“The World’s Preeminent Collection of SPY Artifacts” – with Laura Hicken and Lauren VonBechmann

Andrew Hammond: Welcome to "Spycast," the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host Dr. Andrew Hammond, the museum's historian and curator. Every week we explore some aspect of the past, present, or future of intelligence and espionage. If you go to our page at thecyberwire.com/podcast/spycast you can find links to further resources, detailed episode notes, and full transcripts. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review that will take less than a minute of your time and it will really help other listeners find us. Coming up next on "Spycast."

Lauren von Bechmann: The Trotsky ax was under someone's bed for years and years. And now everybody can see it and it's, you know, a really important historical object. And we find that with a lot of the things that are donated to us. They were in someone's attic or they've been in a suitcase for years. [ Music ]

Andrew Hammond: This week I was joined in the studio by two of Erin and I's favorite spy family members, Laura Hicken and Lauren von Bechmann. Laura and Lauren are two of the members of our exhibitions and collections team here at the International Spy Museum responsible for keeping our 10,000 plus artifacts safe and sound each day. They are two of the most intelligent, creative, and passionate people we have the pleasure of working with. And we are thrilled to share a little bit of their story and their work with "Spycast" listeners. In this episode we discuss the spy museum's largest, smallest, and coolest artifacts, the challenges of being a spy museum, the ins and outs of getting into the museum field, and why they ended up working in museums in the first place. The original podcast on intelligence since 2006, we are "Spycast." Now sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Let's go. So I've got -- I've got what I think is a pretty cool question for two self confessed museum folks. So you're allowed to have any museum in the world for free as a site to gather all of your best friends for a party. Which one would it be? And it's not allowed to be the spy museum. So imagine you can just get access to any museum you want anywhere, gather all your friends, all be flown in, driven and whatever, and you just get to have the space. Which one would it be?

Lauren von Bechmann: I've got two just come to mind. One is Versailles because I mean come on. I don't feel like I need to elaborate on that. And then the Museo Lazaro Galdiano in Madrid which is just like it's in this gorgeous estate and it's this full history of Spanish art and culture and basically everything that inspired Spanish art. So if there were British artists that inspired Spanish art. If there were, you know, like historic periods that inspired Spanish art. It's just it's absolutely stunning and I feel like the best thing I can say is that like that I went there severely jet lagged and dehydrated and I spent like three hours and was like I might die in this museum, but I'm seeing everything. So just yeah. Going and then like, I don't know, having some tacos, feast, in this museum sounds amazing.

Andrew Hammond: Is it an art museum or art and history?

Laura Hicken: It's primarily an art museum, but you know they appreciate the history that folds into their collection.

Andrew Hammond: Okay. Cool.

Laura Hicken: And also they have like a library with rare books on site that my husband was like, "Let's just knock on the door and see if we can come in." And I was like, "They won't let us in." But in my party we would go in.

Andrew Hammond: Well, that's a good one. That's a good one.

Lauren von Bechmann: Yeah. That's a good one. I'm going to stick really English. I've going to go with Chatsworth House. Big, big historic home fan. So I feel like anything that I could have in a historic home plus obviously they shot "Pride and Prejudice" there so I have a little bit of bias. But my dream was to always work in a historic home, to curate it, and I love Chatsworth House. And honestly it'd be really cool because it's kind of in the middle of nowhere.

Andrew Hammond: Tell us more about it. Where is it? What's the deal?

Lauren von Bechmann: So it's like in the middle of England basically and it's this historic home. It's full of kind of an array of paintings and art basically spanning from kind of 16th century to maybe 18th/19th century. There's a lot of different kind of things in the house. And they've curated it so it looks very beautiful. And you just kind of feel like you're transported back into time whenever you go there. And it's this massive estate. They've got this beautiful reflecting pool. Every time I go there the sun is always shining for some reason. It's never, you know, a dull moment here. So I feel like it would be a really nice place to have a party.

Andrew Hammond: And it sounds like Lauren's is a place that you went to for a few hours and it captured your heart, but for you this is a place that you've been back to multiple times. Is that right?

Lauren von Bechmann: Yeah. It's difficult to get to, but it's absolutely worth it. If you're in the U.K, go.

Andrew Hammond: Okay. Get on Skyscanner. So tell us a little bit more about the spy museum collection. So let's just run through some of the basics. What is it? What are we talking about?

Laura Hicken: Sure. So the spy museum cares for over 10,000 artifacts. So that's the 3,000 that are part of our permanent collection that we own and the 7,000 or so that are loaned from individuals or institutions including the ones that are, you know, promised to eventually be given to us. And we span, you know, international history of intelligence. And we have I think probably our smallest artifact is, you know, we have micro dots which are very stressful to catalog because they're teeny tiny. And, you know, we have things as big as the Berlin tunnel, the Berlin wall. You know right now because of bond in motion we have a submarine that had to be air lifted into the building. So it covers a lot of ground. We've got -- I was looking it up. I think our oldest artifacts on loan to us are probably the Mongolian spy artifacts that we have from about the 13th/14th century. The oldest one that we own, we have the political testament of Cardinal Richelieu from 1699. Very tiny old book. And then we have I think our newest things are all pop culture based because of course we can't have classified things. So it's hard to have new spy stuff because it's spying right now and it's very, very secret. So a lot of our recent artifacts that we can actually, you know, have out and we're allowed to own are pop culture based like from the Daniel Craig Bond movies, things like that. We're very excited because we just go on loan from the Korean embassy some artifacts from 2011 which for our collection is very, very new. And yeah. And it's currently all housed on site. We feel very fortunate about that. We got a lot of support from the board to keep the collection here. There is a concern with collections that, you know, it's very real out of sight, out of mind. So not only are we not making it accessible to researchers if we can't access it ourself, but you also obviously we have a lot of conservation concerns. And if something's just in a box and you don't look at it for many, many years, you don't know what it's doing to itself in there. So that's been an exciting development. Is this what you want to know?

