By Hayden B. Peake

The Espionage 'