I spy a new New York museum

NEW YORK — Hello, recruit. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Learn about the elements of spying, its history, and find out what kind of spy you could be.

That’s the order of the day at SPYSCAPE, a new attraction that opened Friday in Manhattan, where visitors can get a glimpse of spying’s past and present, from the code-breaking machines of the Second World War to the most famous names in espionage and their deeds of derring-do or in some cases, dastardly deception.

Visitors can also take a series of tests that gauge everything from their powers of observation to their willingness to take risks, to see what spy role they’d be suited for. (Don’t worry, there’s no secret agency recruiting station at the exit.)

“People are going to come here and find out spies are actually like we are,” said Shelby Prichard, chief of staff at SPYSCAPE. “They’re probably the closest thing you can get to superheroes in the real world, but they’re people. With training, with tools, definitely intelligence, but I think at the end of the day we’ll all discover we each have our own kinds of spy skills and aptitudes.”

The exhibition space is divided into different galleries. They focus on specific areas — encryption, deception, hacking, cyberwarfare, intelligence, surveillance and special ops.

In each of the galleries, visitors can see artifacts related to that area, like an actual Enigma machine used by the Germans to encrypt messages during the Second World War, or masks worn by members of the global hacking group Anonymous.

Several years in the making, SPYSCAPE’s advisers and consultants included former spies and members of intelligence agencies, as well as hackersturned-security consultants.