Andrew Hammond: We'll come on to some more of those questions. I was just trying to get a sense of in the most general term. And what other collections have both of you worked with? So just put the spy museum collection in the context of other museum collections.

Laura Hicken: Sure.

Andrew Hammond: Lauren.

Lauren von Bechmann: Well, so I've worked kind of in a variety of collections for -- in all kinds of different museums. So I've worked in a circus collection. But actually what I was working with specifically there at the Ringling Museum down in Sarasota was old master paintings. So I did mostly French, Spanish, and Italian old master paintings. So I worked in that collection for a long time, did a lot of research in that. And then for a while I worked for the Victoria and Albert Museum specifically with the museum of childhood. So I did a big part of working on researching and moving the collection there which was all about British childhood. So I learned a lot about British childhood not being a British person myself. I learned a lot about things I've never even heard of and very strange things as a part of British child -- Mr. Blobby was my big kind of foray into English and British childhood. I had never seen anything like him before. And we had a lot of kind of masks and toys of his in our collection. And I can't even really describe him. He looks like a McDonalds character who maybe had some kind of disease. He was in this like big massive costume and he would be on kind of children's television and like on -- he was specifically on a specific show that he would like come on and he would like fall down the stairs and like fall over. But he was a -- I remember thinking this can't be a real person. So I worked in that collection for a long time and I got to kind of see all different from dolls, from children's clothing, textiles, toys. So I really got kind of a real look at all kinds of things in a collection from all types of medias which is quite a departure from working with just paintings and doing research. And then I worked at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum where I worked specifically in tennis history and social history within tennis and specifically obviously at Wimbledon. So a lot of those artifacts were or pretty much all of them were tennis related. So I learned a lot about tennis. So I feel like with the collections I've worked in I have a very large range of what I've been able to see over the years.

Andrew Hamilton: What about you, Laura? What other collections have you worked with?

Laura Hicken: Yeah. So I actually my first internship, my first like, "Oh, my gosh. You can work in museums. You can do this." Was at a prison museum. That's a little I think that, you know --

Andrew Hammond: Where as this?

Laura Hicken: This was in Mount Holly, New Jersey. The Burlington County Prison Museum. It had been the county seat so, you know, their court house was right there. This was a very major prison for that area and then eventually it turned into a museum. And so I think that was kind of my first foray into how people learn differently in museums. Like I knew I wanted to study history, but this was sort of a non traditional way of learning and I really loved it. And I think also starting my career in a prison museum really you learn all of the people whose stories aren't told that don't make it into history books, all of the social history that just doesn't come out unless you're physically in the building where these people that aren't really talked about spent years of their lives. And so that was kind of, you know, really eye opening for me. Also also how you preserve history and artifacts when you don't really have that many because that wasn't history that was kept. And so that was just really extraordinary to sort of set me on this path. And then for years right after I graduated from undergrad through 2016 I worked at the International Spy Museum. And I actually started working in the programs. And so I still like I didn't know what I wanted to do in museums. I was coming at it from this place of like oh museums are just run by curators and that's it. That's the only job in a museum. And so getting to work at the spy museum in 2008, it's a very small museum and so I got to learn a lot about the different roles and I got to meet the collections manager and find out that there are people that specifically just work on caring for and handling and tracking these artifacts. And that really excited me because it's sort of this appreciation of like this tedious work that if it's not done you lose these things. It's not glamorous, but it is really important. And so I worked with the spy museum's collection very early on when we were a small collection at F street. We only had about 100 or 1,000 or so artifacts in our permanent collection. And then I was fortunate enough to be there when Keith Melton [assumed spelling], our founding board member who donated his private collection, transferred to the spy museum. So I got to be part of the team packing that up. And that was a really extraordinary learning experience. And then from 2016 to 2022 I was with the national building museum also here in Washington, D.C. And that was a fabulous experience to work with different mediums as Lauren talked about. Like to suddenly be dealing with these massive sheet metal structures and massive, you know, terra cotta pieces of buildings. And so when I was there I worked primarily with the Washington National Cathedral collection. So 30,000 architectural drawings from the entire construction of the national cathedral. So everything from like the most beautiful watercolor of, you know, what the stained glass windows would look like to the like absolutely like dirt stained, you know, tie back drawings that were literally like in the scaffolds as they were doing this. And so that was incredible. I worked with a number of photography collections there which was a lot of fun and just a different way to learn how to process things. And I also got to work with our architectural toy collection there. And interestingly enough one of the first exhibits that I deinstalled at the national building museum was the small stories exhibit that my now colleague Lauren curated at the Victoria and Albert. So that was -- that was just kind of a fun thing when I got here. We realized we had that in common. It's a very small field. Yes.

