THE REAL SPY’S GUIDE TO BECOMING A SPY

Being an ex–CIA agent and also Executive Director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, Earnest carries promising credentials—but his career manual for would-be spies is a big yawn. Illustrated with drably impersonal line drawings of people in trench coats and largely devoid of actual examples, his narrative offers a generic view of what spies do, followed by comments on personal qualities that make good spy material and vague allusions to how CIA agents are trained (industrial espionage rates only a single brief mention). He then moves on to obvious advice about how field agents might enlist human “assets,” get rid of a tail, present security reports to bosses and like spy-ish activities. Frequent “Spy Speak” boxes define special terms that are, mostly, already defined in nearby text. Readers with a serious yen to be intelligence agents will get more insight and information from the likes of Claudia B. Manley’s Secret Agents: Life as a Professional Spy (2001), Kate Walker and Elaine Argaet’s So You Want To Be a Spy (2004) or Richard Platt’s Spy in the Eyewitness series (revised edition, 2009). (Nonfiction. 10-12)