KGB Museum, and Books!

I spent last weekend in NYC, loving every minute of it and walking my hind legs clean off. My hotel's about ten minutes walk from the Flatiron, and most of what I wanted - the Strand, really - is roundabout Union Square, so I didn't bother with the subway this trip. Spent a lot of time at the Pit, which I recommend if you enjoy comedy & improv.

That's not what this post shall be about, tho.

The KGB Museum down on West 14th Street is exactly what you think it is: a room stuffed full of pretty much every kind of spy kitsch you can imagine. If you like the KGB (and really, who doesn't?), Cold War shenanigans, and vintage spy tech, this is exactly the place you want to be. All it needs is a life-size statue of Ken Hite, glad-handing the tourists as they stroll in the door.

I got there at opening time, 10am, on Friday, and I'm glad I did. It meant I got the guided tour free of charge, but more importantly, I could enjoy everything in peace and quiet. There's a lot to see here, crammed into a relatively small space. I can only imagine what it's like with, say, fifty to sixty other sightseers jockeying for position.

It's run by a group of smiling eastern Europeans, probably Russians, and to be honest, if your first thought is, 'this has got to be an FSB front organization,' rest assured, I thought the same thing. It's exactly the sort of dumb-but-it-could-work idea that has fueled many a real-life spy operation, ever since Kit Marlowe got his in the back room of Elanor Bull's tavern. She, incidentally, did a lot of business with Russian merchants … wheels within wheels.

The KGB Museum's collection is very impressive. It leans a little more towards the early years, the Chekists and Beria, than the later Cold War operations. Some of the items stretch credulity a little bit. For example, the Museum has both The Thing - the wooden US seal which hung on the wall of the American Residency in Moscow for many years, which concealed a transmitter invented by musical genius Leon Theramin - and a Bulgarian poison-tipped umbrella, of the type that was used to kill dissident and defector Markov in London, 1978. Surely those are replicas. It beggars belief that the original Thing found its way to the KGB Museum, and as for the poison-tip umbrella … Anything's possible, I suppose.

That's the Museum's greatest trick. It makes everything seem possible. You don't know who owns it, where its money comes from, how it got its very impressive collection together, who all these charming Russians are who either run, or own, the place. It's a brilliant, small little museum, nestled in the heart of one of the greatest cities in the world. Unless you're prepared to go to Moscow, you'll never see anything else like it.

It's a few steps down the street from a great 24-hour diner, the Coppelia, a Cuban place, and no, the irony of a little slice of Cuba a few steps down the street from the KGB museum did not escape me. God, I needed the Coppelia, at about 930 in the morning, when French toast with fresh sliced banana, plus a sinfully dark coffee, was the only shining light on a slate gray day. A good spread of rum on the shelf too; the kind of place worth coming back to again and again.

Now the books.

Hollywood's Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles, Laura B. Rosenzweig, NY University Press 2017. Los Angeles' Jewish community, led by Hollywood's elite, fights back against American Nazis. A slice of pre-Cold War cloak-and-dagger, and probably a good resource for Bookhounds, since a lot of the things happening in bookstore back rooms in Los Angeles in the 30s are probably also happening in London. If you play Technicolor and want some anti-Nazi action, paid for by Warner Brothers, here's your chance.

Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn edited by Andrei Codrescu, Princeton Uni Press, 2019. Hearn's stories enrapture me, and possibly the greatest thing about his work is, he wrote so very much it's almost impossible to run out. The day you think you've read them all, you find a whole new collection. The ghost lovers out there want this book.

Dark Tales, Shirley Jackson, Penguin 2017. Not as prolific as Hearn, but just as evocative. This contains the classics and several obscurities, newly reprinted. Again, ghost lovers, seek this out.

Psycho, Robert Bloch, Overlook Press, 2010. I must have seen the movie a dozen times, but it suddenly occurred to me, standing amid the Strand's towering stacks, that I'd never read the book. Time to rectify that.

How To Catch A Russian Spy, Naveed Jamali and Ellis Henican, Scribner paperback, 2018. Modern espionage tale about Jamali's work with the FBI, drawing out Russian intelligencers with poison packets of fake data. For the Night's Black Agents players and directors out there. Bought at the KGB Museum, so it has their own stamp on the flyleaf. As is only right and proper.

Hungry Ghosts, Anthony Bourdain, graphic novel, Berger Books (Dark Horse). Bourdain borrows from Japanese folklore to create a collection of creepy horror tales. I'll be honest, I hesitated over this one. Bourdain's unexpected death hit me hard, and for the longest while I didn't want to read his books or watch his show. I've recently gotten back into his work, and when I saw this on the shelf, I couldn't resist.

Night's Black Agents, Solo Ops. Pelgrane Press. How could I not? I playtested this, back in the day. I don't know how often I'll get a chance to play, but I couldn't resist. Now if only Swords of the Serpentine was out …

Enjoy, and Happy Holidays!