BEST SPY AGENT IN THE WORLD WINDOWS

In the past two decades, the amount of spy-themed entertainment, or “spytainment,” has skyrocketed, while spy facts remain scarce and university professors teach courses on just about everything other than intelligence. The implications of this shift are far more serious than they appear. In intelligence, art is imitating life and life is imitating art. Government officials hired an engineer from Walt Disney Imagineering to design the agency’s offices, right down to the sleek consoles and lunchroom chairs. It looks like it came straight out of Hollywood. Created after 9/11 to fuse terrorism-threat reporting across the U.S., NCTC has an ultramodern operations center with giant wall monitors, an open floor plan, and computer stations tracking bad guys around the globe. The National Counterterrorism Center is another story. This post is excerpted from Zegart’s forthcoming book. The only clue that this is not a typical government building is the burn bags: Because classified documents cannot just be thrown away, instead of trash cans, striped burn bags that look weirdly like Trader Joe’s holiday shopping bags are scattered around the building to make incineration easier. There, lobby security has no retina scanners or fancy fingerprint devices, just a few turnstiles and a friendly security guard who takes cellphones and hands out paper claim checks. Once cleared by security, visitors head back outside, where they can walk down a winding road or take the rambling shuttle bus to the old headquarters building.

BEST SPY AGENT IN THE WORLD WINDOWS

There are teller windows with bulletproof glass, soda machines, and an old-fashioned black landline phone mounted on the back wall. Instead, the entry to America’s best-known intelligence agency has more of a shabby post-office feel. The visitor center looks nothing like the high-tech offices of Jason Bourne and Carrie Mathison. I have it on video tape and have no memory of how I came by it.F or fans of spy movies and television shows, a visit to CIA headquarters will be disappointing. What a horror to discover that this whole great memory of a blood thirsty intense spy drama is actually played as a super silly spoof. I have the very popular facsimile of the broomhandle mauser that is commonly used by fans of Star Wars to recreate the Han Solo blaster. Charles Vine has to keep his cool and load the trickey top loading magazine of his mauser out of earshot of the close by Red assassin. His final battle places him against a master assassin with holey socks and his own silenced mauser. All of this action barely ruffles his hair. Later, stoppped at an enemy roadblock, he does a trickey behind his back shot, shooting through his coat, then rolls into the middle of the road and from his back shoots the other enemies, shell casing flying.

One car chase where he leans out the window with a long silencer on the ww1 vintage pistol 'Thwipp, Thwipp, Thwipping' at the enemies car in the middle of busy daytime London traffic. He has several scenes where he is blasting away with this great weapon. An 'M' stand in looks Vine over and heartily disapproves of his hand cannon, a broomhandle mauser, in a special holster that covers his entire lower back. As Sammy Davis JR sings, He's The Second, Not the First, but The Second Best Secret Agent in The Whole Wide Worrrrld. The 'other guy' 007 we are lead to believe, has some sort of distraction keeping him from the important task of protecting a defecting Soviet scientist with the secret of anti gravity or perpetual motion or somesuch breakthrough. The Charles Vine character made quite an impression on me at 12 (maybe 13) years of age.

Best spy agent in the world