Spying and writing have always gone together. In Britain, where the modern intelligence agency was born, intellectuals moved smoothly back and forth between secret government service and the literary life, some, like the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, even spending the morning at the typewriter before consulting with MI6 after lunch. Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré all placed their powers of observation and divination at the disposal of the British secret state while mining their experience of intelligence work in their fiction. It was not just a case of satisfying the reading public's apparently insatiable appetite for the espionage novel. There seemed to be some basic connection between the roles of writer and spy: both were iconic, even heroic figures in modern culture, necessarily detached from ordinary society, yet gifted - cursed, perhaps - with unique insight into the darkest realms of human existence. “I, from very early, lived a secret life, an inward life,” Le Carréonce told an interviewer. “I seemed to go about in disguise.”

In this respect, the spies of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were no different from their British counterparts. Indeed, the “man of letters” was, if anything, even more conspicuous a figure in the upper echelons of the American secret service than in MI6. During World War II, Norman Holmes Pearson, a noted Yale professor of literature and editor, alongside W. H. Auden, of the five-volume Viking Poets of the English Language, ran “X-2,” the London-based counterespionage branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the United States' wartime foreign intelligence agency.