In February, Julien's Auctions will sell off the collection of New York City's now-closed KGB Espionage Museum in New York City. From Julien's Auctions:
Over 400 lots will be on offer such as clandestine operative cameras, counter-intelligence detectors, morse code machines, airplane radars, voice recorders and official government documents.
Special highlights include a gun designed to look like a tube of lipstick [above], a secret hotel-room listening device or "bug" [below] from 1964, a rare Soviet version of the Enigma code cipher machine known as the Fialka, a replica of the deadly syringe umbrella [below] believed to have been used to carry out the assassination of Bulgarian author Georgie Markov, a vintage one-thousand-pound carved stone sculpture of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin that stood in the headquarters of the KGB in Kaliningrad, a purse with a hidden camera and shutter apparatus, a machine used by border guards to detect people hiding in vehicles, a German WWII phone tap device, an original steel door from a former KGB prison hospital, a unique portable wire recording machine, and a vintage railroad "Infected Area" warning sign.
More at Smithsonian: "You Could Own a Lipstick Gun, a Poison-Tipped Umbrella and Other KGB Spy Tools"
