Espionage: A Writer's Guide
Being a Beginner's Took Kit for Writing Intelligently About Intelligence
Introduction
About a year ago, I spent the better part of three months gathering notes and writing up drafts for a short pamphlet on how writer's can write intelligently about this subject. The final draft gathered dust as I finished other projects, and I decided lately to serialize the contents as a number of Blog posts before finishing the manuscript and, possibly, publishing as a single volume. I hope you all enjoy the contents, which are still quite rough, but it may be beneficial to you.
With that said, amma ba'du.
This is a guide to help you be a better and, hopefully, more authentic storyteller. It won’t improve your prose style, and it won’t help you attract a broader reading base, at least not directly. But it will give you a better idea how espionage is practiced in the world and will help give you some ideas about how you might want to depict such activities in the world you’re creating, and to do so with a certain flair and some degree of authenticity.
A couple of things up front
First, if you are writing a spy novel, this tiny pamphlet alone is not going to be sufficient to get you where you’re going. Any author worth his or her salt who wants to write a spy novel, especially one set in a real-world context, will need to do some serious and in-depth research to make that novel authentic and appealing to readers. However, if you are writing a story the secondary or tertiary subject of which is espionage, this pamphlet will get you over that hump, especially if you are writing about a fictional or speculative world.
Second, don’t get too hung up on terminology. I use lots of it in this pamphlet. The technical terms I use are based on those used within the U.S. intelligence community (IC). Other countries use other terms and phraseology, and even with in the U.S. IC, terms change frequently and sometimes even vary from agency to agency. If you want to be authentic to a particular country or agency during a particular epoch (1960s Germany, 1980s Central America, etc.), you’ll have to hit the books and do the research. There’s plenty out there in libraries and on the Internet. Also, if you’re building your own fictional intelligence agency in a speculative world, don’t hesitate to apply your own terminology.
But remember, even if terminology changes, good and dependable spy-craft (tradecraft, as it’s sometimes called), changes only slowly over time. It is simply too tried and true, and most changes in the practice of espionage have occurred only in the face of changing technology. A spy plucked out of 1950s Berlin would need to learn some new terminology and technology but otherwise would have very little trouble adapting to a modern environment in the early 21st century. Such tradecraft is the meat and bones of what we’ll be discussing herein.
Finally, this little pamphlet is largely a summary of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) practices, what most people think of when the word ‘espionage’ comes to mind. I will first sketch out a few preliminary pages on the broader intelligence community and on the intelligence cycle and how it works. (HUMINT really is just one part of a larger mechanism.) Then you’ll get a few words on the other intelligence disciplines, all of which are extremely important in building a comprehensive intelligence picture. The bulk of the work will talk about HUMINT and how it is practiced.
That’s the fun part.
Introduction
About a year ago, I spent the better part of three months gathering notes and writing up drafts for a short pamphlet on how writer's can write intelligently about this subject. The final draft gathered dust as I finished other projects, and I decided lately to serialize the contents as a number of Blog posts before finishing the manuscript and, possibly, publishing as a single volume. I hope you all enjoy the contents, which are still quite rough, but it may be beneficial to you.
With that said, amma ba'du.
This is a guide to help you be a better and, hopefully, more authentic storyteller. It won’t improve your prose style, and it won’t help you attract a broader reading base, at least not directly. But it will give you a better idea how espionage is practiced in the world and will help give you some ideas about how you might want to depict such activities in the world you’re creating, and to do so with a certain flair and some degree of authenticity.
A couple of things up front
First, if you are writing a spy novel, this tiny pamphlet alone is not going to be sufficient to get you where you’re going. Any author worth his or her salt who wants to write a spy novel, especially one set in a real-world context, will need to do some serious and in-depth research to make that novel authentic and appealing to readers. However, if you are writing a story the secondary or tertiary subject of which is espionage, this pamphlet will get you over that hump, especially if you are writing about a fictional or speculative world.
Second, don’t get too hung up on terminology. I use lots of it in this pamphlet. The technical terms I use are based on those used within the U.S. intelligence community (IC). Other countries use other terms and phraseology, and even with in the U.S. IC, terms change frequently and sometimes even vary from agency to agency. If you want to be authentic to a particular country or agency during a particular epoch (1960s Germany, 1980s Central America, etc.), you’ll have to hit the books and do the research. There’s plenty out there in libraries and on the Internet. Also, if you’re building your own fictional intelligence agency in a speculative world, don’t hesitate to apply your own terminology.
But remember, even if terminology changes, good and dependable spy-craft (tradecraft, as it’s sometimes called), changes only slowly over time. It is simply too tried and true, and most changes in the practice of espionage have occurred only in the face of changing technology. A spy plucked out of 1950s Berlin would need to learn some new terminology and technology but otherwise would have very little trouble adapting to a modern environment in the early 21st century. Such tradecraft is the meat and bones of what we’ll be discussing herein.
Finally, this little pamphlet is largely a summary of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) practices, what most people think of when the word ‘espionage’ comes to mind. I will first sketch out a few preliminary pages on the broader intelligence community and on the intelligence cycle and how it works. (HUMINT really is just one part of a larger mechanism.) Then you’ll get a few words on the other intelligence disciplines, all of which are extremely important in building a comprehensive intelligence picture. The bulk of the work will talk about HUMINT and how it is practiced.
That’s the fun part.
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