THE MASTER BOOK OF SPIES

You too may have a career in spying, if like the author's informant ""Toni"" you have the ""right"" background. But this gossipy assembly of real and fictional spies, whose life histories are filled in with investigations into ""inside"" operational methods, is definitely for the entertainment of armchair operatives. McCormick gives fair coverage to Genghis Khan, Mata Hari, James Bond, and a host of now unmasked Soviet agents, but where is Howard Hunt? Further the chapter on interrogation, for example, pictures but does not mention the torture of Viet Cong by South Vietnamese soldiers yet describes in Toni's terms the fiendishly subtle brainwashing techniques of the Chinese as they affected one prisoner (""My suspicion is that he was given marijuana in his food""). Possibly the several typos, unexplained discrepancies in proper names and irrelevant or nondescript illustrations (many from movie stills) conceal some sort of secret code.