Also the time when the manager of a supermarket (who looked like an FBI agent from a 1970s movie) thought I was shoplifting (I was going the wrong direction and did look scruffy and had a big bag with an open top) and followed me out holding a clipboard that I'm sure he would have whacked me with and said it was an accident if I'd given him any trouble.
(Spoiler Alert)
At the end, there's mural or placard that says something like: Most exhibits in this museum are here because of failure. The best spies are the ones you never hear of.
Neither James Bond nor Jason Bourne were really "ripped hunks." Maybe an argument could be made for Daniel Craig, but really most Bonds and Bourne were just kind of handsome, charming men who knew their way around a gun.
Doing X for fun and profit Everything we knew about X is wrong I did X for $timespan and Y happened
And yet, in the 1940s at least, the Soviets were absolutely looting the Americans. During the lend-lease program between the US and Russia, planes were flown out of Montana to the USSR. US military officers recalled Soviets flying dozens of large briefcases on each flight. Once, a US officer inspected those briefcases and found detailed factory schematics, product and process diagrams and plans, reels and reels of detailed photographs of machinery and parts, and classified documents on the R&D of uranium enrichment. Apparently, in light of this discovery of massive industrial theft, the U.S. took no action.
> The school’s first explosives instructor was Bill Cumper, a boisterous character who walked around with his pockets full of bomb parts and “a detonator behind his ear as if it were a cigarette.”
come on. we can acquiesce that people were maybe getting a little crazy with it
Is the relationship between academia, the media and intelligence agencies ongoing?
The CIA calls their field HUMINT people "case officers."[3] They recruit spies, people who are on the inside of something, but rarely spy themselves. That's how it's really done.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen
1) Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA by Edward Jay Epstein - https://archive.org/details/Deception-TheInvisibleWarBetween...
2) Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by Kathleen Taylor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing:_The_Science_of_T...
3) Yuri Bezmenov's lectures (available on Youtube) on "Subversion Model/Psychological Warfare" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bezmenov and https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/
Caution: If you go down this rabbit-hole it will seriously alter your perception of "Reality" itself and you can end-up endlessly second-guessing/triple-guessing etc. everything you experience and think about.
It seems to me, at least in pre-computer times, that a regular book would work fairly well as a one-time pad. Especially something widely available, innocuous, and very long, like a bible. You'd probably want to add something like an offset, and a rule to skip letters (e.g. use every 3rd letter) so there are no real words to provide predictability. Guessing the book, offset, and skip rule would be a massive space- on the order of billions of possibilities. With modern computers of course, this method would be easy to crack.
On a completely different note, my favorite fictional spy, Bernard Sampson, says something like this (can't find the exact quote) "experienced agents are like nervous old ladies - always worrying about everything."
Essentially that "brave" agents are either inexperienced or dead. Sampson is able to do things like shoot but overall he feels its a sign of incompetence if it becomes necessary.
If you haven't already, try the "Game, Set, Match" trilogy.
there are tons of books and TV shows about real-life espionage, including by people who went through the CIA's training course.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/19/s...
Another interesting one is "The Nazis Next Door" about the US recruitment of ex-Nazis after WWII as spies in the growing Cold War, many with records of war crimes, who were resettled in the USA after their overseas service was completed.
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-na...
Incidentally, there's a big difference between a spy and an assassin, and James Bond was not a spy - he was an assassin who was 'licensed to kill'. It's a mistake to conflate these two things, even if they're both managed by the same intelligence agency.
> If she wants to know something specific, but doesn’t want people to notice her asking questions, she should simply make incorrect statements while in the company of experts. Her companions will correct her, especially if they’re men.