Andrew Hammond: And just briefly tell me a little bit more about that decision. You know, a lot of museums there's -- there's people that are experts in the form and people that are experts in the content. And there's like a -- there's like a decision there and I guess museum studies is, you know -- it's like the difference between say a photographer -- I'm a photographer. I could go to -- I could photograph children. I could photograph James Bond cars or I specialize in one skip photography or something. Tell me a little bit more about that decision of which way do I go.

Lauren von Bechmann: Mine was kind of made for me, I think. I think that the -- with the museum field in general for me at least personally like my journey there was a lot of me stumbling on to these different jobs. It was a lot of me kind of inserting myself into these kind of situations where I just all I wanted was to get experience and I wanted to work in a museum and I knew that. So a lot of it was just trying a lot of different things and what people would give to me. So a lot of that was, you know, I kind of did all of these different jobs. I did researching. I was doing decanting. I was doing database work. I was moving collections. I was designing exhibitions. So I got to do kind of this array of things. And then I realized what I really wanted to do which is now kind of more of what I do is work in exhibitions and kind of creating them and kind of seeing them through and project managing them. But from the first part of my career -- and I bet Laura will probably say the same thing. It's kind of, you know, what can I do? How can I get into this field? So you kind of take the jobs that you can. I also felt like, you know, there is that kind of fork in the road. Am I going to do academia or am I going to kind of just get this like real world experience? And I did also think about going back into academia. And maybe I will in the future, but I think for me I've just absolutely loved kind of having the hands on like working in museums and I've kind of decided that that's what I really enjoy doing. And, you know, I think either decision is great. So the museum professionals out there, choose whatever makes sense for you. I think for me it was just kind of like following the jobs that made sense to me. So but that was just my personal journey. I think a lot of people might feel differently.

Andrew Hammond: It's probably better for the job market to do something more -- because then you can move to any city and work in most museums. And so forth rather than be restricted. Laura.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. A lot of us -- you know my first full time jobs in a museum were museum educators working in programs. That was -- that was what was available and I had some of those skill sets. But then, you know, especially working at the spy museum, working so close with the collections manager at the time, Nancy Bateman [assumed spelling], I got to see like, oh my god, there are people that can touch this stuff. Like that's amazing. And also Lauren and I are a good team because we are -- we are an extrovert-introvert little power house.

Andrew Hammond: Which is which? I think I know.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. Yeah. I was the one that was like, "Oh. You get to lock yourself in a room by yourself with things that can't talk to you? Oh. Sign me up."

Lauren von Bechmann: And like Laura we've got to do this presentation to five different departments. Let's go.

Laura Hicken: Dragging me out of my closet. So I think also just the nature of the work really appealed to me. And I'll be honest. Like you do not want me to design an exhibit. I'd be like, "It's all gray and it's all centered." So I think I just I just stumbled upon something that I was like, "Oh. This appeals to me on so many levels." And then I went to grad school. I went to George Washington museum studies program. And, you know, they're very good at like trying to get you to do a bunch of things and sort of, you know, they don't want you to pigeon hole yourself. And I think it's because they understand that the job market just doesn't work that way. But I remember in my preventive conservation class we would do these exercises of like, you know, there's a taxidermied eagle on the very top shelf and you need to get it to this room. And there's X amount of doors and here's when it's open and there's a fountain and this -- like how many people do you need? What tools do you need? What do you need to think about? And I just I loved that. Like that was kind of my like oh my god this is so much fun, the like problem solving aspect of this of how do you care for these things. What do you do? How do you make it work? That just like I don't know. It like lit up my brain in a way that I was like, "Oh. I want to -- I want to do this particular puzzle forever."

Lauren von Bechmann: I loved that part of -- it was so much fun. We got to do a narwhal tusk. Yeah. It was -- I loved that part of being able to like actually move stuff around. We did have to do an egg drop as well. Did you guys have to do that?

Laura Hicken: We didn't do it.

Lauren von Bechmann: For packaging. To make sure that you were good at packaging objects you had to package an egg and make sure that if you dropped it from high up it didn't break. It would survive.

Laura Hicken: How'd you do?

Lauren von Bechmann: I did all right actually. I was very nervous. Very, very nervous. At one point, though, it was very, very high and I felt like no one -- no one's egg was really going to survive.

Laura Hicken: I feel like at a certain point in the class you're like, "Well, don't drop it."

Lauren von Bechmann: Yeah.

Laura Hicken: That should be the -- yeah. Lesson number one. Don't drop it.

Lauren von Bechmann: And if you are, please don't drop it from three stories.

Laura Hicken: Yeah.

Andrew Hammond: Erin asked me to tell people how I got into museums and this interloop, so here goes. One. Museums have very, very cool stuff. Two. They are amazing places to visit with your friends, your family, or your loved ones. Three. They are major sites for the production of historical knowledge. Four. They are major sites for the consumption of historical knowledge. Five. They offer unique storytelling possibilities. Six. Artifacts can come alive before your very eyes if you put in the right work and cultivate the right historical sensibility. Seven. The act of stitching artifacts together into a coherent narrative can be as beautiful as any constellation of stars in the night sky. Eight. They allow us to confront our own existence and [inaudible 00:21:19]. Other human beings like us laughed, cried, struggled, sang, swam, and had their culturally conditioned rites of passage. Nine. They're continual reminders of human creativity, ingenuity, and potentially depravity. 10. They underline the fact that there but for the grace of God go I. No one asked you which family, country, or time period you'd be born into. We're all thrown to the world with a culturally conditioned user's manual. Apart from all of those things, I really hate museums. [ Music ] So I'll just take a little bit of what you said earlier and then we'll go into the oldest, newest, you know stuff as if it's like fresh. Okay. So let's -- let's dig into this spy museum collection a little bit more. So you said 10,000 artifacts. Where is it stored?

