Assassination Devices: The most famous assassination in history is that of JFK, and yet from an espionage point of view it was a total debacle: Oswald was almost immediately caught; he was using old, inferior, equipment; and the killing was done in an extremely public place with people like William Zapruder filming it (in color!). If this was an espionage operation, it was somewhat of an amateurish one.

The best spies kill their subjects covertly and in private, with the cause of death being as mysterious as possible. The most famous of these killings was the death of Georgii Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, with a miniature Ricin pellet injected into the leg with an 'umbrella cane' very similar to Apparite's 'cane-gun.' Assassinations like these are often clever enough to obscure the cause of death for days, weeks or even forever in some cases (in Markov's case it took weeks for people to figure it out).

Guns can be used, of course, and are often equipped with silencers (though a slight noise is still made--the mechanics of the metal parts clicking together cannot completely be muffled). The bullets are designed to travel under the speed of sound to avoid the little 'sonic boom' which those traveling beyond that speed create, and the guns themselves can be disguised as cigarettes, lipsticks, or fountain pens, etc. if needed.

There were also poison gas-canes and -guns (the operator took the antidote themselves before firing), and even poison rings that contained the poison within their stones--and this only includes the ones we know about! I'd bet there are other methods still in use that will remain hidden for the time being.

Examples of all of the above are shown in H. Keith Melton's excellent book Ultimate Spy.

The Blackmailing of J. Edgar Hoover: Rumors have surrounded J. Edgar Hoover's sexuality for years, and why not? Associate Director of the FBI Clyde Tolson was his constant companion for forty years; both men were single; and apparently Hoover dressed well and used facial moisturizer or something--well, apparently that's enough to convince some people.

Regardless, it has been said that the Chicago Mob had pictures of Hoover doing things with a man (the transvestite rumors seem to have largely been debunked) and there you have it: Urban Legend Blackmail. Another theory is that Hoover was being blackmailed in some way relating to his passion for horse-racing, though, again, this has remained utterly unproven.

Then again, can anyone really explain Hoover's continued failure to admit the existence of the Mob for years up until the late fifties? Or his reluctance to pursue known felons and murderers in the Mafia? I mean, he had the best intelligence network in America, with files on just about everybody, and he still had no clue as to what was going on? Something isn't quite right with that, although the complete answer hasn't quite arrived--yet.

But then again, it's possible that there were pictures--and maybe the reason why no one has them now is because they are in a safety deposit box in a Swiss Bank under the name of Joseph Judge, or F---- K-------, or Hans Muller, or even John Apparite.

I'm just sayin'.

The Cambridge Five: A famous cabal of spies who studied at Cambridge University in the twenties and thirties (they were also known as the 'Magnificent Five') and who later spied for the Soviets against the West, with devastating results. Hitch's old enemy William Standerton, it should be noted, also studied at Cambridge, and though he would not have been old enough to have been with the original Five at 'university,' apparently he had been inspired, if not eventually recruited, by them to become a defector-in-place (and then, in turn, to have mentored and eventually 'turned' the famous 'double' George Blake, if one believes the rumors).

Unlike many defectors and 'doubles,' the Cambridge Five 'turned' more for philosophical pro-communist leanings (or anti-Western leanings) than any other reason (like money, which is why 'modern' spies seem to do it). The original Five were John Cairncross, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, with Burgess and Maclean eventually defecting to the Soviets in 1951, and Philby following in 1963; the others died in the West somewhat in disgrace. And though there were five of them, they probably did not hurt the West nearly as much as Blake did all by himself, although even he had regrets--in 1991 he publicly said that his support of the Soviets had been a mistake, offering somewhat of an apology.

Too damn late, in my opinion: his treachery probably killed untold numbers of Western agents (estimation: 300+) and informants which, to some, may be unforgivable even today.

Camp Peary: In rural Virginia near Williamsburg is a supposedly-secret CIA training facility known semi-officially as 'Camp Peary,' or more informally as 'The Farm.' All aspects of secret-agency are taught there, including spy 'tradecraft'--dead drops, surveillance, interrogation, language courses, combat courses, escape and evasion, and such (it's essentially what Apparite's 'Espionage Operations' course entailed). I would not wander too close to it after dark, if I were you.

