In a city with so many amazing, free museums (starting with more than a dozen within the Smithsonian Institution), it can feel difficult to justify spending more than $30 per ticket at the Spy Museum.
That’s why I was excited to get free tickets to their annual Spy Fest last year. It occurs on the fifth Friday night of the year. Tickets become available around Jan. 5 and run out within a week or two. If you want to go, you could join the waitlist, or do what I did and set a reminder for the following year to snag tickets as soon as they become available.
About the Spy Museum
The International Spy Museum is, as one would expect, all about espionage, and boasts it has “the largest collection of international espionage artifacts ever placed on public display” on the About the Collection webpage. Go to their Explore the Collection Highlights page to preview some of the items on display.
Artifacts on display
One kind of item that stood out to my husband and me was the spycraft suppositories, including a rectal tool kit that was used by CIA operatives during the Cold War. The YouTube video on the webpage linked above by Atlas Obscura shows a curator saying that he watches people do a double-take when they view that item. A museum representative says in another video about a scrotum concealment prototype that this isn’t glamorous work; it’s not like being James Bond.
Finding the permanent exhibits
When we first arrived at Spy Fest, they sent us up an elevator to the top floor, where there was an expo for kids about working for intelligence services. At first, I feared that’s all Spy Fest actually was. We were able to skip that and got back on the elevator to the fifth floor for the exhibits.
The permanent exhibit space is vast and spread out across the fourth and fifth floors. You start on the fifth floor in the briefing center to watch a short video and get a badge that you will use for your undercover mission, which consists of a series of kiosks through the exhibits. It tests your memory about your assigned identity, gives you secret agent puzzles to figure out, and allows you to choose a disguise. It creates an AI-generated photo of your chosen disguise that you can download.
Finding the museum
The Spy Fest event is from 6–9 p.m., which isn’t enough time to peruse everything there is to learn about; it’s best to plan to arrive early in order to start on time.
Our first mission was to access the entrance after finding free street parking on Independence Ave. Since it’s after hours for all the museums and government buildings in the area, free street parking is plentiful. From there, finding the entrance was a miserable adventure, complicated by one of us riding a motorized scooter due to health issues.
If you’re able to walk up steps, you can access the L’Enfant Plaza Food Court, which has an elevator and escalator to the plaza level of the Spy Museum. After wandering around for a while, unsuccessfully using Google Maps, we ended up going into the underground parking garage for the building, getting lost again, and taking an elevator in the neighboring Hilton hotel up to the ground/plaza level.
Since then, the museum has added more details about finding the entrance to their directions page. I recommend carefully planning your route and watching the new video walkthrough for your chosen route. We did not have the benefit of signs pointing us in the right direction, and the parking lot attendants and security guards were mostly unable to help. That area is also under a bridge and didn’t feel particularly safe at night.
We were so happy to finally explore the exhibits after the saga of getting there and the initial impression that it was just a career expo. It was crowded, of course, but we were able to move freely.
Special exhibit: Bond in Motion
Before leaving, we did a quick run-through of the special exhibit at the time called Bond in Motion with 17 vehicles from the James Bond movies, including Aston Martins, a submarine, a snowmobile, and a hang glider. It normally requires a separate ticket for the third-floor exhibit. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be open for Spy Fest, but we walked in and were the only visitors right before closing time at 9 p.m.
Conclusion: get tickets to Spy Fest
My overall assessment is that I wouldn’t splurge on regular tickets to the Spy Museum, but if you live nearby or will be in the area, you can get free tickets to Spy Fest, and if this kind of museum sounds appealing, definitely take advantage of this event. I’m setting a reminder now for next year and will go on my own if I can’t find any other takers.