Laura Hicken: So we are very excited because the spy museum collection it's had a couple of locations including offsite, but we've in the last year gotten board approval to have the entire collection on site. We have a dedicated space for it. And so this has been really radical because we can actually process the collection every day. We're in there working on the collection every day. Mikaela Ferrara who's our inventory technician is getting everything settled and happy. And so yeah. The collection's on site.

Andrew Hammond: Just out of interest, is she an introvert too?

Laura Hicken: She's a medium.

Lauren von Bechmann: She sits between the two of us, I think.

Laura Hicken: She tolerates us very well.

Andrew Hammond: And tell us a little bit more about the collection. So what's the oldest artifact that we have?

Laura Hicken: So the oldest artifact that is currently on loan to us is from the Genghis Khan exhibit and it is probably one of like their stone passports from the 13th/14th century that would be like a way of identifying yourself. So that's probably the oldest thing in our care. As far as the oldest thing that Spy owns as part of its permanent collection, I think it's probably our -- it's the political testimony of Cardinal Richelieu. And so it's a book from 1699. And it's very cute and little and very stressful to handle.

Andrew Hammond: So those are two different types of artifacts then. Yeah. And what's the -- what's the newest?

Laura Hicken: So the newest like the most recent in our history, it's probably some of our pop culture stuff. So obviously we can't have anything classified. We are not the CIA museum. So it's hard for us to have like oh cutting edge, this is being used by spies right now, because for understandable reasons they don't want us to have that. And so yeah. I would say it's probably we have some props from the latest Daniel Craig movie "No Time to Die." We have a little artifact from one of the Marvel movies representing one of their spy masters. So usually our really newest stuff is pop culture because that's what everyone's allowed to talk about.

Lauren von Bechmann: Yeah. Yeah. It might be the watch and the eyeball.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. We do have some things I would say. We got some loans from the Korean embassy a year ago.

Andrew Hammond: So that's one of the most recent things that we've taken --

Laura Hicken: That's one of the most recent loans. Yeah.

Andrew Hammond: Tell us more about that.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. So the Korean embassy actually reached out to us. They -- some of their employees have visited the spy museum and got very excited. And so they reached out to us and we created this relationship and ultimately they loaned probably six or seven artifacts to us that are actually hopefully going to go on display in the next few weeks. So they will include some things from 2011 which for us -- for us is really recent. That was very exciting. And that's -- that's kind of one of the ways that we get artifacts is through these loans with different institutions. We have relationships with the CIA Museum. We have a flight suit on loan from them. We have a great relationship with the FBI Museum. We have things on loan from them. Various universities. And then we also have things from individuals. So frequently a lot of our newest stuff will be on loan from, you know, when the CIA says it's okay for us to --

Andrew Hammond: A lot of those Korean artifacts are really cool, aren't they? The poison lipstick. Yeah. Wow.

Laura Hicken: Cool and creepy.

Lauren von Bechmann: Yes. Both.

Laura Hicken: We spend a lot of time being like, "Oh. Oh." That's the collection in general I think sometimes. You're like oh. Oh no. They're -- we had the like old camera that was very old timey looking and you're like, "This is cool. What is this?" And then it's like it's Beria's camera that was in his interrogation office. And you're like, "Okay. That's cool."

Lauren von Bechmann: Yeah. You learn about it and you're like I'll put that back down. Bad vibes.

Andrew Hammond: And Beria was Stalin's spymaster who ultimately was taken out by Stalin, but was probably oversaw the deaths of --

Laura Hicken: Death and torture of a lot of people. Yeah.

Andrew Hammond: Thousands and thousands and thousands of people.

Laura Hicken: So you kind of you have this camera and you're like oh god what is -- what has this been in the room for?

Andrew Hammond: Yeah. What did someone see through the lens? Yeah. Wow.

Laura Hicken: And a lot of our collection has that, you, so in that respect actually some of the Korean embassy artifacts that we have, one is a pen with a poison needle that was taken off of a would be assassin. So it wasn't actually used. It was, you know, the south Korean intelligence agency's intercept it and so yeah. We have things that are like, oh, close call.

Andrew Hammond: And what are the largest and smallest artifacts?

Laura Hicken: Largest I -- you know it's probably a fight between the Berlin wall pieces and the Berlin tunnel, although of course now that we've got a submarine in bond in motion that's probably --

Lauren von Bechmann: The biggest.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. Up there.

Andrew Hammond: And the Berlin tunnel, this is an operation by the British and the Americans to dig a tunnel underneath the Soviet embassy and try to tap into their communications, but it's freaking huge.

Laura Hicken: It's huge. I mean because guys are sitting in this with like their equipment set up. Like it's not like -- it's like a tunnel like oh you're crawling out. It's like a tunnel like you're camping out.

Andrew Hammond: Yeah. It's not like the "Shawshank Redemption" tunnel.