Chaos in the Reading Room: It may seem unusual, or possibly even unrealistic to some readers, that spies would hold a supposedly secret meeting in somewhat of a public place as the Reading Room of the British Museum, but actually it's not: espionage agents often met with each other in restaurants, bars, and cafés, for one good reason: mistrust. 'Robert Kramer' would not have wanted a private, secluded meeting where he might be in danger of torture or death; rather, he would want to 'feel the Soviets out' a bit in relative safety--as would the Soviets regarding him, in some ways. The Reading Room--a rather private place in a public building--would have well served both sides.

And there are examples from the Cold War that illustrate this, my favorite being an 'Operation Redcap' episode in Austria in 1955. An American official, and a Soviet considering defection, were going to meet to iron some things out, and the Gartenbrau Café in Vienna was chosen by the Soviet as the meeting place. Unbeknownst to the Americans, the potential Soviet defector was a 'plant' from the KGB, trying to gather information, and other KGB agents would be positioned in the café monitoring things (as would CIA agents as well). During the meeting tempers on both sides flared and a bit of a brawl ensued between the Soviet 'defector,' his American contact, and the KGB and CIA agents monitoring the meeting, and after a few seconds of arguing was about to get very out of hand.

But here's the best part: neither party was aware in the slightest that a branch station of the Viennese police was located just next door, and once the brawl had gotten loud enough, a cadre of Viennese polizei burst into the café, threatening to arrest everyone, screwing up everyone's plans and embarrassing all involved. True story!

I'm sure, as was the case in the aftermath, that various intelligence services put pressure on newspapers, local police, and all to cover-up any messes left in the wake of such meetings; it's not unlikely, then, that no information leaked into the public sector about Clive Hitch's death, or Eddie Humphreys' throat cutting, or about Standerton or the (many) dead KGB agents in either of the two safe-houses. Only now, fifty years later, are people beginning to talk about such things, and though most of the episodes I have heard of happened in Cold War Germany (often in Berlin), I would not be surprised if more examples began to leak out from the United Kingdom, and likely even the U.S.

The Guatemalan Revolt: One of the best examples of CIA involvement in the over-throwing of a government, this episode also raises the most questions about the motives for doing so: in addition to there being communist 'domino-theory' concerns, there was also the issue of whether the nationalization (read: stealing) of United Fruit Company's lands had anything to do with it, too--especially since the Dulles family had intimate ties to that corporation, as did the powerful John Moors Cabot.

Regardless, it's an interesting coup story, replete with CIA-induced Guatemalan pilots raining Coke bottles down onto the population (apparently they whistled like bombs), a once American-supported leader being deposed (Jacobo Arbenz Guzman), and a disinformation campaign with aims to convince the Guatemalan people that the American-approved leader, Carlos Armas, was just about to take over, anyway, so they'd better cooperate or else.

And it worked: the fake-bombs and disinformation convinced many to abandon Arbenz and join Armas, and voila--Armas was in, and Arbenz was out. In the big picture, it probably was in the United States' interests to depose Arbenz (his communist ties were real and his government was getting arms from the Czechs), though it is debatable as to whether we were in the right to do so-there were almost no legal grounds for legitimate military involvement--and also whether the 'straws that broke the camel's back' weren't the ties between the Dulles brothers, Cabot, and United Fruit.

We all know what the Director believes: the United Fruit ties were what brought Dulles to involve the CIA, with the communist threat only being the 'cover story for the coup that followed.'

Minox Cameras: A Soviet-designed subminiature camera, it was able to quickly take photographs with a minimum of work and with very good results when used by well-trained personnel. Minox cameras were used in espionage for an amazingly long time (first developed in 1938, they were still in service into the nineties), and were most often used by 'moles' like American traitor-spy John Walker, who made his living passing on information to the Soviets (though both sides used the cameras). Apparite, the UCOD reader might recall, brought a Minox camera to London with him.

There was a real art to taking surreptitious photographs during the Cold War, and both sides developed ingenious ways of doing it, with a multitude of hidden cameras (in neckties, buttons, lipsticks, cigarette packs, etc.), robot cameras, plus rolling-cameras that acted like photo-copiers, too. Keith Melton's excellent book Ultimate Spy shows examples of all of them and is highly recommended reading for the espionage enthusiast for more reasons than I can list here.

