Books: With My Little Eye

SPYCATCHER (213 pp.)—Oreste Pinto —Harper ($2.75).

When Eisenhower was boss of SHAEF, he dubbed Colonel Oreste Pinto “the greatest living authority on security.” After the fall of France, when Britain was overrun with refugees, it had been Pinto, a Dutch intelligence officer, who put them through the security sieve to pick out the spies and the phonies; and when the Normandy invasion was roaring ahead, Pinto panted along behind, dowsing for underground traitors and saboteurs.

Until late 1942, Pinto was assigned to British Counterintelligence, a body which requires gentlemanly behavior of its agents. British spycatchers are not permitted, as Gestapo agents were, to pull out fingernails and toenails, or to crack open stubborn skulls with screw-hoops of steel. In some cases they are not even permitted to call a suspect a liar; they must say politely: “I suggest that your answer to my last question contained certain inaccuracies.” Moreover, since no confession obtained under duress is valid in British law, the catcher must take care not to hector or bully his man beyond a certain point. The professional British spycatcher must 1) detect the spy, 2) confront the courts with solid proof or with confessions which appear to have been made with willing enthusiasm. The spy can then be hanged.

Swedish & Swahili. Pinto, who had hunted spies in World War I, had first-rate qualifications for his job. He could ask, look and listen in Dutch, Flemish, English, French, German and Italian, and also had “a competent working knowledge of Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Rumanian and Swahili.” For places, faces and cases, Pinto’s memory was tenacious: he can still remember “not only what presents were given to me on my third birthday but who gave them and at what time of day they arrived.” Stored in his mind like a library of microfilms were detailed pictures of every sizable street in all the capitals of Europe, along with their adjacent side-streets, hotels and restaurants.

But the spycatcher and the first-rate spy have these talents in common. So the spycatcher must also know what type of blunder any given spy is likely to make. This knowledge is partly based on the theory that a nation’s particular strengths and weaknesses are usually neatly reflected in the behavior of its agents.

Thus German spies combine meticulous exactitude with an unfailing rigidity of method. During World War I, for example, they made the brilliant discovery that a message written in acetic acid on the outside of an egg would disappear, once the egg was boiled, into the inside. The Allies caught on to this trick; but 25 years after, in World War II, the Germans were still using the boiled-egg device. The British, on the other hand, depended so much on their brilliant powers of improvisation that they often neglected the simplest details. Pinto, who used to inspect British agents before they were parachuted into enemy territory, was pained to find one of them wearing a tie labeled: “Selfridges, Oxford Street, London, W.1.”

Pills & Poison. Most spies carry on (or in) their bodies three kinds of pills: 1) “knockout drops” (“which render a man unconscious for 24 hours”), 2) Benzedrine, 3) a quick-action poison for suicide. But the spycatcher may also be fairly certain that, apart from his pills, “every spy carries something incriminating either on his person or in his luggage.” If he wears a watch & chain, for example, each jewel and metal segment of the watch, each link of the chain, must be microscopically examined for ciphers. All his cigarettes must be tested for invisible writing, all the tobacco sifted.

If the suspect has a book in his bag gage, the spycatcher has a dreary task ahead. The volume must be taken apart and every line of every page put under the microscope. Pinto’s toughest example: “a closely printed dictionary, 700 pages in length,” brought into Britain by a “Dutch refugee.” Not until page 432 did Pinto find what he was looking for —”a tiny pinprick” under one letter. Other pinpricks followed under other letters; when written down in order, they gave the addresses of Nazi agents in Stockholm and Lisbon.

Pinto devotes seven chapters to actual cases, including his exposure of “King Kong,” a legendary hero of the early Dutch Resistance who later became a Nazi agent. But his accounts of spy-catching methods are almost more intriguing than his practice of them, and his book is full of handy suggestions:

¶ “The more doubtful or suspicious a [suspect’s] story is, the more the examiner should appear to accept it . . .”

¶”The really clever spy will make an excellent impression . . . A really honest and innocent man . . . will not be practiced at creating good impressions unless he happens to be a salesman or a commercial traveler in private life.”

¶ “[When posing a vital question] watch the reaction of your subject’s Adam’s apple and eyelids.”

¶ “The only use a woman spy has is to gain information by seducing a senior officer . . . and subsequently blackmailing him into giving further information by threatening to report him to his security officer or, worse still perhaps, his wife.”