MI5 delves into the history of spying in new London exhibition

A desiccated IIO-year-old lemon that played a key role in espionage history is one of the star attractions of a London exhibition drawn from the files of MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence agency. Compact spy cameras, microdots in a talcum powder tin and a briefcase abandoned by fleeing Soviet spy Guy Burgess are also part of the show at Britain's National Archives, which charts the history of a secretive agency that is-slowly-becoming more open.

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In collaboration with host The National Archives and prepared over several years by the agency's own archivists, "M15: Official Secrets" is giving the public the chance to see equipment and methods used by the real life James Bond and his colleagues over the agency's 115-year history.

Ken McCallum, director general of M15, said the agency wanted to be more transparent. While TV fiction showed the dramatic side to spying, real intelligence work was about "ordinary human beings together doing extraordinary things", he said at an event on Tuesday launching the exhibition.

M15 Director General Ken McCallum told journalists at a preview on Tuesday that the organization's work "is often different from fiction, whether that fiction is George Smiley or Jackson Lamb"-the brilliant spymaster of John le Carré's novels and the slovenly supervisor of M15 rejects in Mick Herron's "Slow Horses" series. Many stories told in the exhibition, however, would not be out of place in a thriller.

The lemon, now black and shriveled, helped convict Karl Muller, a German spy in Britain during World War I.