A Brief History of the Spy: Modern Spying from the Cold War to the War on Terror

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A scene from the Iraq War, or perhaps one of the Balkan conflicts of the late twentieth century? No, this is a reconstruction of events surrounding the capture of the town of Jericho, as described in the Book of Joshua, one of the early books of the Bible, which can be dated to somewhere around the fourteenth century BC. Modern spies might be able to transmit information to their superiors using hi-tech equipment, but the core demands of the espionage world have hardly changed in thousands of years. Men and women (from ancient times, spying has always been an equal opportunity profession) have to put themselves at risk in order to obtain information that other people simply do not want them to have.

There can be few people who haven’t seen a spy film, especially one of the score of movies made featuring Ian Fleming’s fictional secret agent, James Bond. The suave, debonair, tuxedoed Roger Moore incarnation of that character belongs firmly in the realms of fiction, but the more gritty, determined agent, as embodied by Daniel Craig’s twenty-first century version or the screen interpretation of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne, is a far more accurate account of life in a world of treachery and deceit. Many of the spies whose deeds are examined in this volume carried out feats that would be dismissed as pure fiction, were they not fully documented.

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