By Southwester Staff
The International Spy Museum, located in L’Enfant Plaza, has launched a new pop-up exhibit featuring the private collection of entrepreneur, investor and technology advisor Grant Verstandig, who also serves on the museum’s board.
On public display together for the first time, the items from the collection run the gamut of tools and tricks of intelligence tradecraft. They include items used by spies in the World War II era for defense and navigation, such as a set of dominos used by Britain’s MI9 to conceal secret maps of Burma (Myanmar) for downed airmen and prisoners of war.
Psychological operations to disrupt the German government’s food rationing system during World War II included counterfeit ration coupons distributed to unsuspecting private citizens, which are now on display alongside a camera hidden inside a pocket watch and a pistol disguised as a tube of lipstick.
Shoes fitted with pivoting blades and a serrated stomping plate are on view alongside the prop passport used in the 1942 film Casablanca, with visible passport stamps for Lisbon and New York, under the name of the film’s famous fictional resistance leader Victor Laszlo. The pop-up exhibit Secrets Revealed will run through the end of March.