Spy museum to get 5K-plus items

Donations include ax that killed Leon Trotsky

WASHINGTON — H. Keith Melton spent 40 years looking for the ice-climbing ax used in the bloody assassination of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. It had been sitting under a bed in Mexico City for decades.

Much easier was acquiring a mangled, basketball-size chunk of Gary Powers’ U2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. It was a gift from a Soviet official.

The items are part of the world’s largest private collection of spy artifacts. Melton, a wealthy businessman from Boca Raton, Florida, is donating all of it to the International Spy Museum in Washington.

The museum announced Wednesday that more than 5,000 items Melton amassed during four decades of crisscrossing the globe will be the cornerstone of a new, larger facility slated to open next year in the nation’s capital.

It is a “magnificent gesture,” gushed Peter Earnest, the museum’s founding director, crediting Melton’s donation with tripling the museum’s current holdings of roughly 2,000 items.

There’s a victory flag that Ciabacked Cuban exiles never flew after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in 1960.

And there are escape-and-evasion devices, codes and cipher machines along with the secret writings, listening devices, clandestine radios, spy cameras and clothes of the most famous spies employed by the CIA, KGB, FBI and Britain’s MI6.

Melton, a founding member of the museum’s board, said professional appraisers estimated his collection at more than $20 million. He said he’s paid “foolish” prices for some item.

Melton’s biggest coup — the item he looked for the longest — is the ice ax that killed Trotsky at his compound outside Mexico City in 1940. The assassin was Ramon Mercader, a suspected agent of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin who was jailed for years in Mexico.

A man who operated a teaching museum within the Mexican police checked out the ax from a police property room in the 1940s. He then got it in the 1960s as a retirement present.

“He gave it to his daughter and it had been under her bed until 2008,” Melton said.

Jacquelyn Martin The Associated Press H. Keith Melton points to a key on an Enigma Machine, one of the many items he is donating, on Wednesday in Washington. The machine was used in World War II to encode messages.