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  From The Sunday Times of London

Spycraft: Inside the CIA’s Top Secret Spy Lab by Robert Wallace and H Keith Melton The Sunday Times review by Brian Schofield
During the second world war, American military technicians tried to improve their bombardment of the Japanese fleet by strapping cats to the underside of their bombs. In theory, as Tiddles plummeted towards the Pacific ocean from the belly of a B-52, the natural feline aversion to water would steer both puss and payload towards the warm, dry surface of the enemy’s warships. According to the co-authors of Spycraft, “Initial tests proved cats were ineffective and the concept died as quickly as the first test subjects.” Spycraft, the first complete history of the CIA’s department for clandestine military gadgetry, known as the Office of Technical Services (OTS), is packed with such nuggets of experimental enthusiasm. It’s a testimony to the comprehensiveness of this chronicle of bombs, bugs, poison pills and exploding cigars (and to Washington’s bureaucratic witlessness, which the authors capture in full) that this book took nearly two years to be cleared by security for publication. It emerges that America’s spyware history began sluggishly in the second world war — hampered by a belief that relying on technology and subterfuge was un-American, and best left to the more naturally sneaky British. There were some wartime successes, though, notably smuggling exploding coal to the French resistance, to blow up German trains. But as the cold war warmed up, America languished far behind the technocrats of Soviet Russia — the KGB had a bug inside the Great Seal of the United States, hanging on the wall behind the desk of the American ambassador to Moscow, and Russian dedication to fieldwork included cracking American diplomatic safes…

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