Ask the Author: Keith Thomson
Answered Questions (6)
Keith Thomson
After answering this question, I will post a link to it on my computer desktop. The answer is: Go to a movie! It always works. But, even though I know that, I feel guilty about leaving the office in the middle of a workday to go to a movie theater. So I usually just gut it out. To no avail. But maybe next time...
Keith Thomson
A thriller about robbers (see answer to What is the best part of being a writer?)
Keith Thomson
Research.
Here's an example:
De Beers, which controls more than half of the world’s diamond mines, has a PR department that gives out too much information for the company’s good. On the De Beers Web site’s media page, I learned about a Brinks truck delivery of two cases of rough, unpolished gems to a vault in a big city diamond center.
I decided to use that vault as a model for the fictitious one the characters in my new novel would rob. The question was this: How would they do it?
As it happens, the vault manufacturer’s site boasted of their big sale to the diamond center. They also detailed the system’s cool new heist-proof tech. Under cover as an "Examiner" reporter writing a story about vaults, I gained admission to the diamond center, and then—two floors below ground to a windowless antechamber the size of a typical kitchen—the four-ton steel vault door. The combination wheel had numbers from 0 to 99. To enter the vault, I would need to dial four numbers, meaning 100 million possible combinations. But by using the right subminiature video camera, I might remotely view the vault being opened.
From my previous spy novel research, I owned five or six such cameras; the most I ever spent on one was $30 (eBay). I stuck one of them on the wall opposite the vault. At seven the next morning, a guard ambled up the vault door and dialed the combination. I watched on my iPhone in the room I was staying in under alias at a hostel on the other side of town.
I decided to try breaking in. There’s just no substitute for first-person research to gather the sights, smells, truth that is stranger than fiction, and so forth. If caught, I’d go with a gonzo-journo cover.
The break-in would need to be at night, after the guards locked down the vault, cleared out of the building, and sent the steel roll-gates slamming down and sealing off all entrances to the vault. During the night, no one patrolled the interior. The diamond center trusted their ten layers of security.
I needed to figure out how to bypass all of those layers. In the course of researching other crime novels, I’ve learned that each time someone invents a security system, someone else finds a way to vanquish it. Take the near-indestructible U-shaped metal Kryptonite lock, a staple of bicycle rack security for fifty years. One day in 2004, a guy in South Dakota figured out that by wedging in the somewhat malleable plastic barrel of a Bic pen, anybody could pop the lock. Thanks to the Web, the next day his discovery was known all over the world. More recently, a home security expert took to the Internet and boasted that he could thwart most burglar alarm systems by finding remote controls from other types of systems—a video game that operated on the same radio frequency, for instance.
A few nights later, I attempted to covertly enter at the rear of the diamond center building, via the courtyard that abuts it.
Using a coil of lightweight climbing rope tipped by a miniature titanium grapnel with retractable flukes, I reached a small terrace on the second floor. A heat-sensing infrared detector monitored the terrace. From my knapsack, I produced a homemade polyester shield; I’d read that the low thermal conductivity of polyester prevents body heat from reaching the heat sensor. It seemed to work now. No alarms—at least that I could hear.
Next I disabled a garden-variety alarm sensor on one of the balcony’s windows—so simple a task that it’s not worth relating. I climbed through the window into a vanilla executive office. Still no alarms. The entire building was silent.
Adrenaline overriding all of my emotions, I proceeded across the hall and then descended the stairs to the antechamber. All the lights were on. Good. I would need them to see, as I’d totally overlooked night vision goggles. I covered the security cameras with garbage bags, then, to cover my tracks, removed my own subminiature camera I’d placed on the wall during my first visit.
