Learn the Secret Histories of These Fascinating CIA Artifacts, From Pigeon Cameras to Cufflink Compasses
With the launch of its new website, the CIA Museum is bringing its sprawling collection of spy artifacts out of the shadows and into the public eye
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As the pigeon flies, the “greatest museum you’ll never see” is eight miles northwest of the center of Washington, D.C., nestled in the CIA’s top-secret headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
But the pigeons in the CIA Museum don’t fly at all. With cameras strapped to their breasts, they were once meant to collect aerial images from a closer range than the CIA’s Cold War-era U-2 spy plane or the CORONA satellites. The program, however, was never operational.
“The pictures were great. It just wasn’t something we could fully depend on,” says the museum’s director, Robert Byer. “Those pigeons have minds of their own.”
The birds are now among the cyanide-bearing fountain pens, Nazi Enigma machines and bricks from Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound that make up the CIA Museum’s singular collection of declassified objects from the history of American espionage and intelligence.
Since it opened in 1988, the museum has naturally had an air of secrecy about it. Only employees of the agency (and, on occasion, invited guests) are allowed to visit its galleries.
For many years, that secrecy limited the museum’s operations. “Everything was compartmentalized. Everything was need-to-know,” Byer says. Groups at the CIA were “afraid or unwilling to give artifacts to someone outside of their control.” Display cases remained sparse. Exhibits talked only about the distant past, like intelligence operations during the Civil War or World War II.
That’s all changed in the past few decades as the museum has taken careful steps to make the CIA’s history more accessible. To mark the CIA’s 75th anniversary in 2022, the museum underwent an extensive renovation to bring new artifacts and engaging displays to the headquarters’ busiest hallways.
Around the same time, it also began a video series called “The Debrief,” which highlights declassified mission stories and artifacts in its collections through more than 40 short episodes.
The goal is “sharing what we can but protecting what we must,” says Mackenzie, a representative from the Office of Public Affairs who requested to go by only her first name.
Now, a new website featuring the objects in “The Debrief” is the latest initiative in service of that goal. To mark its launch on Wednesday, take a look back at a few of the collection’s most fascinating objects.
Spycraft in World War II
The CIA was founded in 1947. But the museum’s collections document a longer history of American spycraft, including the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the agency’s World War II-era predecessor that was directed to fight stealthily against the Axis powers. As the nickname of the agency’s architect William “Wild Bill” Donovan suggests, its methods were experimental.
“I need every subtle device and every underhanded trick to use against the Germans and the Japanese,” Donovan told Stanley Lovell, newly recruited to lead the OSS’s Office of Research and Development. “You will have to invent them all. … Start tomorrow.”
His office delivered. In one episode of “The Debrief,” host Janelle Neises highlights several devices that agents could discreetly carry behind enemy lines. Cufflinks and buttons hid compasses from inspectors. In an unassuming painter’s kit, an explosive material disguised as a lump of coal sat alongside turpentine, oil paint, brushes and beeswax. The saboteur would drop the piece off at an enemy coal dump, and from there it would make its way to a factory. Once placed in a furnace, it would explode, dealing a harsh and mysterious blow to the enemy’s industrial capabilities.
“Partnerships with private sector companies during the war were so important,” Neises says in the video. The Eastman Kodak Company, for instance, helped the OSS wage its shadow war by developing a small camera that could fit inside a matchbox and be operated only by feel.
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Compared to its infamous successor, the OSS has a quieter legacy, despite employing some of the most prominent Americans of the 20th century. The famous filmmaker John Ford headed the OSS Field Photographic Branch, where he shot documentary footage and training films for the undercover officers, while the renowned chef Julia Child, told she was “too tall” to join the military, found employment in an OSS lab developing shark repellent for pilots stranded in the ocean. (It achieved only mixed results.)
“It’s not taught in classes that there was this secret organization in the U.S. government that helped win World War II,” Neises tells Smithsonian magazine. “It was the foundation that the CIA stands on now. I think it’s really important for people to learn about.”
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Spies in the skies
It’s exactly these hidden histories that “The Debrief” is uniquely positioned to highlight. “There’s no shortage of great stories, it’s just [finding] the time to tell them all,” says Brian Moore, head of the agency’s video team, who worked with Neises and Byer to produce the videos during weekends, when undercover agents were least likely to wander into frame.
One of the most intriguing stories explored in “The Debrief” took place over nearly three decades in the middle of the 20th century. The United States was entangled in foreign wars, and the CIA became a major facilitator of America’s global escapades, with covert operations in nearly every corner of the world.
Perhaps no program was more emblematic of this sprawling influence than Air America, a cargo and passenger airline that began as a company in China called Civil Air Transport in 1946.
In 1950, the CIA bought and began to operate the airline. With its motto “Anything, anywhere, anytime, professionally,” Air America both overtly and secretly ferried American assets and supplies around Southeast Asia as it prepared for the Vietnam War. (Allegations of its involvement in heroin smuggling in Laos during the 1960s and 1970s, as depicted in the 1990 action comedy film Air America, are fiercely disputed.)
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With its daring pilots, it helped earn the CIA’s reputation of being “first in and last out” of America’s global conflicts, Byer explains. Years before American involvement in Vietnam was official, for instance, Civil Air Transport pilots were flying into Vietnam on behalf of the U.S., bringing supplies to French troops at the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu. When Saigon fell in 1975, it was Air America that operated the iconic Huey helicopter as it evacuated Americans from the city’s rooftops.
Throughout the war, Air America helped deliver and extract U.S. officials to and from remote regions of Vietnam and Laos. But to enable these top-secret missions, the CIA-run airline had to appear inconspicuous to onlookers.
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The cover was elaborate. Civilians could buy tickets between destinations like Japan and Thailand and eat off Air America dinnerware with Air America chopsticks. CIA pilots posed as civilian aviators in Air America caps. Passengers could buy “incredible swag,” as Byer puts it, including bags, lighters and fans to remember their favorite Southeast Asian airline.
For all covert missions, but especially for a large-scale, public-facing operation like Air America, Neises says in the video, “it’s all about the details.”
Open secrets
These details, pulled out of the obscurity of history, become part of the narrative that the CIA presents to anyone who has the rare privilege of walking through its headquarters—or the more accessible pleasure of browsing its brand-new website.
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During the renovation in 2022, officials placed the exhibits in the compound’s central hallways so that employees could casually engage with their history every day. They all have their favorite artifacts, like Charlie the robotic catfish, and their favorite stories, such as the covert retrieval of a Soviet submarine from the ocean floor.
For Hope, a member of the CIA’s social media team who also requested to use only her first name, one object in particular exemplifies the delicate balance between secrecy and transparency: a white sign from the CIA’s old headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C.
For years, the CIA was hidden inside an unmarked building on E Street. Its location was an open secret for most. But for outsiders, like President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s brother, who struggled to find the location of a meeting with CIA Director Allen Dulles, the secrecy was nothing but an inconvenience.
“The next day, President Eisenhower called Director Dulles and demanded that a sign be placed at our entrance,” Neises explains in a video. “He said that the E Street location was well known and that the lack of a sign was fooling no one.”
The CIA knows that some secrets are not worth keeping forever.