Laura Hicken: No. No. This is like get cozy. We're in a tunnel. So yeah. No. Massive. And actually so big we don't have both -- there were two pieces. And so one of -- one of ours is actually we loaned to the CIA museum because we just didn't have room. So those are definitely some of the biggest and heaviest which is of course also a thing that has to be taken into consideration. Our structural engineers are very responsive fortunately. I email them a lot. Very nice. And smallest is probably our micro dots which makes sense. I mean that's --

Andrew Hammond: Just for people that don't know, tell them what a micro dot is.

Laura Hicken: A micro dot is I mean it's an image. So it can be -- it can be a photo. It can be a document. But it's just it's shrunk down through magical science into like a tiny, tiny, you know, like looks like a flake of salt essentially that can be smuggled, can be hidden in a number of ways, and then you have your special viewers that can -- you can read it or you can blow it up, but it's a fantastic way to hide secret documents because I can say as somebody who's had to catalog them and keep track of them it is extremely stressful.

Lauren von Bechmann: I was just going to say I think micro dots are so stressful. I would absolutely lose the one that was given to me almost immediately.

Andrew Hammond: What are some of the weirdest artifacts that we have? Strange. Weird. Unusual. Things that people wouldn't think about. I mean I've got a couple of examples that come to the top of my head. The scrotal concealment, for example.

Lauren von Bechmann: That is a gross one.

Andrew Hammond: Yeah.

Lauren von Bechmann: Pretty weird.

Andrew Hammond: Tell us like some of the other things that we have.

Laura Hicken: There is the box that Mikaela and I are both ignoring that says caution dog hormones.

Lauren von Bechmann: Yeah. That one is terrifying.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. I think it's used to like track people's scent or I don't know. Like we'll get there. But that's -- every time we get to the shelf with that box on it I'm like, "No. Not today. Move it to a new -- yeah." That one gets pushed down for good reason. Yeah. We'll get there. So certainly you know some of the -- we have Bob Hanssen's couch from his living room. So that --

Andrew Hammond: Robert Hanssen, a notorious FBI spy basically for the KGB.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. So we have his couch.

Lauren von Bechmann: It's massive.

Laura Hicken: It is massive, but so that's an unexpected one.

Lauren von Bechmann: There's a lot of poison. I think --

Laura Hicken: That's something that we used to have poison, but we're never like, we don't want to touch. Yeah. You know. Anything spiky from the KGB you're like, "No. I don't need to touch that."

Lauren von Bechmann: And honestly it kind of feels like that with most things in the collection. Obviously we always use gloves unless it's paper, but I'm just like there's probably poison on here.

Laura Hicken: It's for our protection as much as the artifacts.

Andrew Hammond: So let's discuss some of the big headline artifacts that we have. So the Trotsky ice ax. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. It was Keith's white whale. We -- this is, you know --

Andrew Hammond: You chased it for years and years.

Laura Hicken: Years and years. And, you know, we have all of the provenance information that, you know, talks about how he got this and who he got it from and where and everything that yeah this is the ax. But like the incredible thing is as part of this, you know, record of how he came to find it and get the actual ax we have all of these like anecdotes from his trips to Mexico and his research of like, you know, what it takes to track down something that -- that rare and unusual. And yeah. So it's -- it's just funny because you go through the object file for that one and it's a lot of you know postcards from Mexico. And brochures for hotels. And it's like oh. This was -- you were just down there trying to find it.

Andrew Hammond: It's pretty incredible how he came across it, but that's a story for another.

Laura Hicken: That's a different story. Yeah.

Andrew Hammond: Tell us about the Washington letter because this one's incredible. Right? 1777.

Laura Hicken: 1777. Yeah. So this -- and I will let Lauren talk about our George Washington exhibit that just opened because that is her literal baby. But yeah. So this is actually one of the first artifacts that the spy museum had. It was purchased by our founder and I think really kind of jump started like some of the energy behind the museum of, you know, we can get these extraordinary rare things. And so we have the 1777 letter where George Washington, you know, says, "I'm going to pay for a civilian spy force." It's been conserved. I think multiple times and so we actually -- that is one of the few things that we don't have on site at the moment. It is -- it is off site. But and it is only put on display this most recent time because we were still dealing with our light levels in the new exhibit. It was only on display for four weeks. We're hoping to bump that up a little bit in the future. Revolutionary era ink is like not great under any circumstances, let alone like having exposed to light in a museum. So we have to be very, very cautious with it. So, you know, basically 10 months out of the year usually it's a replica, but yeah. That's one of our -- one of our little treasures.

Andrew Hammond: Tell us more about the exhibit, Lauren, because this has recently been re-imagined, a new exhibit. Tell us a little bit more about the Washington exhibit. And just for our listeners, this letter's like a foundational document in American intelligence. This is George Washington writing a letter telling someone called Nathaniel Sackett to set up America's first civilian spy ring. They call it a spy ring. So tell us more about the exhibition.