The vault’s most significant obstacle was a pair of abutting metal plates, one on the vault door itself and one on the wall to the door’s left. When they’re armed, the two plates form a magnetic field. If I were to break the magnetic field—by so much as cracking the door—I would trigger the alarm. From my knapsack I took a slab of aluminum and, using industrial-strength double-sided tape, stuck it on the plates that regulated the magnetic field, then unscrewed their bolts. I’d read about this on a bank security Web forum. What I was trying to do here is loosen the magnetic plates so that I could pivot them out of my way. I managed to do it, then taped the plates to the antechamber wall, keeping the magnetic field intact. Thus I was able to unlock the vault door—that is, once I correctly entered the combination and deployed the key made from a still photo taken from my subminicam feed.
Before swinging the door open, I flipped off the lights so as not to trip the light detector inside the vault. Once inside, I had to contend with a heat sensor, against which I couldn’t use the polyester shield because I would need both hands free. Turns out if this sort of sensor is coated with a transparent, oily mist, it’s insulated from fluctuations in the room’s temperature, chiefly 98.6-degree me entering. Pam Cooking Spray did the job.
That got me to the inbound and outbound cables powering the remaining security systems and returning their data. I linked the two cables using a precut four-inch length of copper wire, creating a bridge that rerouted the incoming pulse to the outbound wire before the signal reached the sensors, meaning the security company monitoring the vault would get no electronic news tonight.
Resisting the urge to look around, I darted straightaway to the storage compartments, drilled open the De Beers boxes, and tipped the two cases of raw diamonds into my knapsack. As the gems rained against the fabric, I considered for a moment that I might be dreaming. Could I possibly have gotten this far? I hadn’t figured I’d even on making into the vault.
I planned to return the diamonds to the diamond center. Until, back in my room at the hostel, I took a handful out of the knapsack and was enchanted by the way they transformed the harsh light of the overhead fluorescent tubes into the full spectrum.
Unfortunately the one thing you can’t find on the Web is a good fence.
Here's an example:
De Beers, which controls more than half of the world’s diamond mines, has a PR department that gives out too much information for the company’s good. On the De Beers Web site’s media page, I learned about a Brinks truck delivery of two cases of rough, unpolished gems to a vault in a big city diamond center.
I decided to use that vault as a model for the fictitious one the characters in my new novel would rob. The question was this: How would they do it?
As it happens, the vault manufacturer’s site boasted of their big sale to the diamond center. They also detailed the system’s cool new heist-proof tech. Under cover as an "Examiner" reporter writing a story about vaults, I gained admission to the diamond center, and then—two floors below ground to a windowless antechamber the size of a typical kitchen—the four-ton steel vault door. The combination wheel had numbers from 0 to 99. To enter the vault, I would need to dial four numbers, meaning 100 million possible combinations. But by using the right subminiature video camera, I might remotely view the vault being opened.
From my previous spy novel research, I owned five or six such cameras; the most I ever spent on one was $30 (eBay). I stuck one of them on the wall opposite the vault. At seven the next morning, a guard ambled up the vault door and dialed the combination. I watched on my iPhone in the room I was staying in under alias at a hostel on the other side of town.
I decided to try breaking in. There’s just no substitute for first-person research to gather the sights, smells, truth that is stranger than fiction, and so forth. If caught, I’d go with a gonzo-journo cover.
The break-in would need to be at night, after the guards locked down the vault, cleared out of the building, and sent the steel roll-gates slamming down and sealing off all entrances to the vault. During the night, no one patrolled the interior. The diamond center trusted their ten layers of security.
I needed to figure out how to bypass all of those layers. In the course of researching other crime novels, I’ve learned that each time someone invents a security system, someone else finds a way to vanquish it. Take the near-indestructible U-shaped metal Kryptonite lock, a staple of bicycle rack security for fifty years. One day in 2004, a guy in South Dakota figured out that by wedging in the somewhat malleable plastic barrel of a Bic pen, anybody could pop the lock. Thanks to the Web, the next day his discovery was known all over the world. More recently, a home security expert took to the Internet and boasted that he could thwart most burglar alarm systems by finding remote controls from other types of systems—a video game that operated on the same radio frequency, for instance.
A few nights later, I attempted to covertly enter at the rear of the diamond center building, via the courtyard that abuts it.
Using a coil of lightweight climbing rope tipped by a miniature titanium grapnel with retractable flukes, I reached a small terrace on the second floor. A heat-sensing infrared detector monitored the terrace. From my knapsack, I produced a homemade polyester shield; I’d read that the low thermal conductivity of polyester prevents body heat from reaching the heat sensor. It seemed to work now. No alarms—at least that I could hear.
Next I disabled a garden-variety alarm sensor on one of the balcony’s windows—so simple a task that it’s not worth relating. I climbed through the window into a vanilla executive office. Still no alarms. The entire building was silent.
Adrenaline overriding all of my emotions, I proceeded across the hall and then descended the stairs to the antechamber. All the lights were on. Good. I would need them to see, as I’d totally overlooked night vision goggles. I covered the security cameras with garbage bags, then, to cover my tracks, removed my own subminiature camera I’d placed on the wall during my first visit.
The vault’s most significant obstacle was a pair of abutting metal plates, one on the vault door itself and one on the wall to the door’s left. When they’re armed, the two plates form a magnetic field. If I were to break the magnetic field—by so much as cracking the door—I would trigger the alarm. From my knapsack I took a slab of aluminum and, using industrial-strength double-sided tape, stuck it on the plates that regulated the magnetic field, then unscrewed their bolts. I’d read about this on a bank security Web forum. What I was trying to do here is loosen the magnetic plates so that I could pivot them out of my way. I managed to do it, then taped the plates to the antechamber wall, keeping the magnetic field intact. Thus I was able to unlock the vault door—that is, once I correctly entered the combination and deployed the key made from a still photo taken from my subminicam feed.
Before swinging the door open, I flipped off the lights so as not to trip the light detector inside the vault. Once inside, I had to contend with a heat sensor, against which I couldn’t use the polyester shield because I would need both hands free. Turns out if this sort of sensor is coated with a transparent, oily mist, it’s insulated from fluctuations in the room’s temperature, chiefly 98.6-degree me entering. Pam Cooking Spray did the job.
That got me to the inbound and outbound cables powering the remaining security systems and returning their data. I linked the two cables using a precut four-inch length of copper wire, creating a bridge that rerouted the incoming pulse to the outbound wire before the signal reached the sensors, meaning the security company monitoring the vault would get no electronic news tonight.
Resisting the urge to look around, I darted straightaway to the storage compartments, drilled open the De Beers boxes, and tipped the two cases of raw diamonds into my knapsack. As the gems rained against the fabric, I considered for a moment that I might be dreaming. Could I possibly have gotten this far? I hadn’t figured I’d even on making into the vault.
I planned to return the diamonds to the diamond center. Until, back in my room at the hostel, I took a handful out of the knapsack and was enchanted by the way they transformed the harsh light of the overhead fluorescent tubes into the full spectrum.
Unfortunately the one thing you can’t find on the Web is a good fence.
Keith Thomson
HOW HEPATITIS CAN IMPROVE YOUR WRITING:
In December 2002 I came down with a 103-degree fever. Oddly I felt fine. Six days later, I felt great, but my temperature remained 103. So I took my wife’s suggestion and went to the doctor (nowadays, with small children, we would have to have a 103-degree fever for twenty days before thinking of going to a doctor). It turned out that, as a result of eating the wrong burrito, I’d contracted the hepatitis A virus.
“You’ll need to spend six to eight weeks in bed,” the doctor said, a devastating blow because it would cost me a substantial movie rewrite job (at the time I was working as a screenwriter, essentially commuting to Los Angeles from Palo Alto).
It turned out hep A wasn’t all bad. Two of my favorite activities are sleeping and reading. How often do you get to spend two months doing nothing but? I could keep only toast down, and I suffered haunting, recurring dreams of cheeseburgers, but, all in all, I was delighted with the disease. My family and friends took this as delirium.
