From the Shelves of the Paco Library

The cloak and dagger profession has been around as long as there have been…well, cloaks and daggers, and intelligence gathering, misinformation, secrets codes and espionage have been the tools of kings, emperors and presidents as long as men have striven for comparative advantage in acquiring power and promoting dynastic, national (and self) interest.

The Spy Book, by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, is an excellent one-volume encyclopedia of this fascinating, and often deadly, craft, with short biographies of spies through the ages: from Thomas Phelippes, a cipher and code expert in the intelligence service of Elizabeth I, to Aldrich Ames, a CIA Counterintelligence officer who spied for the Soviets (and for the Russian government, after the fall of the Soviet Union). Among many interesting topics, you will find lengthy pieces on cryptanalysis (“the process of converting encrypted or encoded messages into plain text without initial knowledge of the appropriate key”), the evolution of the Soviet/Russian intelligence services, and the Venona transcripts (which put the final nail in the coffin of Alger Hiss’s protestations of innocence).

One item that quickly caught my eye was the “PAG”:

Device developed by the German Air Force in WWII for parachuting agents behind enemy lines. The PAG – for Persönen-Abwurf-Gerät (personnel drop device) – was a metal and wood canister that could hold three agents, strapped in a rigid, horizontal position, and their equipment. While the pod was mounted under a wing, the agents could communicate with the pilot of the carrying aircraft by a telephone connection.

Hey, real pod people!

A special treat, for me, is the section on “literary spies”:

Writing about espionage is as old as writing itself. The earliest source for spy stories is Ti Jen-chieh, a seventh-century Chinese spymaster, whose exploits were fictionalized in 18th-century stories known as the Dee Goong An. They were translated and adapted in recent times by a Dutch diplomat as the “Judge Dee Stories”…

Somerset Maugham, himself a British agent in World War I, drew upon his experiences to write Ashenden (1928). “Of all fictitious spy stories,” Anthony Masters wrote in Literary agents (1987), “Ashenden’s adventures come nearest to the real-life experiences of his creator.” Ashenden, le Carré told a Maugham biographer, influenced him in his espionage writing. Maugham, said le Carré, “was the first person to write anything about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality”…

Most spy novels were thrillers featuring as heroes spies who in no way resembled real intelligence officers, handlers or agents. Writer Malcolm Muggeridge, who was an intelligence officer during World War II, commented that thriller writers took to espionage “as easily as the mentally unstable become psychiatrists or the impotent pornographers.”

“Long ago,” the authors write, “spying was labeled as the second oldest profession, after prostitution. Spying shares several of the characteristics of prostitution: Money, secrecy, sex, great public interest, and people’s reputations – or lack thereof – are involved in both professions.” So get hold of the Spy Book and read all about it!