Spies and Provocateurs
14 March 2023
Spies and Provocateurs
Being Discarded Sucks
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - For thirty years my book served as the original tome of espionage and covert action.
When it came out, the U.S. intelligence community (IC), particularly the counter-intelligence community, used it as a primer on spotting the spy.
Over 800 names of spies from around the world. Who, what, when, why and how. The research for the book was like a master’s degree in espionage and covert action. Every trick in the book.
A chronology stirred the imagination even more with curious events unexplained. The bibliography was massive and all read. This was a time when I actually believed writers read all the books they mentioned. I was a bit naïve.
The book became a library-must for reference sections, not to be checked-out.
The late Dan Halpin, owner of the now defunct New Hampshire-based Cloak and Dagger Books, sent a note in a box of books I had ordered.
It stated that a bunch of Hollywood types had come to the store looking for material. They had purchased ten copies of my book. I was impressed when the note said they had mentioned Robert Redford would be in it. I imagined it would be similar to Three Days of the Condor.
When it came out in the theaters a few years later, I was mesmerized on how many of the tricks of the trade and events discussed in the book were in Spy Games. I was dumbfounded that a book I wrote was getting so much notice.
Then the unexpected happened.
A book publisher in Turkey stole the book and reprinted as Ajan-Provokatörler. After I contacted them to complain, they claimed they thought I was dead.
Then it got worse. My book began appearing on used book sites on the Internet. These were not books previously owned by individuals, but from the stacks of university libraries.
As libraries slowly became passé with the rise of the Internet, they began emptying their shelves.
As of the 30th anniversary, I suspect most of the copies of my book are now in used book websites.
I can not cry too much about it as the book propelled me into a life long career writing about intelligence, military issues, and the macabre.
After Spies, I was writing for publications that most journalists only dreamt about, especially the Far Eastern Economic Review.
The only annoying thing is the book cover above was discarded from the Virginia Beach Public Library. The very city I lived during the writing of the book; irony abounds.
It was a fun place to live.
While living outside the gate of Dam Neck Naval Base, me and my buddies hit the bars around town, even venturing on bases to drink at the enlisted bars; something you cannot do since 9/11.
Outside the gates of Little Creek were the SEAL bars and around Oceana Naval Air Station the aviators.
Memories are fun.
Nostalgia, though, can be dangerous.
Nostalgia is where the devil works; mining those moments, looking for that one crack that will break your heart. There is nothing you can do about it.
When one of my roommates committed suicide over a girl. The fun stopped.
And the fond memories were stored away in my consciousness and the horror was relegated to the unconscious to fester.
The 1921 book On The Nightmare by Ernest Jones might have the answer. The book was a collection of articles written in the American Journal of Insanity in 1910.
I have it sitting next to my bed. It will not put you to sleep. It is not that kind of book.
Over 100 years ago, Jones argued that Satan was misunderstood. And that the difference between memories and nostalgia regarding the nightmare that visits you at 3 am is actually an archetype, even if it is eerie, ghastly, horrific.
He was not cast down from heaven, but arose out of the depths of the human soul. And at these depths, when fully explored,…the Devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed, unconscious instinctual life. The Devil and the sombre dæmonic figures of the myths are - psychologically regarded - functional symbols, personifications of the suppressed and unsublimated elements of the instinctual life.
What Jones discovered were no points of ingress nor egress for the nightmare.
END