Reviews

The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception by Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton

stilgar98's review

4.0

Not what I was expecting, but interesting none the less.

omnibozo22's review against another edition

2.0

This was mainly interesting in that it may actually exist. If it does, it's a pretty silly manual of real magicians' secrets applied to highly unlikely espionage situations. On second thought, these are exactly the kinds of stupid things the CIA used to try and assassinate Castro... exploding cigars, rings with secret poison reservoirs, etc. The chances of agents sitting down and learning these techniques seems pretty slim, not that they might not work as magic tricks, but that they might not work as spy craft. This is full of the lowest Spy vs Spy sort of spycraft silliness.

georgemoore's review against another edition

4.0

A very interesting book. You can tell that a big part of it was written in the '50s. That aside, it's fun and fascinating.