Spies, secrets and surveillance in Berlin

Take a lie detector test, crack a safe or search for audio bugs in a room at Berlin's German Spy Museum

- Ming E. Wong

BERLIN - I recently discovered that an average computer would take 116 years to crack my favourite password. Of course, I am aware that hackers do not use standard computers. Still, that was reassuring.

I also learnt to type my name in Morse code, though who knows if I will be able to recognise it. And I had a glamorous moment when I posed and had my silhouette superimposed on a James Bond movie trailer.

All these took place at the German Spy Museum in Berlin.

Initially, I thought the museum might be old and musty. Don't spies operate in an "underground" sort of world?

The museum, launched in 2015 by former journalist Franz-Michael Gunther, is a hotbed of interactive activities and displays hundreds of fascinating objects. In 2020, it was nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award.

When I was there in August 2024, it was full of students eager to negotiate a labyrinth of laser lights, crack a safe or search for audio bugs in a room.

An extensive wall-mounted timeline traces the long history of espionage, making the point that societies all over the world seem to have had a hand in this game.

In mediaeval times, ancient potters recorded the formula for a special ceramic glazing, in code, on clay tablets. Pope Innocent IV sent monks from the Vatican to meet the Great Khan of the Mongols, who returned with detailed reports of Mongol military organisation and tactics.

Italian diplomats smuggled maps made by the Portuguese, as the latter dominated the spice trade. Before World War I, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill empowered the intelligence service to intercept the mail of private citizens.

The range of artefacts in the museum is a testament to the inventiveness and development of the espionage industry.

There are archaic listening devices, skeleton keys for picking locks, coins containing microfilm and a red bra hiding a tiny camera.