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Spy vs. spy: A web of intrigue
International Spy Museum
The recent radiation-caused death of defected Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in London, and the poisoning of former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar have been alarming items in the news. These incidents, along with a prior death of a fellow critic of Vladimir Putin's presidency, seem to strongly suggest some implication by the Russian government, despite official denial. If anything, these Cold War-like cloak-and-dagger doings indicate that international espionage continues in the post-Iron Curtain age.
Mata Hari
Intelligence is "a critical component of national security," asserts Milton Maltz, founder and chairman of the International Spy Museum (http://www.spymuseum.org/) in Washington, D.C. Established in 2002, the museum houses more than 600 artifacts, ranging from clandestine weapons to surveillance devices. The Web site offers a description of permanent and traveling exhibits, a schedule of guest speakers and other special programs, and online encryption and decoding games. Also, there are ongoing "SpyCasts"—audio feeds of interviews with former CIA or KGB operatives.
Espionage certainly did not spring into existence as a Cold-War byproduct—consider the Trojan Horse—and there have been records of spy activity in ancient Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Hebrew societies. In the U.S., agents on both sides of the Revolutionary War (sometimes simultaneously as double agents) dispatched secret messages revealing military secrets. Many of these documents have been preserved in the Sir Henry Clinton collection at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. The site Spy Letters of the American Revolution (http://www.si.umich.edu/SPIES/) presents these, along with biographies of the spies and others, the techniques used to conceal the intelligence content within the letters, and the success—or failure—of their missions.
James Bond’s Aston Martin
Similarly, spying occurred frequently on both sides of the Civil War, and there are Web sites too numerous to mention here. You can get links to many such sites by navigating to http://www.civil
warhome.com/links9.htm#Espionage. Women were prominent in Civil War espionage, and would continue to do so in more recent periods of history. The New York Times' About.com domain offers Women Spies In History (http://womenshistory.about.com/od/spies/
Women_Spies_in_History.htm) offering profiles and links to Belle Boyd, Laura Ratcliffe and other Civil War spies, along with other worldwide female agents such as Mata Hari, Rose Pastor Stokes and Melita Norwood. More recent history can be found at the CIA's page on the Office of Strategic Services' Web site (https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/oss/) and the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=
topics.home&topic_id=1409).
Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone
The popularity of the most recent 007 film, the television thriller "Alias" and the novels of John Le Carré exemplify the fascination that many of us have with spies and espionage. Two Web sites celebrate the legacy of spy thrillers in pop culture. The Spy Fiction Guide (http://spy.shadowdark.org/) is a directory of espionage fiction in books, movies and TV. And surprisingly, the CIA weighs in with a rather campy exposé (https://www.cia.gov/spy_fi/index.html) depicting the various paraphernalia of Hollywood spy heroes, from the "Man from U.N.C.L.E.'s" pen communicator to Maxwell Smart's shoe phone.
Now: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to maintain surveillance of the latest developments in the Litvinenko/Gaidar stories utilizing any number of online news sources. A good starting point would be to click under the category "News Articles" at UB's Best Basic Resources page (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/quickstart.html). This week's column will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck.
—Rick McRae, University Libraries