{"id":17219,"date":"2025-11-03T13:17:05","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T13:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/?p=17219"},"modified":"2025-11-07T12:54:54","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T12:54:54","slug":"the-spy-museum-in-washington-dc-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/2025\/11\/03\/the-spy-museum-in-washington-dc-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spy Museum in Washington, DC – Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

continued… <\/a>In 1945, WWII ended and then-President Truman dissolved the OSS. But with the Cold War brewing, people convinced Truman they needed to peacetime intelligence agency to prevent another Pearl Harbor from happening. To try to garner public support, they even used the propaganda card by making a Hollywood film called “OSS” about the heroic actions of the OSS during the war. In 1947, Truman authorized the creation of the CIA, which was staffed by many OSS alumni.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next section was provocative. “In a democracy, there is always tension between openness and secrecy. When people fear their country is under threat, they accept more security. When fears fade, they often demand greater transparency.” The first display was about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were convicted of espionage in 1951 and later executed, based on the US governments assertion that there was indisputable evidence that the Rosenbergs had passed atomic weapon information on to the Soviets. However, the evidence was top secret and couldn’t be shared — while there was supporting evidence revealed in court, the jury convicted without seeing the allegedly most damning evidence. The execution was highly controversial, with many protests. In 1995, the evidence was finally released — it was captured and decrypted correspondence that proved that Julius was a Soviet spy. Whether he passed on information about atomic weapons and whether Ethel was a spy were less clear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1970s, there was a movement to expose the government’s extralegal activities. In 1971, a group broke into the FBI office and stole information about COINTELPRO, a secret counterintelligence program to infiltrate, monitor and disrupt social and political movements. Tactics utilized included wiretapping, forgery, searching homes, sending anonymous notes ad leading false information. The files were given to the press and published. The burglars were never caught. From 1975 – 1976, there were congressional hearings on the FBI and CIA operations, which led to reforms, including instituting a congressional oversight committee and the creation of the FISA court to review secret surveillance requests. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2013, government contractor Edward Snowden stole and leaked to the press 1.5 million classified files about secret US surveillance programs, such as PRISM, that violated people’s privacy rights by harvesting data from cell phones, land line phone, emails, texts, social media and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Snowden display led into an exhibit on cybersecurity, the current big battlefield. “From propaganda to sabotage, economic interference to political meddling, cyber operations let intelligence agencies gather information or disrupt vital systems swiftly, safely and remotely.” And there was a display about Moonlight Maze, a cyberattack from Russia targeting the US that began as early as 1996 and infected computers at the Pentagon, NASA and the department of energy. In 2010, Washington DC wanted to prove that their electronic voting machines were secure, so they challenged hackers to try to beat the system. The hackers easily infiltrated. In 2010, the US magian to infect Iran’s nuclear power plant with a virus called Stuxnet, despite the fact that the plant’s computers were’t connected to the internet. Stuxnet destroyed 25% of Iran’s uranium enriching capabilities. They mentioned a ransomware attack, where the attacker locks you out of your own computer until you pay them to unlock it, on the British National Health System in 2017. They mentioned that China makes some military equipment so strikingly similar to American technology that the US believes that China stole the plans from the US military. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next section was about cultural propaganda, with displays about toys, films, comic books, etc, all geared at making the police and other government agencies look like the good guys, thus garnering public support. Interestingly, they mentioned the CIA cover-up of aliens here. According to the signs, what people thought were alien sightings were actually people seeing the US testing spy equipment or seeing what the US government believed was foreign spy equipment. The signs said that the CIA was happy to let people believe that they were alien craft. It also said that Area 51 was a U-2 test site “linked to popular lore of alien visitors,” though it didn’t explicitly say that there wasn’t any truth to the rumors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There was an exhibit on interrogation. They detailed some physical torture strategies, which were pretty horrifying. Christi learned that an Iron Maiden was a coffin-like chamber with spikes that ever so slowly and painfully killed its inhabitant. This information has affected how she views the band with the same name. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Interrogations involving physical torture has been illegal in the US since 1956. Yet, after the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center,<\/a> then-President George HW Bush authorized “enhanced interrogation.” Basically, the US Department of Justice took techniques that the US had previously defined as “torture” and redefined them as “not torture” — and thus legal to use. This issue went to the Supreme Court in 2006. The Supreme Court ruling in Hamden v Rumsfeld<\/a> <\/em>was that these “enhanced techniques” violated the rules of the Geneva Convention and were thus illegal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The signs also described psychological techniques: some to make detainees more amiable to talking and others to coerce them into talking. The signs again briefly mentioned the CIA’s MK Ultra mind-control project<\/a>, where extensive psychological testing was done, in part to help make psychological interrogation more effective and in part to train our agents to better withstand such techniques. The CIA admits to 162 research projects at more than 80 universities, labs and foundations between 1953 and 1973. Many of the test subjects did not volunteer and were experimented on without knowledge or consent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the Revolutionary War, the US used the “amiable to talking” method and was nice to its prisoners. We’d learned in Yorktown that many soldiers fighting for the British chose to stay in the US<\/a> after the war ended, in large part because they’d been treated well and had become part of the communities they’d initially been fighting against. And while we’ve never read this in any of the museums, we suspect that befriending the enemy was part of the reason that George Washington had managed to create such a vast spy network<\/a>. Napoleon also discouraged torture as he believed the people being tortured didn’t tell the truth; they just said what they believed the torturers wanted to hear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next exhibit was on terrorism. To be continued…<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

continued… In 1945, WWII ended and then-President Truman dissolved the OSS. But with the Cold War brewing, people convinced Truman they needed to peacetime intelligence agency to prevent another Pearl Harbor from happening. To try to garner public support, they … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,425,1,44,2,398,397],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-washington-dc","category-general","category-history","category-northamerica","category-tourist-activities","category-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17219"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17309,"href":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17219\/revisions\/17309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosmos.liveflux.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}