More than anything, hepatitis nudged me into doing research to fill out the pirate manuscript I’d begun that fall in the novel-writing class I took at Stanford’s School of Continuing Ed. Ships are complicated, and I didn’t know my bow from my poop deck. My story involved an extensive duel between a superyacht and a clipper sailed by a bunch of actual pirates hiding in plain sight as a troup of pirate reenactors. To write the clipper scenes, I needed to know how the craft was rigged and sailed, and I needed to know about most every part of it, because about most every part gets blown sky-high. While in bed, I read about forty maritime books, mostly non-fiction, from Stanford’s singularly extensive maritime library—in several instances, I was the first person to check out the book in half a decade. If I hadn’t had hep A, I don’t know when I could possibly have done all the research. Or that I would have ever done it. Or that the book would have sold (St. Martin’s bought it in 2003).
Now I’m a research junkie. Is that good? How much research is too much? At what point does research hinder writing, in terms either of time drain or diluting the creative process? How do you decide to go to a story location for research, or simply visit via YouTube? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions; I’m eager to know your thoughts.
In the interim, would I recommend hep A to other novelists? Absolutely. Just follow your doctor’s instructions closely or you could wind up getting published by Davy Jones.
In December 2002 I came down with a 103-degree fever. Oddly I felt fine. Six days later, I felt great, but my temperature remained 103. So I took my wife’s suggestion and went to the doctor (nowadays, with small children, we would have to have a 103-degree fever for twenty days before thinking of going to a doctor). It turned out that, as a result of eating the wrong burrito, I’d contracted the hepatitis A virus.
“You’ll need to spend six to eight weeks in bed,” the doctor said, a devastating blow because it would cost me a substantial movie rewrite job (at the time I was working as a screenwriter, essentially commuting to Los Angeles from Palo Alto).
It turned out hep A wasn’t all bad. Two of my favorite activities are sleeping and reading. How often do you get to spend two months doing nothing but? I could keep only toast down, and I suffered haunting, recurring dreams of cheeseburgers, but, all in all, I was delighted with the disease. My family and friends took this as delirium.
More than anything, hepatitis nudged me into doing research to fill out the pirate manuscript I’d begun that fall in the novel-writing class I took at Stanford’s School of Continuing Ed. Ships are complicated, and I didn’t know my bow from my poop deck. My story involved an extensive duel between a superyacht and a clipper sailed by a bunch of actual pirates hiding in plain sight as a troup of pirate reenactors. To write the clipper scenes, I needed to know how the craft was rigged and sailed, and I needed to know about most every part of it, because about most every part gets blown sky-high. While in bed, I read about forty maritime books, mostly non-fiction, from Stanford’s singularly extensive maritime library—in several instances, I was the first person to check out the book in half a decade. If I hadn’t had hep A, I don’t know when I could possibly have done all the research. Or that I would have ever done it. Or that the book would have sold (St. Martin’s bought it in 2003).
Now I’m a research junkie. Is that good? How much research is too much? At what point does research hinder writing, in terms either of time drain or diluting the creative process? How do you decide to go to a story location for research, or simply visit via YouTube? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions; I’m eager to know your thoughts.
In the interim, would I recommend hep A to other novelists? Absolutely. Just follow your doctor’s instructions closely or you could wind up getting published by Davy Jones.
Keith Thomson
I was once dating a young woman we'll call Jane, and I was intimidated by her prior boyfriends, who included the likes of an All-Big-Ten quarterback, one of the youngest Fortune 500 CEOs, and a comparably successful financier who was fluent in several languages. The financier and I happened to have gone to the same college and graduated the same year, but we never met, probably because I only hung out with mortals.
I suffered from the comparisons to this pantheon of great boyfriends until Jane told me a story about the time the financier took her home to Virginia for Thanksgiving.
Tragically, Alzheimer's had forced the financier's father into retirement in his early sixties -- he'd been a big American company's factory manager in several foreign countries. While the family lived abroad and the son soaked up cultures and languages, becoming a worldly sophisticate, the father was a xenophobe of the Archie Bunker school, going out of his way to procure Budweiser and adamantly sticking to speaking English. Accordingly, everyone around the table that Thanksgiving day in Virginia was surprised when he began speaking French.
