A SECRETIVE serial entrepreneur who has helped to create companies worth billions is in discussions with British spies to bring their work into the open.
John Hunt, who co-founded the Seattle Coffee Company that was sold to Starbucks for £75m, is planning to create a spy museum at the London Trocadero, the entertainment complex that was home to the Guinness World of Records until the 1990s.
He is understood to have held discreet talks with current and former spymasters from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the government’s listening agency, about his vision to create Spyscape, a homage to “intelligence and cybersecurity”.
Having launched a series of businesses including Syzygy, an internet consulting company that was floated on the German stock market for about £145m, Hunt has decided to fill a gap in British museums by exploring the world of the double-cross and dead letter drop.
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The Irish businessman, who is married to Samantha Sackler, heiress to the billionaire pharma entrepreneur Mortimer Sackler, has spent 18 months courting former spy chiefs in the hope of getting them on board for Spyscape.
Plans submitted to Westminster council reveal it will occupy more than 50,000 sq ft of the ground and basement floors at the Trocadero with 10 open-plan galleries, four multimedia rooms, a gift shop and a cafe.
“The applicant’s vision is to deliver the headquarters for Spyscape: a contemporary museum based on the theme of intelligence and cybersecurity, using large-scale fully immersive interactives as well as stunning original artefacts and mixed-media storytelling techniques,” says a summary.
Hunt, 51, has worked quietly to recruit intelligence bosses, with only a brief mention of his project appearing on the website of Archimedia, his brands and investments firm.
However, the application to Westminster council was made by DP9, a London-based planning firm, on behalf of Cipher, a company set up by Hunt in February 2014.
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Hunt started his career at Procter & Gamble before going on to launch businesses including a software firm, yacht-maker and Caribbean luxury holiday resort. Based between New York and London, he is a producer on Palio, a documentary about the twice-yearly horse race in the Tuscan town of Siena.
Described on his website as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he has given money to arts organisations in the US and Ireland. He and his wife reportedly bought a grade II listed mansion in Chelsea for £26m from Jemima Khan in 2009.
The museum has been designed by the London-based architects Adjaye Associates and its content will be delivered by Local Projects, the New York-based firm behind the 9/11 Memorial Museum in Manhattan. It will feature a “multifunction exhibition space” for large gatherings and screenings.
The closest Britain has to a spy museum is the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, the country’s signals post during the Second World War, where Germany’s Enigma code was cracked by Alan Turing and his team.
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Spyscape is nearer in concept to the International Spy Museum in Washington, which exhibits “spy-related artefacts” and tells the stories of individual intelligence officers in films and interactives.
Alistair Brown, policy officer at the Museums Association, welcomed the plan and said he hoped the venue would explore the ethical complexity of “the often-contested histories” of Britain’s spies.
Professor Anthony Glees, director of security and intelligence studies at Buckingham University, said the time was perfect for an espionage museum as agencies were trying to be more transparent.
“Transparency and secrecy are incompatible with each other. So a museum dealing with the past will be a dandy solution to the conundrum.”
Spyscape’s application is expected to be reviewed by a planning committee in September. Hunt declined to comment.