Lauren von Bechmann: Laura's pointed out that, you know this -- and Andrew as well that this letter is kind of of the utmost importance, and especially, you know, for our museum. And it's a big kind of historical object for us to have. And we really wanted to highlight it because we don't actually have a lot of this kind of era of artifacts. It might be one of the -- one of the only ones we have. So we really wanted to highlight this story. And Andrew mentioned the Culper spy ring. And we really wanted to highlight what that looked like and what that movement looked like and how kind of amazing it was for things to travel by horse and by row boat and all of these different methods. And how spying kind of looked in that time period. And so we've made with the help of our VP of exhibits Kathryn Keane who helped us re-imagine this basically make an immersive exhibition on bringing the letter to life and showing how the Culper spy ring moved and what that movement looked like. And kind of bringing to life like what the letter meant. It's narrated by Chris Jackson. So any "Hamilton" fans out there, he played the original George Washington in "Hamilton." So it's been a really like incredible experience to try to put this together. And it's been really nice to be able to highlight the letter as well. You know, it's been on display this -- as Laura said, not the real one all the time, but the replica or the real one has been on display for quite a while now. But we really wanted to just make sure that it kind of got the flowers that it deserved and we really wanted to make sure that it was the centerpiece for, you know, why we spy. And that's what the fourth floor of our museum is about is why do we spy. So everyone should come see the immersive exhibition. We worked very hard on it. I stayed very late hours to finish it. So I think everyone should come see it please.

Laura Hicken: It's very cool. [ Music ]

Andrew Hammond: We've been talking a lot in this episode about the importance of taking care of the artifacts in the spy museum's collection. We assume most of our listeners have never taken a historic preservation class. So here is a short crash course. Take a piece of paper, for example. Let's say the letter George Washington wrote in 1777 to Nathaniel Sackett asking him to set up what would become the Culper spy ring. Artifact preservation is a careful and delicate process. A number of different factors contribute to the deterioration of artifacts. Think humidity, light, air pollution, human interaction, and household pests like moths and termites. That's right. Book worms really do exist and the could eat away fast at paper artifacts. Let's stick with this example and we'll spare you the detailed explanation of the different types of paper and the different techniques you'd use on each one. If you want to keep your average piece of paper in tip top shape for as long as you possibly can you'd want to keep that piece of paper below 72 degrees Fahrenheit and between 30 to 40% humidity. You'd want to store it completely flat and away from any form of light, natural or unnatural. You'd want to keep that piece of paper in acid free folders and boxes ensuring no infestation of pests and keeping the box high on the shelf in order to avoid potential water damage. Of course you'd use gloves not to transfer any oils from your skin onto the document and you'd employ a capable mind of a collection technician like our very own Mikaela Ferrara to keep constant records of where these artifacts are on the shelves and what conditions they are in. Oh. Great. You're ready to preserve your birth certificate for centuries to come. [ Music ] Let's go on to a key question. What's your favorite artifact?

Lauren von Bechmann: This is hard. I never know with this one because I feel like each one --

Andrew Hammond: Even if it changes like for me it sort of changes month by month. What's your current favorite? What, you know -- it's like a song.

Laura Hicken: So I'm always going to love sleeping beauty which is the one man submersible canoe that was developed by the British during World War II. It's just fun.

Lauren von Bechmann: It's really fun.

Laura Hicken: It's cute. I love the way we display it. I love our like videos of like the frog men in their little under water canoe. So my favorite like classification of artifact that we have. And I just made a bunch of jokes about concealment devices. But I love our concealed listening devices. I mean love is the wrong word, but I think the severity and danger and risk of what we cover that the people in our museum went through and the people not in our museum that we don't even know about, I mean that they're intentionally boring. They're ashtrays. They're lamps. They're these things that you're not supposed to notice in the room. And that could ruin your life. It could cost you your life. And I think that for me, like the levity, is just there of like this thing that is so unremarkable can be so important. So I do again love them as -- I just think they really hammer home what we do in our museum.

Andrew Hammond: And they really have in the past. Right? Like a concealment device has cost people their marriage, their job, and ultimately sometimes their life.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. It's -- so I think you. They -- I think that really represents like that this is -- it's everywhere. Spying is everywhere.

Lauren von Bechmann: Yeah. I go back to Tony Mendez disguise kit a lot. I love that one. I think you love that one too. I love disguise. I think it's so interesting. I think, you know, how it's developed has been really interesting. Obviously I've told you that. I'm interested in film. And you look at like the history of disguise and you look at kind of how like film and disguise have kind of gone hand in hand sometimes, you know. People in film have used different techniques from disguise that we've like used to kind of like in the CIA and FBI and vice versa there's been a lot of like disguise techniques that we've seen kind of go hand in hand together. And I just, yeah, I find disguise in general like really, really interesting. That's also like a weird thing that we come across in the collection is a false nose or --

Laura Hicken: Teeth.

Lauren von Bechmann: Yeah. So that one is definitely -- to go back to your question, Andrew, is always a weird one when you come across just a nose and you're not really prepared for it. So I kind of love that and I love his kit that you can see in his drawings. I think it's really, really interesting.

Andrew Hammond: So we're always on the look out for cool new espionage or intelligence related artifacts. If any of our listeners out there, and I know that many of them are current or former intelligence community or they're very interested in this topic or maybe they have a family member with a spooky past, if any of them have something really cool that they're considering donating or giving to the International Spy Museum, what would the steps be they would take? How do they get in touch with us or with you guys?

Laura Hicken: Sure. So there's actually -- we have a forum on our website that you can go. It's an object inquiry form. And so you can plug in some basic details about your artifact or your group of artifacts and I'll email you and then ask a lot of very intense questions like are you allowed to have this. Where did this come from? Should the CIA know about this? But no. And then also kind of more fun questions like, you know, send us photos. Where -- what are the anecdotes involved in it? You know, I -- we don't always have a lot of details about the objects that are offered to us just because of the nature of them. I think we felt very lucky there have been a couple of recent donations. One. Photos from a gentleman who was in the OSSX2 counter intelligence. As well as some artifacts from someone who was at the Potsdam conference. And we have, you know, the oral histories and you know people wrote down when they asked their parents or grandparents questions. And they passed those along and that's really extraordinary for us to get that. And, you know, we -- we love the quirky anecdotes. You know, I mean it's great to have the full historical background, but you know I love whenever somebody's like, "Yeah. And Winston Churchill was mean." You know, or something like that. You want that background and so yeah. You can fill out an object inquiry form and it will have the basics, but then yeah. I'll email you and be like, "Tell me -- tell me the secret stuff."

Andrew Hammond: And just for our listeners that don't, you know -- museum's not their world, like help them understand that value in donating things to a museum. So, you know, posterity, the ways in which you look after it. Humidity. Temperature. Wear and tear. Light. Just give them the overview of like why do this.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. So I would say the primary reason to do this is, you know, because things will be lost. I mean, you know, we're talking about a letter from 1777 that's hugely important that like people are seeing today, that people will see 100 years from now because it's not just been properly cared for, but it's been entrusted to the public. We're a nonprofit museum. So our permanent collection exists for the public to see forever. And so when we accept things into our permanent collection, you know, you guys know we have a collections committee. We have discussions about, you know, not just, you know, can we take this, but can we care for it forever? Because we're very serious that like this is -- this is our job is to, you know, not just pop it in the museum tomorrow, but to know that future generations will have access to this. And then that's where all of it comes into you know making sure it's in the proper boxes and stored with the appropriate materials. You know, even just photographing and scanning things is such a huge part of the preservation process because it means we can share something more widely without having to physically take it out all the time and put that wear and tear on the artifact. You know, and have conservators come in and make sure things are looking okay. We -- I have my little pest traps and my humidifiers and my temperature readers and yeah. That's from my perspective. Like that's why you donate to a museum is because you see something is bigger than you and it will impact humanity.

Lauren von Bechmann: And so that, you know, we create an accessibility for everybody. I mean the Trotsky ax was under someone's bed for years and years and now everybody can see it. And it's, you know, a really important historical object. And we find that with a lot of the things that are donated to us. They were in someone's attic or they've been in a suitcase for years. So it's kind of that ability to give accessibility to our audiences so that they can see like parts of history. So it's not only to preserve it, but it's so that people can see it as well, you know. And a lot of people don't always know what they have. So that's why we always encourage people to you know at least ask us, you know, if they think something could be potentially donated because, you know, like I said, you're cleaning out your attic sometimes and you come across something and it could be of a large historical significance. And you find that a lot in museum collections. So and you know that's what we want to provide, a place for people to see kind of the unseen.

Andrew Hammond: That's kind of beautiful in a way. It's a way for something to live on forever. Yeah. Wow. And I don't know if it's worth mentioning. We don't do appraisals. We're not -- we're not the antiques roadshow. But if you want to know --

Laura Hicken: We can't authenticate and that's not -- you know, that's just that's not our role. That's like a really specific job. And but, you know, we -- and we admit this. We feel very lucky that we have content experts on our board. We have, you know -- it's hard to accept that Andrew does not contain all of human knowledge, but you know you have colleagues at museums. And we've done this in the past too. People have reached out to us and said, you know, "Do you want this?" And we've, you know -- we've had colleagues reach out to people at the Wende Museum in Germany and then, you know, trying to figure out what things are and if they apply to us. And yeah. We don't -- we don't really authenticate because that's not a skill we necessarily have. And we don't appraise because for us it's, you know -- it is invaluable if we're bringing it into the museum. It's not -- it's not what it's worth financially. It's what it's worth to human history.

Lauren von Bechmann: Right.

Andrew Hammond: Yeah. Yeah. That's a service that you purchase somewhere.

Lauren von Bechmann: Yeah. If you want an appraisal, that's -- it's --

Laura Hicken: You can Google an appraiser.

Andrew Hammond: I think that's what -- I think that that's one of the things that a lot of people maybe overlook with our museum because, you know, if you think about most other museums like nobody's trying to hide castle paintings. Maybe Greek vases from the first century BC are hidden, but it's not because anyone's intentionally squirreling them away or probably not by and large. Most other history museums in the country the material -- if there's something that's involved in the government the files are opened up after a period of time. No one's losing sleep over it. But with this stuff there's still stuff that's classified from like the JFK assassination. There's like you say. Some of this stuff we're not meant to know about. I mean enigma didn't come out until the 1970s. The Culper spy ring didn't come out until much, much later. So -- so there's a lot that we will never know. So I think that in some ways we are almost just for a history museum I can't think of any subject matter that's more challenging or more slippery or difficult to deal with than this subject matter.

Lauren von Bechmann: It's ever changing as well. You know, if we even look at kind of what's recently been happening and like even contemporary news, that's also hard. So all of it has been -- and you'll find a lot of things like the classified documents will be out, but the actual artifact won't. It will still be classified. We've had a couple of those where like we can't tell the full story because not everything has been released. And we don't feel like we can because we don't have all of that.

Laura Hicken: Or we don't know.

