The National Cryptologic Museum is almost as notable for what it doesn't depict as for what it does. Less than a mile from the National Security Agency in Washington, DC, the museum offers a fascinating but sanitized peek into the NSA's double mission of protecting US military communications while intercepting conversations in the rest of the world.
The museum's small, eclectic collection includes devices such as the Civil War-era "wig-wag" crypto system and Confederate cypher wheels, both used to send secure messages from battlefields; a World War I radio-interception station for listening to behind-the-lines German communications; and a large electromechanical rotor machine built during World War II to decrypt Japanese diplomatic ciphers. A larger exhibit recounts some of the military's most successful cryptographers: Native American "code talkers," whose tribal languages were unintelligible to the enemy.
In the back of the museum is a copy of a 2-foot wooden seal of the United States of America, allegedly carved by Soviet school children and given to US Ambassador Averell Harriman in 1946. The ambassador was so taken with the seal that he hung it in his office; six years later, a routine security sweep discovered a hidden microphone inside the wood that the Soviets had used to eavesdrop on the ambassador's conversations.
But the best exhibit at the museum is the collection of 13 German Enigma machines, the standard military cipher used by Hitler during World War II. Not only do the machines work, but you can use them to encrypt and decode secret messages. To try it yourself, set the code wheels to 10-10-10, type in your message, and watch it translate into an unintelligible jumble of letters. If you were to send this communiqué, your collaborator would simply punch in your secret code to read the message.
So, what's missing? Almost every advance in cryptography since the invention of computers - save an IBM Harvest processor and a Cray supercomputer which faithfully served the code-crackin' NSA from the '60s into the '90s. A secure telephone exhibit is under construction.
But to get the real low-down on the nation's secret ciphers, you'll still have to walk a mile down the road and ask the spooks for a job.
National Cryptologic Museum: Admission is free. Museum hours: weekdays 9 a.m.-3 p.m., Saturdays: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. National Security Agency: +1 (301) 688 5849.
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