SPY MUSEUM
Palm Beach collector's got a secret -- and it's really spooky
Posted on Sat, Jul. 05, 2008
BY GLENN GARVIN
LILLY ECHEVERRIA / MIAMI HERALD STAFF
Spy historian and gadget collector H. Keith Melton's new book is filled with fascinating spook contraptions.
SPY STUFF
Some of the best stuff in
Spycraft, the book H. Keith Melton wrote with co-authors Robert Wallace and Henry Robert Schlesinger, is unfortunately not on display in his museum:
• The acoustic kitty: Trying to figure a way to plant a bug on an Asian leader, CIA spy techs learned he loved cats and let them wander freely in and out of his office. They implanted a microphone in a cat's ear, a transmitter in the loose skin on the back of her neck and an antenna woven into her fur. Didn't work. ''You really can train a cat to move small distances on command,'' Melton says. ''But only in a familiar environment. In a new place with new sounds and smells, it didn't work.'' The gray-and-white tabby, name still withheld as a national security secret, was unwired ''and lived a happy, normal life,'' Melton says.
• The untasty rat: The concept of the dead-drop -- the term spies use for places they pass covert messages and equipment -- turned disconcertingly literal in the early 1970s when it occurred to somebody that even the most hardcore KGB officers were unlikely to pick up a dead rat to see if something was hidden inside. CIA technicians immediately began to freeze-dry rat corpses with a little Velcro-fastened cavity inside where stuff could be hidden. They quickly discovered the rats also had to be treated with a healthy dose of Tabasco sauce to discourage relatives of the acoustic kitty. ''I've seen some of the rats, but I don't have one of my own,'' says a disappointed Melton.
• The exploding pancake: During World War II, OSS operatives in China figured out a way to mix high explosives into flour that could be made into pancakes -- but would also blow up if hooked to a detonator. No word on how the stuff tasted, possibly because no one lived to tell.
-- GLENN GARVIN
The surgeon general doesn't know the half of it: H. Keith Melton's got a cigarette that isn't just bad for your health. It can kill, abruptly and noisily.
''You stick it in your mouth,'' Melton explains, gesturing, ``pull it sharply like this to release the safety, and then you squeeze the filter to fire a .22-caliber bullet.''
If you think the cigarette-gun sounds like a daffy outtake from the spy spoof Get Smart, you're on the right track . . . almost. It was a real weapon issued to American spies during World War II by the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. And now it's one of thousands of espionage artifacts that Melton maintains in a private museum in his Palm Beach County home.
From microdot film barely visible to the human eye to a midget one-man submarine, Melton -- an intelligence historian whose latest book, Spycraft (Dutton, $29.95), is a fascinating and often funny compendium of spook contraptions -- has packed his house with espionage exotica:
• The bat bomb. During World War II, OSS scientists experimented with a scheme to parachute cages filled with a million bats strapped with tiny incendiary bombs over Japan. The idea was that the cages would open during descent, and the bats would flock like furry little suicide bombers to the attics and eaves of Japanese houses, igniting a catastrophic firestorm.
''It turned out the bats didn't travel well, so they abandoned the idea,'' explains Melton as he examines one of the bomb-shaped cages. ``But from a technical standpoint, the idea worked perfectly -- really perfectly. Some of the bats got loose during a test and burned down an air base in New Mexico.''
• The killer umbrella. In 1978, Bulgarian intelligence agents assassinated an exile critic of their country's communist regime as he waited at a London bus stop. The weapon: an umbrella that contained a tube of compressed gas, which fired a pellet the size of a pinhead into his skin. ''It was filled with ricin, one of the most toxic substances on Earth,'' Melton says. ``The KGB manufactured these umbrellas and used them for political assassinations around the world.''
• The spy who loved me or, at least, turned me on. During the 1950s, the CIA began passing messages to its spies overseas in microdots -- photographic negatives so tiny they could be concealed in the dot of a typed exclamation point like this! But for a spy to keep a microscope around the house to read the microdots would invite detection. Happily, the CIA found a photographic novelty company that manufactured small, unobtrusive lenses, and ordered 100 of them. ''When they arrived, it turned out they were pre-loaded with porn photos,'' Melton cackles. ``That's what they were used for, porn peep-viewers.''
The museum, a sort of little brother to the 20,000-square-foot International Spy Museum that Melton runs in Washington, D.C., consumes three large visible rooms in Melton's house and who knows how many hidden ones behind the 37 -- no kidding, 37 -- secret doors, hidden panels and fake bookcases. (''I just love stuff like that,'' he concedes.)
