The International Spy Museum is a privately owned museum dedicated to the field of espionage located within the 1875 Le Droit Building in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, D.C., across the street from the Old Patent Office Building (which houses the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery) and one block south of the Gallery Place Metro station.

The museum was built by Milton Maltz & the House on F Street, L.L.C. at a cost of approximately $40 million. It is one of the few museums in Washington that charges admission fees.

The International Spy Museum was conceived as a for-profit organization. Milton Maltz, himself a code-breaker during the Korean War, founded the Malrite Company, a media corporation that owns the Spy Museum. Maltz believed that in a post-9/11 world the public wants and deserves more information on the intelligence community.

The Malrite Company provided half of the foundation cost of the International Spy Museum. The other $20 million came from the District of Columbia as enterprise zone bonds and TIF bonds, an acknowledgment of the museum’s ability to foster economic renewal. The International Spy Museum is part of the ongoing rejuvenation of the Penn Quarter in D.C., kicked off in the 1990s by the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation.