RUSSIAN AGENT
HANDBOOK FOR SPIES, by Alexander Foote; Museum Press. English price, 10/6. ERE is thorough disillusionment for readers of secret service fiction who have been led to believe that every brunette sipping a calvados in a Continental café is a dangerous spy, and every non-drinking blonde a_ virtuous woman in distress. According to Mr. Foote (he was in the business professionally for nine years) a spy’s life is for the most part extremely dull and prosaic because he must be inconspicuous and ordinary; anything unusual is liable to attract attention and the suspected spy is well on the way to being an arrested spy, as the author discovered for. himself. An Englishman who was recruited by the Russians for espionage work after taking part in the Spanish Civil War, Mr. Foote graduated to an important position as a Soviet agent in Switzerland, where most of his work wés done. He makes singularly little of the exciting patches which came his way. He was even suspected by his employers of double-crossing them with the British, so that the most astonishing thing about it all is that he lived to Write his story. This is und6ubtedly a useful text-book for those young men and women who feel a call to set up in business as spies, but T can’t help thinking that its market
will be limited.
E.R.
B.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19500210.2.31.7
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 555, 10 February 1950, Page 17
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228RUSSIAN AGENT New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 555, 10 February 1950, Page 17
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