One subject that I’ve long been interested in - though not in any particularly serious fashion - is that of the “black arts” of spying, espionage, and so on. Commonly referred to as “tradecraft”, the field is dominated by paranoid conspiracy theorists, anecdotes, and dubious-looking “instructions” of uncertain provenance. For all I know, a lot of the information out there might actually be workable, and an accurate representation of contemporary “tradecraft”; I simply have a hard time taking people seriously when they begin talking raving about the “New World Order” or “black helicopters”.
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