CyberWire Daily - Andrew Hammond: Understanding the plot. [Historian and Curator] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: August 1, 2021

Historian and Curator at the International Spy Museum. Dr. Andrew Hammond, shares how he came to share the history of espionage and intelligence as a career. Starting out in the Royal Air Force when 9/11 happened, Andrew found himself trying to understand what was going on in the world. Studying history and international relations gave him some perspective and led him on his career path which included an introduction to museum industry at the 9/11 Museum. After a stint in academia in the UK, Andrew found his way back to the US and eventually ended up at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. He said one of the "greatest parts of the job being able to engage with the artifacts" and share their stories. We thank Andrew for sharing his story with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. My name is Dr. Andrew Hammond, and I'm the historian and curator at the International Spy Museum. The most important stage for me was being in the Royal Air Force. It's not like I was a major general or anything like that, but in a humble way, I felt like I was an actor in a play,

but I didn't understand the plot. That was really as a result of 9-11. So I joined the Air Force in 1998. 9-11 happened. I was in the dark room of a military intelligence section in Germany and I saw the South Tower be struck. And I guess we all knew that in one way or another, all of our lives would be changed then. But for me, it just led to a really deep desire to try to work out what was going on in the world and ever since then in one way or another I've been trying to understand what the plot was that led me to leave the Royal Air Force and go back to school and start studying in history

and international relations. I enjoyed both subjects but I I don't know, history just spoke to me more. The only way to kind of try to anticipate where we may be going or to try to get any wisdom out of the whole journey is to look at what came before. The pathway was in some ways straightforward, in some ways quite circuitous, but I went to school, went to do a master's and a PhD. I had a number of different postdoctoral fellowships. I spent a couple of years in New York City. Quite fittingly, given where my journey began at the 9-11 Museum,

it was quite moving because where my desk was directly overlooked, ground zero. So occasionally I had to pinch myself a little bit just to think about how I'd ended up there. I was working on my research. I was also a fellow at NYU. I was learning the museum business. Went back to the UK, went into academia

for a little bit, and then came back to the US for a fellowship at the Library of Congress. After that, the job came up at the International Spy Museum. My day-to-day can really vary, but some of the typical things that I would do would be researching, editing, producing our podcast, Spycast. The other one is our collection. It's not hyperbole to say that we've got the world's greatest collection of intelligence and espionage-related artifacts,

so I research them, I engage with them, I help to interpret them, I help to communicate them to other people. So there's always new things to find out about the collection of I think around 9,000 artefacts. One of the greatest parts of the job, Being able to engage with the artefacts, it can be a multi-sensory experience. Sometimes the artefacts give off a particular smell, they sound a particular way. If you press the key on an Enigma machine,

it makes a particular type of noise. You can see some of the lights light up, you can move some of the plugs around. It's a really fascinating way to engage with them. And as a historian as well, the historian and curator role just go so well together because historians mainly look at documents and curators mainly look at artifacts. If you combine both of them, it's quite a synergistic enterprise, I think. if you combine both of them it's quite a synergistic enterprise I think and I think another fascinating thing that I love about the artifacts is that

through the artifact it's like a portal into a different world I feel incredibly lucky I could go there now and just look at or engage with some of the artifacts or research more about them so I've kind of got the keys to Aladdin's cave. I think if you have a bit of imagination and a bit of empathy and a bit of historical knowledge, you can use those artefacts to go back into a different place and time. I think that in the past, a lot of museums, it would be a label, and it would say, this is what this artefact is. I think that now there's a different approach. How do we stitch together narratives where we can almost sprinkle an artefact along,

and if you connect all of the artifacts then you're hanging on to a particular story. The history of espionage and intelligence is just filled with incredible stories it engages the people that like the big historical canvas because when we're

talking about espionage and intelligence we're talking about international relations, war, peace, life, death, you know, all the biggies. I'm just a sucker for stories. I just love unearthing these absolute doozies and humdingers that are attached to these. For example, we have a depth analyzer

that was used to basically crack Japanese naval code, GN-25. And that is one small part of the U.S. victory at the Battle of Midway, one part of the war in the Pacific and America's role in the world. You can inductively move up to the bigger historical canvas or you can deductively go down but I think it's the stories that make it all hang together. Thank you. to partner with ThreatLocker, a cybersecurity solution trusted by businesses worldwide. ThreatLocker is a full suite of solutions designed to give you total control, stopping unauthorized applications, securing sensitive data, and ensuring your organization runs

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