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"Ulitmate Spy," by H. Keith Melton (DK Publishing, $30, 208 pp.)
Reviewed by David Podgurski
(c) 2002, The Stamford Advocate
If you've ever wished for a James Bond gadget or grew up hoping to become an agent like 007, "Ultimate Spy" just might be the book for you. It isn't a spy novel or a boring dossier about the more tedious rigmarole of surveillance or special covert ops; it is, rather, like a candy store of the gear, methods and technologies that spies have used for generations. It's long on pictures and shorter on text, but "Ultimate Spy" is what you want if you in any way enjoy the world of espionage as experienced in movies or books.
This is not to say that what is contained in this pretty book isn't genuine. What is most surprising is that there are devices that were made for spies that look like they were taken directly from Q Branch. From bugs hidden in items of furniture or listening devices concealed in shoes (remember "Get Smart" and the wingtip phone?) to cameras disguised as notebooks (the KGB used a "rollover camera") and assassination umbrellas (another KGB specialty), the book is like "Spy Game" on overdrive. There's even the "real Q," Charles Fraser-Smith, the inspiration for Ian Fleming's gadgetmaker.
The book is divided along temporal lines at first, from early espionage (think Christopher Marlowe) to World War II through to the post-Cold War years (check out, for example, a Confederate cipher used during the Civil War). From there the book goes into the mechanics of spying, with equipment and techniques, secret operations and counterintelligence and clandestine operations. The final chapter, "How To Be A Spy," deals with recruitment, training and different spy networks, such as Israel's Mossad or the former East Germany's HVA. The somewhat gruesome elements of what at times has happened to caught spies is dealt with in "Fate of a Spy," in which one learns that the KGB used an "interrogation cosh" (a leather tongue with lead in the flat end) that would allow captors to engage in aggressive negotiations without killing those caught.
Probably the most fascinating elements in the book are to be found in the "Equipment and Techniques" section, a smorgasbord of hidden cameras, sabotage and countersurveillance techniques/gadgets, cipher devices and weapons that almost convince one that spying is all about the gear. Luckily, the section details the techniques surrounding the equipment as well as the tools themselves. One can learn about the differing operations of the agents through the "Spy Profiles" (short descriptions of their lives/operations and, in some cases, their fates) as well as how spies used particular devices and how certain objectives were achieved.
Many of the most famous spying operations on both sides of the Iron Curtain are detailed in the early parts of the book. Take, for example, the 1954 Berlin Tunnel, a joint venture between the CIA and Britain's MI6 that involved drilling a 1,500-foot tunnel under East Berlin to allow wiretapping of Soviet communications. This comes in a section called "Berlin: Spy City." In two pages, one catches the whiff of a John Le Carre novel in looking back at what is now history.
Above all, the illustrations and pictures in the book are the most engaging elements, as are the details about special missions, such as Operation Mongoose (Robert Kennedy's 1961 plan to eliminate Castro) or the 1942 escape of Britain's Airey Neave from Germany's Colditz Castle. This is a visual reference book that covers all the bases (even the recent Robert Hanssen case). In reading the text and viewing the many photographs, one gets a better appreciation of what a spy actually does as opposed to espionage's depiction in movies and novels, but one also realizes that often the spy's real life is more fantastic than any movie could be.
Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service