A couple of months ago, I decided I needed a trip to D.C. I had lived there in the late 1960s and left in June 1970 to begin my law practice.

As some of my readers know, those couple of years were a combination of being in the Air Force and also working for the CIA. I loved that town. We booked a hotel and decided to drive rather than fly. As it turns out, that was a good decision. Little did we even think about a federal shutdown at that time.

I also wanted to revisit the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. I had been there once and was overwhelmed with the tributes to my good friend, Col. James Kasler.

Before we left, we did have some knowledge of the shutdown of the federal government over the locked battle in Congress, but we went anyway.

First, the disappointments. All the federal museums were totally shuttered. No Smithsonian, no zoo and no art museum. The first day we walked to the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Wall, the WWII Memorial and a rear view of the White House. We went to the Washington Monument but could not take the ride to the top.

The crowds were not huge, and fortunately, we were four days away from the “No Kings” rally. The second day, we hit a home run. The Spy Museum was open as it is private. It has a lot of material on the spies over the years. As you enter, you are given a code card and a password. As you go through the various sections, there are computers that you can sign in to and take a variety of tests to see if you could be a spy. I only tried four or five, but scored pretty well.

But the more interesting parts for me were exhibits that related to my experiences at the CIA and the Air Force. The first job I had was to write Black Propaganda. I was to write an article as though I were an Egyptian soldier who had been supplied with Soviet weaponry for the Six-Day War against Israel in 1967. I was to complain that the weapons sent were inferior and didn’t help the Egyptians fight off the Israelis.

So, what is Black Prop? Well, White Prop is the US writing that the USSR was awful. Gray Prop is writing such material, but the creator is unnamed, again saying that the Soviets are awful. Black Prop is an article purportedly written by the Egyptian officer criticizing the USSR, but we actually wrote it. My article was translated into Arabic and appeared in a Lebanese newspaper. The exhibit did quite a good job explaining these areas of propaganda.

The next exhibit was even better. I was part of a team working on the first satellite films shot over the USSR and other enemies in the late 1960s. The film shot from the satellite was then dropped by parachute near Hawaii, where it was caught mid-air by planes and shipped to us in Massachusetts. There, we did quality evaluation and then made copies and delivered film across the US to those intended to receive parts of these miles of film. But here, for the first time, I saw the bucket that fell from the satellite with the film. It was huge!

The other parts were equally interesting and ran from those spies who infiltrated the enemy as early as George Washington’s days, to current spies from Mata Hari to Gary Powers and his U-2. Because of my prior life and interests, I knew many of the names of these spies who were eventually discovered, like Julius Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel Greenglass, who stole atomic secrets and gave them to the

Soviets. They were both executed in 1953 when caught. All in all, an exhibit of really great information, and we got in!

The final day was a private bus tour throughout the D.C. area. It included the eerie Korean War Memorial with its metal soldiers advancing through a field, the new FDR Memorial made of huge stone blocks and statues and the Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial with its massive stone background. Then it was a glimpse of the Pentagon, the White House and then lunch in the Georgetown area near where I had lived in 1967.

The final stop was my favorite over the years, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, with his famous quotes on the walls. As I reread them for the umpteenth time, the words brought forth some different meanings in these turbulent and divisive times. Here are parts of two of those wall quotes of Jefferson.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident. That men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind as that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances.”

It reminds me that there was derision over change, be it from the revolution, our own civil war, the depression or the present state of affairs. Even sadder, the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Base was closed as well. I will go back to both someday.

· Dennis Marek can be reached at llamalaw23.gmail.com.