got geoint?

When you cover the comings and goings of the intelligence community, sometimes real life can be stranger and more interesting than fiction. This is certainly the case in a story we uncovered about the CIA in the 1950s tapping into a famous magician to help the agency with the “art of espionage.” In a recently unearthed and published manual called “The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception,” American magician John Mulholland describes Houdini-like tricks designed to help spies pull off a number of clandestine operations, such as slipping poison into an enemy’s drink or surreptitiously removing documents. Pretty cool insight into the agency back in the 1950s, and at the time, it was probably a fairly innovative program. My how the times have changed though…we need much more than magic tricks to help defeat our enemies.

Tags: CIA, CIA and Magic, CIA and Magician, GEOINT, Intelligence Community, John Mulholland, The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception, USGIF