This seems like a good place to post this question.
What are the best books on agent tradecraft/spy craft?
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The first rule of Moscow rules is you don’t explain the rules!
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Obsolete or still useful?
The spy and the traitor, for instance is full of interesting details, but the world has moved on since the 1980s. The author of that book recommends Kim Philby’s My Silent War.
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This does not help me infiltrate the book club😉
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Both. History is always interesting. And helpful when I write my screenplay about a grandmother and granddaughter spy team.
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Most of my books are boxed up in storage right now (I should have made a list… Eh, most of them are out of print and in German anyway.).
I found autobiographies of real spies helpful.
Off the top of my head:
And then there is always stuff in unexpected places. The other day I looked something up in Peter Ustinov’s autobiography about the time when he played Nero and stumbled across some spy stuff mentioned in passing - Ustinov’s dad worked with British intelligence during WW II.
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Hah! I bet you’ve got a thumbtack and a piece of yellow chalk in your pocket right now.
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Incidentally, guess whose birthday it is today:
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I read both of those!
I totally agree about odd places too. For example there is a short story by Graham Greene which is really just a narrative description of what being encouraged to spy in Britain was like. You weren’t formally in or out, you might get some stipend sometime, you weren’t told what was useful, and had minimal contact. His family were all spies to some extent.
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IIRC Rational Security recommended this french television show as being particularly realistic in depicting the working relationship between a handler and his clandestine sources.
I’ve only seen the first season.
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Bob and Dayna Baer’s book The Company We Keep is also quite good. An interesting perspective on both the professional and personal aspects of working for the CIA in the recent past.
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Still trying to get the second series.
First series was brilliant. The (English) Wikipedia entry is a bit of a stub and only gives a rough summary of what happens, but not how, which is something else. Like French agents “inventing” the hijacking of commercial flights because they don’t want to miss the rugby final in Wales.
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That show is brilliant - you will really enjoy the second season, I think. I was so sad that there are only two seasons!
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free for all who click the link.
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[…]
The man was a local staffer, according to a Reuters news agency source, so he did not have access highly classified documents. The source added that the British MI5 counter-intelligence unit took part in the investigation of the suspect.
According to German internet publication Focus Online the documents the suspect passed on to the Russians were about counterterrorism.
[…]
Interesting. Looks like small fry, though.
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Wright was a bit of a loony and fantasist though.
