The revamped NSA museum opens with displays of former nuke secrets, spy artifacts
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In an unassuming brick building just minutes from a heavily fortified spy agency, a smiling, short-haired blond man is poking away at buttons on an old-school device that resembles a typewriter.
But it isn't a typewriter.
His name is Vince Houghton, and he's the new director of the National Security Agency's National Cryptologic Museum — and this is an Enigma cipher machine captured from World War II era Germany, formerly used to encrypt Nazi communications.
Just weeks before the NSA's 70th anniversary in November, Houghton and his team unveiled what they'd been working on during the COVID 19 pandemic: a complete overhaul of the aging, 1990s-era museum in Fort Meade, Md. It's designed to show off new and old stories about the history of cryptography. That includes everything from the codebreakers of World War II to the efforts to protect communications in space. Every artifact on display is real.
Over the years, NSA has journeyed from complete secrecy — it's sometimes jokingly referred toas "No Such Agency" — to maintaining social media
