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, you know, like 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 darkroom 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 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 way straightforward in some ways quite circuitous but I went to school

went to do a master's in a PhD. I had a number of different post-doctoral

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.

And 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 high verbally to say that we've got the world's

greatest collection of intelligence and espionage-related artifacts.

So I researched them, I engage with them, I helped interpret them, I helped to communicate them to other people.

So there's always new things to find out about the collection of, I think around 9,000 artifacts.

One of the greatest parts of the job, been able to engage with the artifacts. It can

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