From a rectal kit to a Berlin Wall-era transmitter: the artefacts of Australia's spy museum which doesn't exist
Every morning Mike Pritchard eats breakfast next to a Stasi surveillance rack. The machine, sitting on a couple of milk crates near his dining room table, is composed of colour-coded buttons, switches and dials. It contains a surveillance receiver, a controller for up to 10 receivers, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and a numbers-station broadcast box.
'The equipment in this rack can be seen in the German film The Lives of Others,' the Sydney man says. 'It's absolutely been used. They used this stuff every day. Remember, this was a police state – they are using this stuff to listen to everybody. This is not a once-a-month thing, it's your day job.'
The artefact is not the only piece of espionage history in his home. He has spy cameras once favoured by intelligences services such as the CIA and KGB and a field radio used in the second world war by US women parachuted in behind enemy lines.
The really interesting things he keeps off-site in a facility that is packed to the brim – like cipher devices used by the French intelligence services during the Algerian civil war and in Indochina that were once uncrackable; several working enigma machines; a briefcase built to conceal a compact automatic firearm; a bra built to conceal a hidden camera; a rubber stamp from a Berlin Wall checkpoint; and a nameless device built to detect invisible writing.
'The truth is, I think I am a complete nerd,' he says.
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Every so often he extracts these items to photograph them for the Australian Spy Museum's social media feed – an institution which doesn't yet exist but which the 59-year-old is working to make real.
Currently, Washington DC and Berlin host the biggest public spy museums in the world, with smaller collections on display in Spain, Latvia and Finland; a private collection of mainly KGB equipment in France that occasionally tours; and some good cryptography museums including in Bletchley Park in the UK and in Moscow.
No such institution exists in Australia – something Pritchard wants to change.
Australia's intelligence agencies maintain their own in-house 'captive' collections, and a spy camera museum exists outside Cairns. Pritchard is thinking bigger.
His museum would span the history of espionage from the Renaissance to recent times, with exhibitions organised around the pillars of spy-craft: cryptography, mass surveillance, covert communications, tradecraft equipment and modern threats.
Within each one of those, a collection would track the development of events and technologies over time, from old clockwork devices through to the digital age.
Pritchard's collection, which started in 2011 and is now 'well north of 1,500 artefacts' is enough to get started, he says. He won't say what it's worth – 'its value is: 'I don't want my wife to see that in print'' – but it includes artefacts from the intelligence services of the UK, US, France, Russia, Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Finland, Peru, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Czech Republic and more, all across different eras.
He has also sourced like-models for equipment issued by Australian intelligence services but says agencies such as Asis and Asio have been 'notably scrupulous' at policing their kit and destroying it at end of life.
'We've also never had a big dramatic event like a government collapse or a civil war in our contemporary history that would have allowed some of this stuff to get out,' he says.
James Bond may have glamorised espionage, but Pritchard says the franchise is a fantasy that is a 'powerful marketing vehicle for watches and cars', a world away from the reality – which can be less glamorous.
Within his collection is a rectal conceal kit, a capsule about the size of a thumb, that contains diamond wire that could be used to cut metal as part of an escape. Another example is a Tochka – a spy camera about the size of a finger – built to be hidden behind a necktie. The Romanian man who sold it to him, he says, was among those who raided the Securitate building, headquarters of a brutal secret police, at the fall of the regime.
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His favourite artefacts, however, demonstrate an extraordinary blend of prowess and deviousness – like a device used by the Stasi to speak to its operatives across the Berlin Wall using infrared. Unless you were standing inside the beam of light, there was no way to know a conversation was being had – and no way to eavesdrop.
'I can hold in the palm of my hand this tiny object, and it's built with this craftsmanship, this jeweller-like precision that goes into this tiny camera,' Pritchard says.
'And to think about the effort and the work that went into it is extraordinary. And it has its own life as just this beautiful little example of precision engineering, which is then overlaid with its story, its place in history, of these monumental changes in our world.'
Any future spy museum, Pritchard says, could also serve as something of a Trojan horse to educate people about modern threats – such as climate change. Among his most prized items are rare, first-edition books and publications charting the development of the theory behind the greenhouse effect.
The materials begin with Joseph Fourier, who in 1827 first used the term 'greenhouse effect', and Eunice Foote, who in 1856 performed experiments that demonstrated the greenhouse effect. There are also artefacts once belonging to Guy Callendar, who confirmed the Earth's temperature was rising in 1938, and Roger Revelle, who warned of 'radical climate changes' way back in 1958.
'It's about rebuilding that story on a timeline that ordinary people can walk into and can see, and then go, 'Oh my God, this is what we knew at this point. This is what we knew at this time.''
Governments and intelligence agencies tend to have a particular view about how the past gets told, so Pritchard's preference is a privately owned open museum in Sydney, with its vibrant tourism market.
Think of it as 'educational espionage', he says.
'A museum where the Get Smart gadgets are on the surface and everyone goes, 'Wow, a telephone hiding in a shoe!' but then, as they walk through the galleries, they learn about cryptography, or they learn about the security aspects of climate change and they go, 'OK, I never really thought about that before.'
'It's learning by stealth.'
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