Sorry everyone. No trains this week. I’m just as bummed as you are.
I had a very rare opportunity come up this past week and I would be remiss not to blog about it for your benefit. Fun fact: There are whole museums, full of national treasures, that we will probably never see. These museums are tucked away on military bases, inside the walls of intelligence agencies and even onboard US warships. This week, I had the unique opportunity to visit the CIA museum, located inside their headquarters. I’ve also had the privilege to see several US ships and the semi-museums they keep onboard. But lets be real: you want to know about the CIA Museum.
The CIA museum itself is unclassified, as is the information inside it. Its getting to it that will prevent you from ever seeing it. There are two different exhibit spaces, one focusing on the OSS (a CIA forunner agency) in WWII, the other on CIA involvement in the Cold War and in the War on Terror. The latter galleries are actually a functional hallway that employees walk through in spite of the exhibits. I wouldn’t even try to list out all of the unique artifacts located inside the galleries, but here are some that might get your attention: a model of Osama bin Laden’s compound used for planning the Navy SEALs raid, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s signature white fedoras, a Mi-17 helicopter that ferried the first CIA operatives into Afghanistan after 9/11. Clearly, these items have important stories to tell to the general public. My question is, will these artifacts ever leave the CIA headquarters building so that more Americans can see them?
I can also speak, broadly, to museums or museum panels on US warships. Just about all of them will have info on the ship’s namesake and/or previous ships of the same name. Destroyers will typically have several large panels or shadow boxes in the P-way (that’s a hallway for you non-Navy types) outside the XO (executive officer or 2nd in command)’s stateroom. My ship had our namesake’s actual Medal of Honor along with the gazillion other medals he was awarded for heroism, each with the citation below it. A really neat one I was able to see was USS Samuel B. Roberts FFG-58, before she was decommissioned. An entire P-way detailed her ordeal with an Iranian mine in 1988 and the efforts to keep the ship afloat. The most impressive shipboard museums are aircraft carriers. These behemoths have an entire space on the ship dedicated to their namesake. The museum on USS Bush was literally in a ‘B’ in honor of the former president.
This is from my old ship,
USS James E. Williams
Sorry for any conservation types out there, but no one onboard knows anything about artifact care. We just dust them every week or so.
So what’s the point of these cloistered museums? Sure the occasional dignitary gets paraded through them, but if they aren’t for the public, who are they for? Quite simply, its the people that work there. I had memorized most of the panels outside our XO’s stateroom by the time I left my first ship because junior offices tend to spend a lot of time waiting in line outside that office. All of those CIA employees that pass through the galleries of the CIA museum may not stop and look at the exhibits, but hopefully are instilled with a sense of purpose even by glancing at the Agency’s storied history.
These small museums have a purpose, but just saying they are for the local employees doesn’t exempt them from several thoughts for improvement. As I said, some of the artifacts they have should make their rounds in the public sphere, if even as temporary loans or as traveling exhibits. Likewise, these museums (or conjoined panels as the case may be) should change from time to time as well, otherwise, employees have no real reason to revisit them. Remember the audience…people at work with busy lives. Visiting should still be worth their while.
If anyone is interested, you can at least view parts of the CIA museum’s collection on their website at: https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum
Chasing the Museum Train 