Did you know that the CIA hired a magician to write a pair of tradecraft manuals for them in the early 1950s?
Magician John Mulholland wrote these once classified manuals to show CIA case officers how to secretly pass documents, hide items discretely, slip pills into enemy cocktails and even covert communication tricks. The real nuts and bolts of espionage!
Once thought to have been destroyed, one copy of each of the two declassified manuals was recovered by the author and appear in their entirety within The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.
The book is a very good read for those interested in CIA tradecraft history and also its original roots in stage magic.
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These have been on my Amazon wish list for some time now. Anyone read them yet?
I got this from the library a few weeks ago and will start reading it tonight. If I remember to I’ll post up my thoughts of it.
I’d be willing to bet that page 1 says: “Never admit you’ve read this book…”
If these are declassified documents from our Gov, then they should be available as public domain PDFs. ITS should also post links to the documents themselves.
It is not just the parts of the manual that have not been redacted, but it is also a history of the CIA around the making and use of this manual.