A tube of lipstick hiding a miniature camera, issued to female K.G.B. spies during the 1970s. A box of matches containing message-writing tools, used by British double agents in World War II. A Russian-designed cassette player with secret compartments for surveillance equipment. A hollow battery in which an MI6 operative could store reels of miniature film.

In the first room of the exhibition “Spies, Lies, and Deception,” at the Imperial War Museum in London, these items are introduced by a wall panel explaining that, although intelligence officers often need specialist tools and weapons, “the story of spying and deception is about more than gadgets. It is about people who live shadowy lives, and sometimes take on new identities.”

On a recent morning, the message that spying was about more than cool stuff did not appear to have been fully absorbed by the preteen boys marching importantly from exhibit to exhibit, propping hands on hips as they cast appraising glances over surveillance equipment, pencils containing hidden blades and papier-mâché dummy heads used to distract German sniper fire during World War I.

They clustered around a display case holding footprint overshoes created for British spies working in Southeast Asia during World War II. (Strapped over the wearer’s boots, these could disguise both someone’s footprints and the direction they were walking in.) They discussed the merits of invisible ink, and a pair of boys made machine-gun noises as they raced from room to room, easily evading their mother’s attempts to make them sit quietly and watch a short film about Klaus Fuchs, the scientist who passed atomic secrets to the Soviets at Los Alamos and who was described by his former boss at the laboratory as the only physicist who “truly changed history.”

With over 150 objects displayed alongside filmed interviews and archival footage, the show explores the history of espionage over the past century, beginning with the rapid technological advancements made by British intelligence during World War I, and ending more or less in the present, with an analysis of an investigation by Bellingcat, the investigative website, into the 2018 attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, the Russian double agent.

Despite this clear timeline, the exhibition is organized thematically, rather than chronologically, so that visitors move from Tools of Deception through to Using Deception and finish up at Being Deceived. And though the perspective is British, with a jingoistic emphasis on World War II heroics (it is the Imperial War Museum, after all), the thematic approach allows for, or at least aims at, a more universal examination of espionage and its impact, on both the spies and the spied on, the betrayers and the betrayed.

In one room, old footage shows Kim Philby, one of the “Cambridge spies,” laughing delightedly as he lies to the press about being a communist, followed by an interview with Nicholas Elliott, an MI6 officer who’d once been Philby’s close friend, and who refused for years to believe that Philby was passing “devastating amounts” of western intelligence to the Soviets. In the interview, filmed decades after Philby’s exposure in 1963, Elliot still looks electrified with disgust as he describes Philby as “ a straightforward high-level disreputable traitor.”

Elsewhere, documents relating to Operation Mincemeat — an implausible-sounding but ultimately successful World War II caper — are placed near a display about British military operations during the 1991 Persian Gulf war: This includes diary entries from an officer tasked with misleading Iraqi forces about where the invasion would begin. The tone of these extracts veers between the thoughtful and flowery — “I lay in bed in a most strange situation; hearing the statement that soon we shall be at war, and I am amongst those involved” — and the startlingly banal, as if the officer were describing a vacation abroad: “amazing to think this is our third country in three days.”

Despite the diverting presence of pencils-turned-knives and powder puffs with secret microfilm compartments, the emphasis throughout is on the warping effects of deception, the way spying unsettles and often oversteps legal and moral boundaries.

Take George Blake, a British double agent who spied for the Soviet Union for almost 10 years and was convicted of espionage in 1941. The show includes a letter from one of his supporters, which identifies what she saw as “a monstrous piece of hypocrisy” in Blake’s imprisonment for betraying his country, when his job for MI6 had required him to convince Soviet officials to do the same thing.

Another exhibit considers Operation Ghost Stories, the yearslong F.B.I. investigation that uncovered a network of Russian sleeper agents in the United States. Posing as ordinary American citizens, some of the spies raised children who had no idea about their parents’ true identities. In a video interview, an F.B.I. agent who surveilled one family for years reflects on the experience of closely watching the children: “I saw them grow up into beautiful young women,” he says, “and then one day, we arrested mom and dad.”

It’s a fine line, however, between deception and delusion. In a display about the development of camouflage techniques during World War I, there is a book published after the war by Solomon J. Solomon, the man in charge of Britain’s first camouflage division, who oversaw a team of artists and theater painters making disguised observation posts and netting that concealed trenches. The work took a toll on Solomon’s mental health; his outlines in detail his mistaken belief that Germany had built enormous hidden army camps and sophisticated networks of covered roads. When the sites were examined after the war, no evidence of this was found.

The paranoia was catching. Standing in front of a case containing Philby’s pipe and hip flask, I caught myself scanning the items for clues as to their true purpose. Could the pipe double as a powerful telescope, capable also of emitting clouds of noxious smoke that would stun and befuddle Philby’s enemies? How about if the hip flask was equipped with a sophisticated mechanism that would turn the whisky inside it to poison at a moment of Philby’s choosing? Philby was a heavy smoker, though, and died an alcoholic in Moscow after defecting to the Soviet Union. On closer examination, the hip flask turned out to be only a hip flask. The pipe was just a pipe.

Spies, Lies and Deception
Through April 14, 2024, at the Imperial War Museum, in London; iwm.org.uk.