Lauren von Bechmann: Or we don't know. So it is a little bit of kind of having to put puzzle pieces together and, you know, we are a museum so we are a place where you want to tell a story that you kind of know all of the answers to and sometimes we don't. And that's really difficult when we're a place that people go to to find all the answers usually. Because we don't always have them.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. We'll just forward them to the CIA.

Andrew Hammond: I think one thing that's interesting about our content is because of the slipperiness and because of the fact that the totality of it is essentially unknown, whenever people come through the museum and because we're also dealing with more recent content matter, like there's no one -- the Greek part of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. There's no curator or collections manager there that's worried about someone 2 and a half thousand years old walking past them saying, "Well, actually we didn't use Greek vases like that. You've got your interpretation wrong." But for us there could literally be people that were involved in the operations and they know something that we don't. But then one of the difficulties is we're like, "Well please help us like fill out the part of the story that we don't know." And they say, "Well, we can't because we signed paperwork that says that we'll get charged if we do." I don't know. There's something interesting going on there, the fact that the people could come here and have been involved in the operations and may know stuff that we don't, but they can't share it with us. I think that's quite interesting as well. And let's be honest. We have 18 intelligence agencies as our neighbors. So we know that they come here.

Lauren von Bechmann: Right.

Laura Hicken: Yeah. It's -- I mean and we certainly even the things that we've got we've got things in our collection that like we know we're allowed to have. You know, the CIA knows we're allowed to have it. All those things. But the person that donated it is like, "Never show the part with my name on it." Yeah. We have a lot of things flagged and they're very well identified. But understandably so because it's kind of like, you know, even if your mission is totally out there and everybody knows everything, you still might not necessarily want your name attached. So we -- we always have this kind of, you know, just this little veil between us and what we're doing. I will say, though, you know, I am sure there is somebody complaining to the Met about the Greek statues. There -- yes.

Lauren von Bechmann: I think you do always run like difficulty in having a social history museum or history museum where people are still alive. And I think, you know, you find that with kind of any like any museum that you work at. The Museum of Childhood was, you know -- a lot of people who donated these things are still alive so I did get a lot of inquiries about that's wrong. But like you said, Andrew, it's even trickier if also they can't tell you that it's wrong or you don't have all the information. So I think you already -- we're already starting off at a hard enough base where, you know, people are still very much alive and can tell us no, but then --

Laura Hicken: But not what. But not what. Right.

Andrew Hammond: So final question. So imagine overnight humanity's wiped out. Like we're all gone. 100 years time. An alien spaceship comes. They come to Washington, D.C. We heard this was the capital city of this really important and powerful country. They're like, "Wow. What's this museum down by the river?" They come and they look at the spy museum's collection. What does that tell them about humanity?

Laura Hicken: Oh. I don't know if that'd be good. It'd be like wow. There's a lot of poison.

Andrew Hammond: What would it say to them?

Lauren von Bechmann: They loved spying on each other is what -- yeah.

Laura Hicken: Honestly creativity. I think yeah. I think they would be shocked by the amount of things that can be a concealment device. I think they would see a lot of creativity. I mean, you know, especially you just you read -- you read these things and you see these inventions and you're just like, "Oh, my god. Like literally anything goes in spy." And yeah. So I think that's the number one thing they would take away is like wow. These people tinkered. Didn't leave anything alone.

Lauren von Bechmann: No. Honestly I think that's a very beautiful answer because my first thought was wow these people are paranoid. And they have gone to the utmost lengths. And again I guess that hearkens back to your creativity comment. It's that these people have gone to such lengths to figure out information on each other that they have come up with some of the most creative solutions that we have seen. And also done some horrible things. So I think that would probably be my main take away.

Laura Hicken: I imagine them like being in the part of the like romantic comedy where you're like, "Can you people just talk to each other?" Like I'm sure they'd be looking at this and be like, "Did they not just talk?"

Lauren von Bechmann: Did they not have a therapist or like someone they could really -- like a couples therapist that they could have just sat down with and sorted it out.

Laura Hicken: I guess I'll stick with creative as opposed to just like, "Oh. Maniacal."

Lauren von Bechmann: Yeah. I'll stick with paranoia.

Andrew Hammond: I think that's a nice way to bring this to a close. Well, thanks ever so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure.

Laura Hicken: Thank you.

Lauren von Bechmann: Thanks for having us. Yeah. [ Music ]

Andrew Hammond: Thanks for listening to this episode of "Spycast." Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, please tell your friends and loved ones. Please also consider leaving us a five star review. Coming up next week on "Spycast."

Unidentified Person: I adore driving classic cars because of that, because you're much more involved in the process. It is not something you can do absentmindedly. I think I've driven three or four different DB5s. It's given me a newfound respect for the work that stunt drivers did when they were shooting these films and those sequences.

Andrew Hammond: If you have feedback, you can reach us by email at spycast.spymuseum.org or on X at incospycast. If you go to our page at thecyberwire.com/podcast/spycast you can find links to further resources, detailed show notes, and full transcripts. I'm your host Andrew Hammond and my podcast content partner is Erin Dietrick. The rest of the team involved in the show is Mike Mincey, Memphis Vaughan the Third, Emily Coletta, Emily Rens, Afua Anokwa, Ariel Samuel, Elliott Peltzman, Tre Hester and Jen Eiben. This show's brought to you from the home of the world's preeminent collection of intelligence and espionage related artifacts, the International Spy Museum. [ Music ]