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| The Whole Earth Catalog of Spying And Information Assimilation | ||||
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The Whole Spy Catalog
The Ultimate Guide for Finding Information and Intelligence on (Damn Near) Anything "This book is chock full of secrets. The public doesn't need to know this stuff and it should be suppressed."
"I wish I'd known Mr. Laqpin a few years ago. I'd have made him a Major, or had him shot."
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"This handy catalog is just what the citizen - and espionage buff - need to untangle the jargons
and players in the 'great game' of intelligence." "The 90's is the information decade and Lapin is probably the best hands-on/how-to writer around,. This book
has got something for everyone; from private detectives to intelligence agents to curious citizens."
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| TABLE of CONTENTS |
FROM THE AUTHOR: So what the hell is THE WHOLE SPY CATALOG? Choosing the name of this book was by far the most difficult part of putting it together. I realize the term "spy" conjures up a certain image that, although it fits some sections of this sterling publication, does not fit others. At least in the conventional sense. My first choice would have been THE WHOLE INTELLIGENCE CATALOG, but the word intelligence is somewhat ambiguous (could it be a how-to-increase-your-IQ book for the upwardly mobile?) and, frankly, THE WHOLE SPY CATALOG has a sexier ring to it. So, first and foremost let's define our terms - this is a book about acquiring intelligence (as defined by Dr. Adda Bozeman in Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft) "stands for the human being's inborn capacity to come to terms with life by engaging in thought, and acquiring, developing and investing knowledge." It's my personal opinion, for whatever that's worth, that one can never have too much knowledge. But see, it's also a book about having fun listening in on the cellular telephone call from the guy in the Mercedes next to you who is calling his wife to explain why he's going to be late to dinner and then calling his mistress to set up the evening's entertainment... It's how to find your old college lover and see what really happened to his dream of curing world hunger, or running down the guy who owes you $28,000 from that stock scam, or checking if your new fifianceeeally does own those companies he claims to be CEO of. It's about hiring a real life KGB agent to tell you what your company's competitor is doing, renting a model airplane with a built-in video camera to fly over the new neighbor's compound (you know, the one who's just moved in with the 28 wives, guns and armored vehicles) to see what's really going on... Ms. Bozeman goes on to define strategic intelligence as that,"which is a component of statecraft that centers on the needs of one politically unified community to have reliable information, knowledge, or intelligence about other societies in its environment." Well, Virginia, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we are all in one or more "politically unified groups," be they families, companies, clubs, organizations or countries. And, as we will soon see, there are amazing in-place resources to help you in your quest for either tactical or strategic intelligence. THE WHOLE SPY CATALOG is also about understanding what the hell is happening to our political world as we know it. Where have all the spies gone? We'll talk to CIA agents, KGB agents, out of work (and bitter), STASSI agents, look at how France and Japan are stealing our comcompaniescrets, and how you, I mean you personally, can buy a tank, locate anyone who subscribes to a magazine, find who owns the company that just bilked you out of your life savings, protect your private information, hire a satellite to take photos of any part of the earth you want a picture of, get on forums and bulletin boards that let you talk with some of the heaviest hitters in the info and/or spy biz, and have some fun. Yeah, this book is going to break some rules: one of my favorite reviews (from an earlier book) was from, I believe, Library Journal. The nice, staid, realistic, librarian said, "great information, but the writer's a real smart ass." Right ON. I'll provide esoteric, jagged pieces that seem to fit no immediately discernible jigsaw puzzle that can suddenly and unexpectedly fall into place during those embarrassing lulls at the company Christmas party, or maybe win you $25,000 on Jeopardy. I accept this award for my family, my wife who never gave up on me and most of all, for Lee Alpine who had the...Well, you get the idea. As our world changes, information, intelligence, knowledge, or at least the ability to procure it becomes more and more important. Intelligence is the hard currency of the decade. Although admittedly presumptuous, I would like to think of this book as the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG for the 90's. Not only has the amount of available information increased Logarithmically, access methods have exploded. Everything from on-line database searching to electronic surveillance can be, and is, used to collect and correlate intelligence in order to give people advantages in situations ranging from getting a job promotion to checking whether the spouse is making waves in someone else's waterbed. If you don't know what is out there and how it is stored you will soon find yourself watching daytime television and responding to those ads where little old ladies say, "Functionally illiterate? Can't access databases? Trouble finding the right CD-ROM? Don't know what competitor intelligence is? Dial 1-800-555-~XXXX for a list of programs offered by your local library that will help bring you into the 20th century and get a better job." Or you're going to be responding to the ones that promise a "high paying career in bartending", 'cause there just ain't going to be much left that doesn't depend on information procurement in one form or another. Oddly enough, spies (real spies) and librarians now share many common collecting and retrieval methods. Knowledge acquisition has become dependent on planning and research skills instead of shady deals done in the smoke filled back rooms of Casbahs. So did Gary Powers get shot down in vain? No. But the next prisoner exchange between one of the final communist holdout regimes and us will be that of two research librarians. Not U-2 pilots. (Although, damn, we do have a new spy plane that is just amazing, I'll show you how to listen to conversations between it and the tower.) THE WHOLE SPY CATALOG is designed to be a hands-on look at how skilled information collectors operate and how you can do the same things. Let's recap here: need to find sugar production in Tahiti, your old college girlfriend (or boyfriend, let's keep this evenhanded),listen to anyone's wireless or cellular phone calls, (or protect yours) develop a complete dossier on your business competitor, hire an ex-CIA or still employed KGB agent to do it for you, get the latest data on where it's safe to travel, see what the CIA (or KGB) thinks about other countries, get a spy plane photo of an industrial complex, hire a satellite to photograph any part of the world, watch the best spy films, visit real CIA (and KGB) hangouts, see over your neighbor's fence, track down long-lost relatives or get the real info on your new fiancée' who seems just a bit too good to be true, find any book, hire a convicted computer hacker to safeguard your business, get the inside info on any potential investment, protect your computer data, crack computer codes, schmooze with research librarians, communicate with experts on any subject, anywhere in the world on a real-time basis, find a 5-year-old newspaper article, loin an "electronic club" hosted by the world's best private detectives, see what the real spies are doing to protect their jobs in The New World Order, buy Russian military equipment, attend a conference of surveillance experts, disappear, reappear, or just have fun reading about this stuff. Hell, I'll even throw in books that rate the best spy films, TV shows, actors, smuggler's pubs, show where to get kits that teach your kids to create secret codes to write their friends or lift fingerprints lust like the FBI does. Then we'll talk to some of the top spies in the world (on both sides of the fence) about what they did, how they did it, and what they are going to do next. Okay, you get the idea. I don't want to over sell it... Now, I know some readers, and God knows, some reviewers are going to object to the portions herein that show how personal privacy is violated, but this information does exist and you better know about it. You gotta admit, restricting Xerox machine access to high party officials didn't work too well to protect the secrets of the former Soviet Union. THE WHOLE SPY CATALOG is designed to be both a horizontal and a vertical book. This means you should be able to use it to find where damn near any information you need is stored (the personal phone number of the under secretary of electronic import controls?) as well as how to access it, but you should also be able to pick up THE WHOLE SPY CNFALOG, open to it to any page and enjoy what you are reading. A tall order I admit, BUT it works. If you find a database, or use a program that saves time and money, protect your data more efficiently, or even use this information for purposes that could be considered a bit less than completely moral, try to think of me kindly. Uh, just don't mention where you got the idea to any folks that wear badges or have strange bulges under their suit jackets... -Lee Lapin The Whole Spy Catalog PP024$44.95 Lee Lapin 440 pages |
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