It's not all devoted to gizmos. The shelves are stacked with everything from the mundane (the tea samovar used by KGB spy Kim Philby after he fled Great Britain for Moscow) to the macabre (the model skull prepared by Mexican authorities in their investigation of the murder of exiled Communist renegade Leon Trotsky). There's even an official spy in residence -- the ashes of defected Soviet intelligence officer Alexander Orlov, along with the whistle he always wore around his neck to summon aid if Stalin's agents tried to kidnap him.
The skull, complete with a hole where a KGB assassin smashed a mountaineering axe into Trotsky's head, is part of Melton's next big project, a book called The Search For Trotsky's Icepick. It will document his 20-year hunt for the murder weapon, which disappeared from a police evidence room in Mexico City four decades ago.
''You've got to have a quest to keep your blood running, and this one is mine,'' Melton says. ``I've got the skull model -- I believe it's authentic, even though the hole is not quite in the right place. I've got the gold watch the Soviets gave the assassin as a reward. I've got three or four axes that people have claimed were the weapon, but weren't. I'm pretty sure I know where the real one is and a way to authenticate it. I'm going to get it.''
HOBBY TO PROFESSION
But it's the gadgetry that really drives Melton's espionage fascination, which began when he was serving in Vietnam with the U.S. Navy (he's a 1966 Annapolis grad) and brushed up against some intelligence operations. It has grown from a hobby to a profession: Melton has written 23 books on espionage and lectures at the Interagency Training Center, a government spy college.
He has also served as technical advisor on a number of spy movies and TV shows. And, Melton notes, lots of the gimcracks used by fictional spies have had startlingly close counterparts in reality, like Maxwell Smart's shoe phone in Get Smart (Czech spies planted bugs in footware during the Cold War) and the poison-dispensing pen James Bond used in Moonraker (the CIA gave something similar to a would-be assassin of Fidel Castro).
''There's a surprising correlation between gadgets in fiction and in the real-life clandestine world,'' Melton observes. ``Probably the best thing I've ever seen in that regard was the old Mission: Impossible TV show. Everything in that show had to be do-able under the engineering of the time. They didn't just make things up.''
But even when Hollywood producers did make things up, their imaginations tended to run in the same direction as those of actual spymasters. The seemingly fanciful Cone of Silence in Get Smart -- a force-field that allowed the hapless Smart to talk without anyone else hearing him, though it always failed at the worst possible moment -- was, in fact, similar to something the CIA came up with to thwart enemy eavesdropping.
'We call it `the bubble,' '' Melton says. ``It's a small, acoustically shielded room where everything's made of clear plastic -- the chairs, the tables, everything. That way, nobody can put any kind of bugging device in it. It would be instantly visible. We put them in embassies in Moscow and anyplace else where the host government was hostile, because if the bad guys had ever controlled your territory, it's possible they've left listening devices.''
That's not to say you can believe in every piece of technology you see in a spy movie. The Swiss Army knife equipped with a flamethrower in Get Smart just makes Melton smile and shake his head.
WHAT'S THE USE?
''Forget the feasibility,'' he says. ``The real question is, what would be the purpose? The primary purpose of intelligence is this: You've got an agent in the field with secrets, but he's no good to you unless you can communicate with him and find out what the secrets are. The majority of espionage devices are to gather and transmit secrets.
'A Swiss Army knife with a flamethrower isn't going to help you do that. What would be really great espionage technology in a Swiss Army knife would be to take that little plastic toothpick and recast it with a special plastic that leaves traces on paper that can be detected with a chemical or something like that. Then an agent can sit down and write his secrets in the margins of an ordinary letter and mail them. In tradecraft, that's known as `more or less invisible writing,' and it's incredibly useful.'' (So useful, in fact, that the CIA actually did it.)
The mention of Swiss Army knives, however, makes Melton smile with nostalgia. ''Before 9/11, a Swiss Army knife was a great place to conceal spy technology,'' he recalls. ``Everybody had them, they didn't attract any notice. Now if you try to travel with one, you look like a terrorist.''
Nobody, Melton admits, is likely to make a movie about plastic toothpicks, or most of the other handy-but-dull spy gadgets in his museum. He picks up one, a hollow three-inch metal bolt.
''You pull a real bolt out of a bridge and replace it with this,'' he says. 'Then, sometime later, maybe years later, you tell your agent, `Go to this bridge, and the 13th bolt from the top in the second pillar is hollow. Unscrew it and leave your documents in there.' That's called a dead-drop. A dead-drop that's used only once is an incredibly secure way to pass messages. How to pass messages in a bolt under a bridge doesn't make a very interesting movie, but it's one of the fundamentals of espionage.''
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