Fluently.
Taking in the looks of mystification, he switched to German.
Evidently, xenophobic factory manager and Bud man had been cover.
I wondered: What do intelligence agencies do when operatives lose their ability to retain important secrets?
According to Fred Rustmann, who was a CIA operations officer for twenty-five years, "Whenever anyone is going to be under anesthesia or in any situation where he may babble, there's an agency minder to make sure he doesn't divulge classified information."
It turns out that there are so few long-term cases of potential babbling, however, that no official policy exists.
"Usually with older operatives, keeping secrets is practically ingrained," says Peter Earnest, the executive director of the International Spy Museum whose thirty-six year CIA career included over twenty years in the Clandestine Service. "You also have to take into account the relative sensitivity of their secrets: Generally, when these men and women leave the field, they spend years consulting for us or for outside firms. During that time, the sources and methods that they are obliged to keep forever secret change at an incredibly fast rate."
So once the former spies' minds begin to fail, decades have passed, at which point they could sit down and dictate their memoirs to a North Korean agent and cause little damage, if any.
Still, it's not unprecedented for an older or retired spy to have a head chock-full of valuable intel. What if such a person did fall into enemy hands?
Take the case of William Colby, who served as director of the CIA from 1973 until 1976, then founded a law firm and remained actively involved in intelligence matters. On April 27, 1996, Colby went canoeing by himself near his home in Rock Point, Maryland. Later, the canoe was found, but he wasn't.
A week passed without any sign of him. Had enemy operatives spirited him to a secret interrogation facility? Were they extracting vital national security secrets from the seventy-six year-old?
His body turned up in the water two days later. Although suspicion of foul play ran rampant, an inquest established that he had suffered a heart attack or stroke, fallen out of the canoe, then died from drowning or hypothermia.
But what if there was merit to the suspicions?
Similarly, what if someone like the financier's father went for a stroll in the park one day and didn't return? Alzheimer's sufferers often depart for the corner store and are found halfway across the country. The financier's dad was still young enough, still close enough to his clandestine service days, that he might have rattled off the names of numerous American operatives abroad, compromising their operations and costing them their lives.
The hypothetical intrigued me enough that I wrote an entire novel, "Once a Spy" (Doubleday), which I hope contains a sufficient portion of reality -- the research brought me into contact with an array of other intelligence community personnel ranging from a National Security Agency temp to a director of the CIA, plus several spies so bright and dashing and heroic that I would guess at least one of them dated Jane.
I suffered from the comparisons to this pantheon of great boyfriends until Jane told me a story about the time the financier took her home to Virginia for Thanksgiving.
Tragically, Alzheimer's had forced the financier's father into retirement in his early sixties -- he'd been a big American company's factory manager in several foreign countries. While the family lived abroad and the son soaked up cultures and languages, becoming a worldly sophisticate, the father was a xenophobe of the Archie Bunker school, going out of his way to procure Budweiser and adamantly sticking to speaking English. Accordingly, everyone around the table that Thanksgiving day in Virginia was surprised when he began speaking French.
Fluently.
Taking in the looks of mystification, he switched to German.
Evidently, xenophobic factory manager and Bud man had been cover.
I wondered: What do intelligence agencies do when operatives lose their ability to retain important secrets?
According to Fred Rustmann, who was a CIA operations officer for twenty-five years, "Whenever anyone is going to be under anesthesia or in any situation where he may babble, there's an agency minder to make sure he doesn't divulge classified information."
It turns out that there are so few long-term cases of potential babbling, however, that no official policy exists.
"Usually with older operatives, keeping secrets is practically ingrained," says Peter Earnest, the executive director of the International Spy Museum whose thirty-six year CIA career included over twenty years in the Clandestine Service. "You also have to take into account the relative sensitivity of their secrets: Generally, when these men and women leave the field, they spend years consulting for us or for outside firms. During that time, the sources and methods that they are obliged to keep forever secret change at an incredibly fast rate."
