Interview – Chris Costa – Executive Director of the International Spy Museum

• ABOUT MUSEUM: The International Spy Museum is a museum dedicated to the tradecraft, history and contemporary role of espionage, featuring the largest collection of international espionage artifacts currently on public display.
• BIO: Chris Costa is a former career intelligence officer, a former member of the National Security Council at the White House and the current Executive Director of the International Spy Museum. Recently, Mr. Costa served as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council (NSC).  At the NSC, he was responsible for coordinating counterterrorism policy and strategy as well as US hostage recovery activities. Mr. Costa had 34 years of progressive national security experience and well-documented success in strategy policy, special operations, counterintelligence, and human intelligence, deploying on multiple contingencies and to combat operations in the Republic of Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Mr. Costa’s most recent assignment was with the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) as a Program Director in the Operations Directorate.
• Spy Museum prepares for big move. The museum has now outgrown its home in Penn Quarter and will head to a new building twice its in L’Enfant Plaza.The International Spy Museum has attracted visitors curious in espionage for 16 years, but soon it will be on the move. The museum has now outgrown its home in Penn Quarter and will head to a new building twice its size in L’Enfant Plaza. “We’re starting off in 2019 with a brand new museum based on all those years of learning,” said Chris Costa, the Executive Director of the International Spy Museum.  “So there’s a lot of excitement, a lot of anticipation with our move.”  The new Spy Museum location, at 700 L’Enfant Plaza SW, is 140,000 square feet and was built from the ground up specifically for the espionage exhibits.  Staff will officially close the doors of the current location, in Penn Quarter, at the end of the day on January 1st.  The first artifact to make the move on January 5th will be the iconic James Bond Aston Martin DB5 from the movie Goldfinger, which will be taken out by crane. While the Aston Martin will permanently reside in the new museum’s lobby, the Bond artifacts in the Spy Museum’s Exquisitely Evil: 50 Years of Bond Villains exhibit will not be part of the move. “We knew we were going to have to move, it’s no secret,” said Costa. “We’ve been planning for it for a long time.” Costa says the museum has outgrown its home at the intersection of 9th Street and F Street NW, where it was founded in 2002. He pointed out the museum has tripled the number of artifacts it has since it opened.