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Books I am currently reading: Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre. Spies + history = catnip for me anyway, but it's very engagingly written and I'm really enjoying it.
Popular image of spying: glamorous, competent people sipping martinis and seducing sexy enemy agents.
Actual spying: an equal blend of bureaucracy and crazy people.
At some point I need to transcribe or scan the book's section(s) on pigeons, because the pigeon stuff is AMAZING. It involves MI5 agent Richard Melville Walker ("He adored pigeons. He lived for pigeons. His reports were long, cooing poems of love.") who was convinced that Germany was going to smuggle intelligence out of the country with homing pigeons, despite the total lack of evidence for this, and deployed a series of anti-pigeon countermeasures, such as a brigade of trained falcons that only managed to succeed in taking down British pigeons ("friendly fire," the book comments dryly) and attempted pigeon double agents that quietly went native in French pigeon coops. A few choice bits are quoted here.
The "what happened to everyone after the war" chapter includes the following for Gustav the pigeon, who carried invasion news from the Normandy beach front and is the only war pigeon named in the book:
Apparently Gustav was also awarded the Dickin Medal, the UK's distinguished service award for animals.
Popular image of spying: glamorous, competent people sipping martinis and seducing sexy enemy agents.
Actual spying: an equal blend of bureaucracy and crazy people.
At some point I need to transcribe or scan the book's section(s) on pigeons, because the pigeon stuff is AMAZING. It involves MI5 agent Richard Melville Walker ("He adored pigeons. He lived for pigeons. His reports were long, cooing poems of love.") who was convinced that Germany was going to smuggle intelligence out of the country with homing pigeons, despite the total lack of evidence for this, and deployed a series of anti-pigeon countermeasures, such as a brigade of trained falcons that only managed to succeed in taking down British pigeons ("friendly fire," the book comments dryly) and attempted pigeon double agents that quietly went native in French pigeon coops. A few choice bits are quoted here.
The "what happened to everyone after the war" chapter includes the following for Gustav the pigeon, who carried invasion news from the Normandy beach front and is the only war pigeon named in the book:
Gustav died soon after the war when his breeder trod on him while mucking out his loft.
Apparently Gustav was also awarded the Dickin Medal, the UK's distinguished service award for animals.
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Haha in one of my mental play-crossovers, there is a point where Adam (the name I have assigned to the launch tech who refused to launch the Insight carriers) solemnly explains to Penelope Garcia (Criminal Minds) the most important advice the late Agent Coulson ever gave him:
"There are no sane, normal, or even particularly stable alpha-level agents. Sane, normal and stable people don't do this job. And if they try for too long, they stop being sane, normal and stable. Learn to anticipate that, and being part of this agency will get a lot easier."
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(Also, Adam is a great name for that guy! He looks like an Adam ...)
I think what interested me most about this book is that, while the handlers are professionals (for whatever value of "professional" you get in a spy organization) the actual spies themselves are amateurs, mostly volunteers, collecting and/or manufacturing information while carrying on their normal daily activities. They're much more like police informants than I had ever realized -- well, basically they are police informants, just working across national lines rather than informing on a criminal organization. It makes sense that it would work that way (why go to the expense, effort, and danger of training and planting someone when you can turn someone who's already there?), and I'm aware that it doesn't always work that way, particularly in the modern post-Cold War era when there's been so much effort and funding put into intelligence gathering as a profession; I know the CIA uses trained plants, for example, in addition to recruited informants. But I think the total chaos of it, and the resemblance to the kinds of bottom-level intelligence networks that the police and FBI use, really intrigued me -- largely because it's so different from the pop-culture James Bond-esque image of how spying is "supposed" to work.
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"That seems a little . . . weird."
"Rumour has it Agent Romanoff once broke into the Falcon's house and finished the renovations in his basement. If you can't find Agent Barton, he's probably on the roof, or maybe hiding in the ceiling, watching you. There was a guy who died when the Triskelion fell, Agent Soza, who used to bring his bunny to the office any time he came. On a leash. Field agents are mostly weird, especially really good ones."
Yup. And these days even if you have a field agent and a trained plant s/he's . . . probably still at least partially a collecting point for a whole lot of local contacts, informants, secret-sellers and other assets.
Really James Bond is much more of an assassin than a spy. Or a distraction. I like to believe that during every ridiculous Bond escapade that's distracting the entire world from everything else, someone somewhere is quietly getting the ACTUALLY super important work done. (And actually in the everybodylives!AU, that exciting distraction is more or less what Howard and Steve are for, while Peggy and Bucky get on the with the actual scutwork that keeps the world safe. :P)
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And thank you for the link; I'll take a look! I think it's possible that skygiants' post is where I originally found out about the book in the first place, because I remember that it was some sort of write-up or review that I came across while browsing my network, and it sounded so intriguing (and so very much my thing, because WEIRD ENTERTAINING HISTORY INVOLVING CON ARTISTS) that I had to read it.
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