BEST SPY AGENT IN THE WORLD HOW TO

'I don't believe in your cloak-and-dagger stuff,' she said, before walking out. As Fox, who is half-English and went to Oxford, did when a professor with the British Secret Service who had no doubt heard about her Suu Kyi interview invited her to a pub called the Fuggle & Firkin and sold her the whole help-us-make-the-world-safe spiel. How?Īs a space that is both public and private and relatively safe, the restaurant is an unshowy but invaluable cog in what the great spy writer John le Carré so eloquently calls 'the grammar of intrigue.' It offers intelligence officers not only a place to exchange information (the envelope slid across the table the briefcase switch the taped message in the toilet tank) but a chance to evaluate their informants' habits, temperament and coolheadedness, over a meal.īut evaluation is a two-way street, and the recruitee can also assess the recruiter. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

BEST SPY AGENT IN THE WORLD HOW TO

Most undramatically, but crucially, they were also taught how to reconnoiter restaurants.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Life Undercover Subtitle Coming of Age in the CIA Author Amaryllis Fox Back exits are always good.'Īfter Fox and Moran were recruited, they were sent to 'the Farm,' a secret CIA facility in Virginia where their grueling training included all the obligatory skills of what Fox refers to as 'the Bond business': how to flip or crash a car how to use a Glock how to parachute how to use a speedboat how to withstand torture how to use a grocery bag and duct tape to bandage a punctured chest and how to commit suicide. You might also choose a time of day when the place is relatively empty and you will have pre-cased the place to pick the best location within the restaurant. 'You want a place where you're unlikely to be seen by known associates of the target, so you pick an out-of-the-way restaurant not near his place of work. 'During the 'developmental' stage of recruiting a foreign agent, you are typically meeting him or her for a meal or drink,' Moran told NPR. Mostly, they are planned to look accidental.'Īn equally emphatic endorsement comes from another former CIA operative, Lindsay Moran, whose 2005 memoir, Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, recounts her espionage work in Macedonia. 'Restaurants offer the opportunity to meet the people we most seek - those with access to a government or terror group that might be able to help us predict or prevent the next attack. Her memoir, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA, released this month, recounts her adventures as a clandestine CIA operative from 2003 to 2010 deployed to 16 countries to infiltrate terrorist networks in the post-Sept.

'Restaurants and cafés are in many ways the lifeblood of espionage,' is how Amaryllis Fox puts it. This observation is borne out by the lavish caviar-and-champagne dinners in this epicurean thriller that unfolds amid baccarat tables, bomb explosions and bitingly cold vodkas in a modish seaside town of France.īut what also becomes crystal clear is that the restaurant is a key piece in the mise-en-scène of another equally subtle and unforgiving game: spycraft.

In Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, the taciturn MI6 lothario with the cold eyes and cruel mouth who would go on to become the world's most famous spy muses that the restaurant is a key piece in the mise-en-scène of seduction. A new book written by a former CIA officer details how restaurants and cafes 'are in many ways the lifeblood of espionage.' Actor Roger Moore, who played secret agent James Bond in the '70s and '80s, holds a martini.

Best spy agent in the world