visit to the International Spy Museum was the Spy in the City Tour. We were issued with a 'COBRA unit' with fingerprint scanner, GPS and direct line back to spy HQ to receive instructions. It seems that a strange shortage of trained spies had developed and they had to recruit a ten-year-old boy to do an important job, backed up by his family, of course. Led by our unit we were taken around the city, solving a range of clues to complete a mission and achieve a rank at the end. The mission was amusing and the kids got some exercise and fresh air. The interactive device made the experience seem cooler than it otherwise would have although a dodgy touchscreen made for some frustration - there is a sense that the museum should be updating their hardware there.
I wouldn't normally mention the shop in a description of a museum, but the International Spy Museum shop has a great range of geeky items around the spy theme and is worth a visit in itself. Escaping from the shop without buying anything would challenge James Bond himself.
To round up, the International Spy Museum is a better visit for a family with kids than the reviews had led us to fear, but you will need to make an effort to keep the kids interested in the stories. That's not a big effort, though, given how interesting the stories are. The Spies in the City Tour is absolutely worth doing and is a cheap alternative to the museum as a whole – it only cost $14 for a couple of hours of entertainment.
The International Spy Museum can be found at 800 F ST NW, Washington DC, 20004 and on the web at www.spymuseum.org.
