The Secret-code Museum
Jack Ingram, curator of the National Security Agency’s National Cryptologic Museum, denies that his institution is a mysterious place. Yet visitors have to find it on an access road behind a gas station, surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence of chainlink and barbed wire, housed in the former restaurant of a nondescript gray ranchstyle converted motel at Fort George G. Meade, just outside Baltimore. Though the agency, a division of the Department of Defense, is trying to go public, it’s been enshrouded in secrecy for so long that there’s no wonder the collection is exhibited without much shouting.
The ice surrounding the NSA started to break fifteen years ago, when its then director, Bobby Ray Inman, allowed an exhibit of NSA cipher machines in the Smithsonian. David Hatch, a recently retired NSA historian, says the agency was “still too much caught up in the culture of the Cold War” then. The museum was finally assembled last year; it opened to the public in December. Most visitors are the family of employees and their curious neighbors and friends, who always wondered what Bob across the street was working on for all those years.
“We sometimes get the people who thought they were going to see James Bond, and they leave pretty quickly,” Ingram says. But for the amateur cryptologist or the former intelligence worker, the museum has more than twenty cipher machines on display, along with books, radios, and computer equipment from the NSA collection, as well as exhibits featuring the prominent men and women involved in code making and breaking in this century. Many items seized from foreign intelligence outposts are on view, along with America’s World War II machines based on Hebern designs.
The atmosphere of the museum is so subdued you expect to hear polite conversation and the clinking of silverware—not to casually view machines you once might have been shot for looking at. The museum has a few hands-on exhibits, including a working Enigma cipher, and it plans to add secure-voice and voice-scrambling exhibits by the end of the year. Some of the biggest finds have come from within the NSA. One retiring employee rediscovered a Civil War cipher while clearing out his office and donated it to the museum.
The National Cryptologic Museum, located on Colony Seven Road just off Route 32 and adjacent to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, is open weekdays rom 9:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. , other hours by appointment at 301-688-5849.