So once the former spies' minds begin to fail, decades have passed, at which point they could sit down and dictate their memoirs to a North Korean agent and cause little damage, if any.
Still, it's not unprecedented for an older or retired spy to have a head chock-full of valuable intel. What if such a person did fall into enemy hands?
Take the case of William Colby, who served as director of the CIA from 1973 until 1976, then founded a law firm and remained actively involved in intelligence matters. On April 27, 1996, Colby went canoeing by himself near his home in Rock Point, Maryland. Later, the canoe was found, but he wasn't.
A week passed without any sign of him. Had enemy operatives spirited him to a secret interrogation facility? Were they extracting vital national security secrets from the seventy-six year-old?
His body turned up in the water two days later. Although suspicion of foul play ran rampant, an inquest established that he had suffered a heart attack or stroke, fallen out of the canoe, then died from drowning or hypothermia.
But what if there was merit to the suspicions?
Similarly, what if someone like the financier's father went for a stroll in the park one day and didn't return? Alzheimer's sufferers often depart for the corner store and are found halfway across the country. The financier's dad was still young enough, still close enough to his clandestine service days, that he might have rattled off the names of numerous American operatives abroad, compromising their operations and costing them their lives.
The hypothetical intrigued me enough that I wrote an entire novel, "Once a Spy" (Doubleday), which I hope contains a sufficient portion of reality -- the research brought me into contact with an array of other intelligence community personnel ranging from a National Security Agency temp to a director of the CIA, plus several spies so bright and dashing and heroic that I would guess at least one of them dated Jane.
Keith Thomson
I was once dating a young woman we'll call Jane, and I was intimidated by her prior boyfriends, who included the likes of an All-Big-Ten quarterback, one of the youngest Fortune 500 CEOs, and a comparably successful financier who was fluent in several languages. The financier and I happened to have gone to the same college and graduated the same year, but we never met, probably because I only hung out with mortals.
I suffered from the comparisons to this pantheon of great boyfriends until Jane told me a story about the time the financier took her home to Virginia for Thanksgiving.
Tragically, Alzheimer's had forced the financier's father into retirement in his early sixties -- he'd been a big American company's factory manager in several foreign countries. While the family lived abroad and the son soaked up cultures and languages, becoming a worldly sophisticate, the father was a xenophobe of the Archie Bunker school, going out of his way to procure Budweiser and adamantly sticking to speaking English. Accordingly, everyone around the table that Thanksgiving day in Virginia was surprised when he began speaking French.
Fluently.
Taking in the looks of mystification, he switched to German.
Evidently, xenophobic factory manager and Bud man had been cover.
I wondered: What do intelligence agencies do when operatives lose their ability to retain important secrets?
According to Fred Rustmann, who was a CIA operations officer for twenty-five years, "Whenever anyone is going to be under anesthesia or in any situation where he may babble, there's an agency minder to make sure he doesn't divulge classified information."
It turns out that there are so few long-term cases of potential babbling, however, that no official policy exists.
"Usually with older operatives, keeping secrets is practically ingrained," says Peter Earnest, the executive director of the International Spy Museum whose thirty-six year CIA career included over twenty years in the Clandestine Service. "You also have to take into account the relative sensitivity of their secrets: Generally, when these men and women leave the field, they spend years consulting for us or for outside firms. During that time, the sources and methods that they are obliged to keep forever secret change at an incredibly fast rate."
So once the former spies' minds begin to fail, decades have passed, at which point they could sit down and dictate their memoirs to a North Korean agent and cause little damage, if any.
Still, it's not unprecedented for an older or retired spy to have a head chock-full of valuable intel. What if such a person did fall into enemy hands?
Take the case of William Colby, who served as director of the CIA from 1973 until 1976, then founded a law firm and remained actively involved in intelligence matters. On April 27, 1996, Colby went canoeing by himself near his home in Rock Point, Maryland. Later, the canoe was found, but he wasn't.
