I Asked You Not to Tell Me That

When the Central Intelligence Agency's Fine Arts Commission was putting together a museum exhibit for its Langley, Va., headquarters, it called Danny Biederman in Los Angeles. Biederman, the world's leading private collector of memorabilia from spy movies and TV shows, lent 400 of his 4,000-item collection to the CIA's exhibit, including Maxwell Smart's shoe phone from the Get Smart series and a communicator from The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which was activated by the actors intoning “open channel D” into a microphone in a pen. Why mount an exhibit of fictional items for real spies? “Many people who worked here were inspired to work here by these shows,” a CIA spokeswoman said. (Reuters) ...Great: that means the next generation of spies is being inspired by Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.