Spy in the City

What was the first spy movie you watched? Did it make you want to be a spy- at least for awhile? The International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. gives visitors a chance to experience the intrigue, mystery, technology and danger (have you ever been on the streets of DC during tourist season?) with an interactive game using a hand-held GPS (named COBRA- Covert OBservation and Reconnaissance Analyzer) as you tour the city searching for your "man" and completing your mission. Yep, this was right up our alley and Saturday we headed into the city with Janne, Adam and Lisa (Janne's friend from grad school) to be "Spies in the City!"

I like the woman crouching down in front of Janne and Adam... like that would make her not be in the picture! Or maybe she was also a spy and was just being stealthy? 

The website advised us that this would be a covert mission so we should try to "blend in with the crowd"- not draw attention to ourselves, dress like tourists, things like that- and that the mission would cover 1.2 miles  and take approximately an hour and a half. Armed with water bottles, cameras and comfortable walking shoes (tourists to the core!), we arrived at the International Spy Museum at the designated time and received our equipment, briefing and code names. We were ready to start our mission.

Otto, Natasha, Mitch Rapp, Agent 911 and Elle 

Our mission, inspired by two real cases, Operation Lemon-Aid (1977) and Kitty Hawk (1966), required us to use intel from an informer code-named CATBIRD- and our COBRA's  to locate and deactivate a device that would emit an electromagnetic pulse that would wipe out electronic equipment. COBRA could receive secure text messages, audio files, video and photographs as well as scan fingerprints, chemical samples, etc. and transmit the data to HQ for analysis.

Analyzing data from HQ was not always a simple task. And we certainly blend in well with our earphones and COBRA's on lanyards that scream "SPY MUSEUM" in brilliant white letters!

We went to various locations where we searched for clues, deciphered codes, scanned a bank deposit drop box for fingerprints, checked a pillar for microdots and triangulated signals until we discovered where the device was hidden. We then had to deactivate the device. Mitch Rapp (Adam) was the only spy able to correctly deactivate the device.

The J. Edgar Hoover Building, Ford's Theater, a statue and the National Archives... a few of the places we "spied!"

The alley where the device was hidden.

After we had completed our mission, our "answers" were graded and we were given a score. Although Mitch Rapp (Adam) was the only one to correctly deactivate the device, Elle (Lisa) won the game with about 133,000 points. Agent 911 (Janne) and Natasha (me) become "agents" while everyone else became "case officers."

Natasha's  score... guess I need some more practice!

Good job, Elle (Lisa). When do you get your "license to kill" and Double O status?

We enjoyed the game with a few caveats: 1) the COBRA units didn't work as well as we would have liked- some were slow to respond or malfunctioned part way through the game, 2) it would have tied together better if the places we were sent had more history with the story line. As it was the game could have been set anywhere.

After resuming our real identities, we headed over to the White House for some sight-seeing since this was Lisa's first trip to Washington, D.C. Secret Service Police (not agents) were everywhere and we pondered what it would mean to live in the White House- the loss of privacy, etc.

We decided we wouldn't like living with snipers on the roof of our house. We left thinking about some of the sacrifices the First Family makes.

We left the north side of the White House and started walking around to see the other side. We had just arrived at the south side when a bunch of Secret Service police descended on the area- some on foot (running), some on bikes, some screeching to a stop in a car with lights flashing and siren screaming- and told people to leave the area immediately. They began barricading walkways and yelling at people to leave NOW. Once we had all regrouped, we wondered what precipitated that response. Did President Obama just want to go for a walk in the Rose Garden? Was Marine One landing? Was there a bomb threat? Was it a drill? One thing we know for sure- we'll never know the real story!