Microdots: One of the more fascinating intelligence devices I ran across was the microdot: a small, perhaps only 3 mm dot (a tiny square, actually) which is, in reality, a miniaturized photograph of perhaps a page of a book, or a formula, or also, as in Apparite's case, a tiny little picture of SMERSH assassin Viktor walking down the street. There were special cameras used to make the microdots, and special instruments used to read them (they were black and looked somewhat like long-barreled microscopes), and none of them, I bet, came cheap. Apparite, of course, used the smallest (1 mm) microdots ever made, with the most advanced microdot reader ever made, too (his microdots were round, and the reader was silver--he got the newest and best of everything, you know--excepting the K-rations in the warehouse, of course).

The Space Race and Rocket Fuel: The U.S. Navy was, in general, the driving force in the development of rocket fuels in the mid-fifties in the American scientific community--and they did a bang-up job, often using civilian contractors. One of the most significant developments was in making a solid-fuel that was portable-meaning, basically, one that could be taken on submarines and safely stored until use. It may not sound important, but it turned out to be terribly so: when the U.S. developed the Polaris missile in the late fifties and early sixties, the Soviets had basically nothing comparable in their own arsenal.

The Soviet mind-set was different than ours when it came to things like rocket-fuels and submarines--they did not worry nearly as much about safety, and as a result they had more nuclear reactor mishaps, sunken subs, and ballistic missile troubles than most Americans would have tolerated from their own sub fleet. So in one way, the Soviets were intrinsically much more lackadaisical in developing safer submarine missile fuels--in fact, they continued to use the more dangerous liquid mixtures into the seventies!

But they did much better than the U.S. with rockets. The Soviet R-7 rocket was a good one, and though it used a rather primitive liquid oxygen/kerosene mixture, it served its purpose well. The U.S., however, got side-tracked by trying to develop the 'Vanguard' rocket for space exploration when, in reality, they already had a decent rocket called the 'Redstone' which would have done the job quite adequately, and which they ended up using a variation of anyway (called the "Jupiter-C") when the initial Vanguard test launches proved to be embarrassingly unsuccessful (meaning they blew up on the launching pad on national television). If the powers-that-be had let Wernher Von Braun have his way, which was going with the Redstone from the start, then no one would have ever heard of Sputnik because we would have been up there first. The unwise decision to begin with the Vanguard rocket, more than nearly anything else, ended up being the reason the Soviets beat us into Space (more in this will be forthcoming in the third book, The Hunt for John Apparite).

And speaking of Apparite, it would have been likely that had a man like Robert Kramer approached the Soviets with a ready-made solid-fuel formula for rockets that they would have jumped at the chance to buy it, as indeed they did in UCOD.

After all--how many more rockets could they launch from hidden barges before Khrushchev found out what had really been going on?

Swiss Bank Accounts: Apparite is promised $5 million dollars to be paid to him in a Swiss bank account at the conclusion of his duties as a Superagent which, to some readers, might raise a couple of questions: Why a Swiss bank? And why dollars if the bank is in Switzerland? The answer to the first question is simple: because if you are someone with $5 million dollars who wishes to remain nearly anonymous, and yet still have a functioning place to bank, then Switzerland is the place for you.

Swiss bank accounts are notoriously private and protected; in fact, you may choose a numbered-only account, where the only link between your name and your account number is kept in a locked safe with very limited access. All transactions, therefore, involve only your account number--there is no name at all on the account, paperwork, or statements.

The Swiss are so concerned with secrecy that there have been criminal penalties for revealing privileged account information since the year 1934 (enacted partly due to the experiences the Swiss banking industry had at the time, when German clients were liable to be killed by the Nazis if non-German-banked investments were revealed to Hitler's government). But that doesn't mean that the account is completely proofed against everything: the Swiss authorities can open it up for inspection in the event of bankruptcy proceedings involving a client; in the event of suspicion of money-laundering; or in cases of tax fraud (oddly, tax-evasion is NOT considered criminal-enough to do it!). U.S. citizens with U.S. investments in securities must also declare their accounts to the IRS, or the Swiss will essentially do it for them by sending the Capital Gains Tax directly to the IRS. Yes, the IRS can even get a Swiss bank account to send them money!

In Apparite's case, the money would have been in U.S. dollars (basically an easily converted, universal currency), but his identity would not have been that of a U.S. citizen (I suspect he would have been under the cover of a South African or someone from the Principality of Monaco). Note that it is wise NOT to have your money in Swiss Francs, as this is subject to Swiss tax-better to stick with the Euro for the time being. Maybe, someday, if I get enough money, I'll open an account. It would admittedly be pretty cool to say you had one, even if there was only a hundred bucks in it.