Buy now to get the main key ideas from H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace’s The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception Just like magicians, spies need to do their job without anyone noticing. In the 1950s, the CIA even hired magicians to teach its agents how to use stealth and trickery. In The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception (2009), espionage experts H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace detail how and why the CIA hired its first magician, John Mulholland. They then reproduce Mulholland’s manual of magic for spies - once considered top secret - which taught agents how to evade the eyes of enemies and exchange undetected information.

Magic or spycraft? In 1953, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the CIA initiated a top-secret program, code-named MKULTRA, to counter Soviet mind-control and interrogation techniques. Realizing that clandestine officers might need to covertly deploy newly developed pills, potions, and powders against the adversary, the CIA hired America's most famous magician, John Mulholland, to write two manuals on sleight of hand and undercover communication techniques. In 1973, virtually all documents related to MKULTRA were destroyed. Mulholland's manuals were thought to be among them—until a single surviving copy of each, complete with illustrations, was recently discovered in the agency's archives. The manuals reprinted in this work represent the only known complete copy of Mulholland's instructions for CIA officers on the magician's art of deception and secret communications.

Once a top-secret training manual for CIA field agents in the early Cold War Era of the 1950s, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception is now available to the general public. An amazing historical artifact, this eye-opening handbook offered step-by-step instructions to covert intelligence operatives in all manner of sleight of hand and trickery designed to thwart the Communist enemy. Part of the Company’s infamous MK-ULTRA—a secret mind-control and chemical interrogation research program—this legendary document, the brainchild of John Mulholland, then America’s most famous magician, was believed lost forever. But thanks to former CIA gadgeteer Bob Wallace and renowned spycraft historian H. Keith Melton, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception is now available to everyone, spy and civilian alike.

The manuals reprinted in this work represent the only known complete copy of Mulholland's instructions for CIA officers on the magician's art of deception and secret communications written to counter Soviet mind-control and interrogation techniques.

Illustrated with specially commissioned photography and archive material, a guide to the world of espionage covers everything from the daily life of a special agent to the complex world of international agencies.

An insider's tour of the past half-century's espionage technologies also recounts some of the CIA's most secretive operations and how they have been performed using state-of-the-art spy instruments.

Washington Post Bestseller Washington, DC, stands at the epicenter of world espionage. Mapping this history from the halls of government to tranquil suburban neighborhoods reveals scoresof dead drops, covert meeting places, and secret facilities—a constellation ofclandestine sites unknown to even the most avid history buffs. Until now. Spy Sites of Washington, DC traces more than two centuries of secret history from the Mount Vernon study of spymaster George Washington to the Cleveland Park apartment of the “Queen of Cuba.” In 220 main entries as well as listings for dozens more spy sites, intelligence historians Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton weave incredible true stories of derring-do and double-crosses that put even the best spy fiction to shame. Maps and more than three hundred photos allow readers to follow in the winding footsteps of moles and sleuths, trace the covert operations that influenced wars hot and cold, and understand the tradecraft traitors and spies alike used in the do-or-die chess games that have changed the course of history. Informing and entertaining, Spy Sites of Washington, DC is the comprehensive guidebook to the shadow history of our nation’s capital.