A week passed without any sign of him. Had enemy operatives spirited him to a secret interrogation facility? Were they extracting vital national security secrets from the seventy-six year-old?
His body turned up in the water two days later. Although suspicion of foul play ran rampant, an inquest established that he had suffered a heart attack or stroke, fallen out of the canoe, then died from drowning or hypothermia.
But what if there was merit to the suspicions?
Similarly, what if someone like the financier's father went for a stroll in the park one day and didn't return? Alzheimer's sufferers often depart for the corner store and are found halfway across the country. The financier's dad was still young enough, still close enough to his clandestine service days, that he might have rattled off the names of numerous American operatives abroad, compromising their operations and costing them their lives.
The hypothetical intrigued me enough that I wrote an entire novel, "Once a Spy" (Doubleday), which I hope contains a sufficient portion of reality -- the research brought me into contact with an array of other intelligence community personnel ranging from a National Security Agency temp to a director of the CIA, plus several spies so bright and dashing and heroic that I would guess at least one of them dated Jane.
I suffered from the comparisons to this pantheon of great boyfriends until Jane told me a story about the time the financier took her home to Virginia for Thanksgiving.
Tragically, Alzheimer's had forced the financier's father into retirement in his early sixties -- he'd been a big American company's factory manager in several foreign countries. While the family lived abroad and the son soaked up cultures and languages, becoming a worldly sophisticate, the father was a xenophobe of the Archie Bunker school, going out of his way to procure Budweiser and adamantly sticking to speaking English. Accordingly, everyone around the table that Thanksgiving day in Virginia was surprised when he began speaking French.
Fluently.
Taking in the looks of mystification, he switched to German.
Evidently, xenophobic factory manager and Bud man had been cover.
I wondered: What do intelligence agencies do when operatives lose their ability to retain important secrets?
According to Fred Rustmann, who was a CIA operations officer for twenty-five years, "Whenever anyone is going to be under anesthesia or in any situation where he may babble, there's an agency minder to make sure he doesn't divulge classified information."
It turns out that there are so few long-term cases of potential babbling, however, that no official policy exists.
"Usually with older operatives, keeping secrets is practically ingrained," says Peter Earnest, the executive director of the International Spy Museum whose thirty-six year CIA career included over twenty years in the Clandestine Service. "You also have to take into account the relative sensitivity of their secrets: Generally, when these men and women leave the field, they spend years consulting for us or for outside firms. During that time, the sources and methods that they are obliged to keep forever secret change at an incredibly fast rate."
So once the former spies' minds begin to fail, decades have passed, at which point they could sit down and dictate their memoirs to a North Korean agent and cause little damage, if any.
Still, it's not unprecedented for an older or retired spy to have a head chock-full of valuable intel. What if such a person did fall into enemy hands?
Take the case of William Colby, who served as director of the CIA from 1973 until 1976, then founded a law firm and remained actively involved in intelligence matters. On April 27, 1996, Colby went canoeing by himself near his home in Rock Point, Maryland. Later, the canoe was found, but he wasn't.
A week passed without any sign of him. Had enemy operatives spirited him to a secret interrogation facility? Were they extracting vital national security secrets from the seventy-six year-old?
His body turned up in the water two days later. Although suspicion of foul play ran rampant, an inquest established that he had suffered a heart attack or stroke, fallen out of the canoe, then died from drowning or hypothermia.
But what if there was merit to the suspicions?
Similarly, what if someone like the financier's father went for a stroll in the park one day and didn't return? Alzheimer's sufferers often depart for the corner store and are found halfway across the country. The financier's dad was still young enough, still close enough to his clandestine service days, that he might have rattled off the names of numerous American operatives abroad, compromising their operations and costing them their lives.
The hypothetical intrigued me enough that I wrote an entire novel, "Once a Spy" (Doubleday), which I hope contains a sufficient portion of reality -- the research brought me into contact with an array of other intelligence community personnel ranging from a National Security Agency temp to a director of the CIA, plus several spies so bright and dashing and heroic that I would guess at least one of them dated Jane.
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