Trail of the unexpected: Spies Come In From The Cold In Washington Dc'S Latest Museum

For the world's most powerful centre of government, Washington has an oddly dual personality. At the centre of a massive conurbation, it has banned skyscrapers and remains low-rise. And, while it hosts many of the institutions that uphold the ideals of the US constitution, it is also home to much of the double-dealings and dubious machinations deemed necessary to protect the American way of life.

For the world's most powerful centre of government, Washington has an oddly dual personality. At the centre of a massive conurbation, it has banned skyscrapers and remains low-rise. And, while it hosts many of the institutions that uphold the ideals of the US constitution, it is also home to much of the double-dealings and dubious machinations deemed necessary to protect the American way of life.

An ideal location, then, for a museum of espionage. The $36m (£24.5m) International Spy Museum resides in what were once five handsome downtown office buildings. All more than a century old, in Romanesque Revival, Italianate and other Victorian styles, they are subject to preservation orders, making refurbishment a painstaking exercise.

Two of the individuals behind the Spy Museum, Denis Barrie and Milton Maltz, were founders of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. However, there are no plans to elevate spies in a similar way to the rock stars in the Hall of Fame.

The museum's first room is called Covers and Legends, and it is where visitors are required to adopt a fake identity for the duration of their tour. Next stop is the briefing room, with its maps bearing coloured lights to mark the world's espionage hot spots.

My education in spooking gathered pace in the School for Spies, which reveals tricks of the trade. Here, visitors can disguise faces on a computer screen, and subsequently attempt to pick out their subject in a crowd. The Cold War section boasts a mock-up of a Berlin café. Attention to detail is admirable – there is even an authentic German manhole cover set into the floor.

Elsewhere, a replica of the library of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of modern Russian espionage, appears cosy until you realise that this was where Dzerzhinsky carried out interrogations, and that one of the exit doors led straight to prison. But perhaps the exhibit of which the museum is most proud is its original 1944 German Enigma Cipher Machine.

There is no denying that the museum is fun. However, regrettably, covert government action has a more serious, not to say macabre side. This is hinted at by some of the sombre items on display: a pistol masquerading as a lipstick and a cyanide gas gun, both of KGB manufacture. Jennie Saxon, the marketing manager, plays down their implications: "We want our visitors to understand that the goal of espionage isn't really to kill people," she says. "It's to gather information to prevent adverse actions and activities taking place."

Yet what is left out of the museum is at least as important as what's there. In true Washington style, the public and private faces of the museum are very different. Its advisory board is packed with former members of the CIA (and one former KGB officer, General Oleg Kalugin), and the more disturbing aspects of the CIA's history don't get an airing here.

In its Phoenix Programme counter-intelligence exercise in South Vietnam alone, between 20,000 and 40,000 civilians were tortured and executed by the agency and its hirelings. There are no plans to feature this in the museum as yet, nor the agency's predilection for hiring private armies and air forces to wage clandestine wars in developing countries, or of its drug trafficking.

In the meantime, instead, you can check out the room devoted to the likes of Austin Powers and James Bond.

The Spy Museum, 800 F Street NW, Washington, DC. (www. spymuseum.org; 001 202 393 7798) will open on 19 July – 10am-8pm every day except Christmas Day; adults $11 (£7.50), children/students $8 (£5.50), five and under, free

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