Capital city of spying puts the tools of its trade on show

Forget the White House, Capitol Hill and the Lincoln Memorial. As of yesterday Washington has a new attraction – the International Spy Museum.

This staid, imperial capital, devoted to the exercise of power, may not be everyone's idea of sin city. But when it comes to the second oldest profession you can't beat it. Where better to open what is billed as the world's most comprehensive museum on spying than the city with more spooks per head than any place on earth?

America does museums fabulously, and this is no exception – five old, downtown office buildings a couple of blocks from FBI headquarters, knocked together and turned into a $40m (£25m) state-of-the-art, total-immersion experience.

The museum is the brainchild of Milton Maltz, 72, who worked during the Korean War at the then super-secret National Security Agency (NSA or 'No Such Agency') before becoming a disc jockey and building a small network of radio and television stations. He now owns Malrite, a company specialising in museum development, and which helped set up the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

The parentage shows: an abundance of pop glitz, lots of interactive devices, spare metal walls and mirrors in the exhibition rooms, a souvenir shop which covers acres, and the Spy City Café with tabletop maps of Washington spy sights.

And this city has plenty. It is, after all, the home of James Jesus Angleton and Alger Hiss, of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, of defectors and CIA safe houses in the Virginia suburbs, of the Venona decrypts, the city where Kim Philby and Donald McLean plundered US intelligence and nuclear secrets by the suitcaseful.

The museum's board isn't bad either, a multinational A-list of intelligence celebs – from the British spy historian Christopher Andrew to William Webster, the only man who headed the FBI and the CIA, and Oleg Kalugin, formerly a general in the KGB and recently convicted in absentia of treason by a court in Moscow.

"We want to show that spies are not just romantic cowboys who ride off into action," says Mr Maltz. "A spy is a spy around the clock, playing the role of deception for 24 hours every day. Technology is fine, but in the end spying comes down to an individual."

Just as the Holocaust Museum here gives each visitor the ID card of a victim whose fate he learns when he leaves, at the spy museum you can choose a cover identity, on which you will be grilled in a mock interrogation (I failed lamentably; after five wrong answers, the video border guard's eyes narrowed in suspicion and the console warned "taken in for further questioning", flashing "abort mission").

Ultimately, the museum is a show – espio-tainment, one might call it – where real spy gear mingles with the movies: one room a meticulous recreation of the office of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, another featuring a replica of James Bond's silver Aston Martin. This is America, where fact and fiction merge. But the biggest disappointment for real spy buffs is the lack of historical artefacts.

Yes, you see plenty of the gizmos used by the spy services. Among my favourites are: a pistol disguised as a lipstick (the "kiss of death") and a tiny poison gas gun, courtesy of the KGB; a "through-the-wall" spy camera perfected by East Germany's Stasi to photograph foreigners in hotel rooms; a 19th century French ring with a gun concealed in it, as well as some nasty killing devices for our own special operations boys in the Second World War.

But of items associated with famous spies, you find only the briefcase of the US Navy spy John Walker with its electronic counter-measures kit, and the blue US Mail box from 37th Street in Washington DC which Ames, the CIA mole, marked with chalk to communicate with his KGB handlers.

Could the FBI not have kicked in some of the incriminating evidence found around Ames' home and in his trash cans – or personal items of Hanssen, the worst spy in the bureau's history, jailed for life just a couple of months ago? Philby and McLean too did some of their most infamous work in Washington, as diplomats at the British embassy in the late 1940s. But the small tableau devoted to the Cambridge spies consists of a few photo blow-ups, three worn wooden tennis rackets and a pewter beer mug – the last presumably to give period feel.

By far the best British- related segment is a mock-up of the tunnel built by the British and Americans in 1950s Berlin to enable them to tap into Soviet communications. Unbeknown to them, however, it had been betrayed by a young MI6 operative called George Blake. Blake now lives in Moscow.