The cult of the secret agent.
The hero of spy fiction is fearless, obedient, efficient and clever. His real-life counterparts may enjoy some of the virtues Ian Fleming endowed James Bond with, but consider the careers of Heinrich Albert, George Davis, Richard Bissell, and Reino Hayhanen- bumblers all from the days of yore that would make a strong cast in a black comedy…
Albert, a German spy in New York prior to World War I, was expert at budgeting covert operations but innocent of Manhattan. It was on an elevated train that he met his Waterloo. He neglected his briefcase full of sabotage plans only for a moment, but as every New Yorker knows, a moment is enough: a U.S. agent snatched it and just disappeared.
—A pair of MIT engineers are working on a real world Cone of Silence like the one in both the new Get Smart movie and the ’60s television series of the same name — though hopefully the duo’s take on it will be more successfully then the often faulty fictional Cone.
Ditching the idea of plastic domes or enveloping forcefields, Joe Paradiso and Yasuhiro Ono are instead looking into a network of sensors that could identify possible eavesdroppers.—
Davis, ne Dasch, left America for his native Germany in 1941 and returned the next year on a U-boat that deposited him and three other agents on a Long Island beach Six day later he got cold feet and turned himself and his companions in to the FBI. Davis and one of his comrades went to prison; the rest were executed.
Bissell, an economist turned CIA man, seems to have been pursued by bad luck. Involved in the information gathering programs that launched the inglorious U-2 incident, he went on to administer the most embarrassing fizzle of all: the Bay of Pigs invasion. Dedicated service did not stand him in good stead and he was fired.
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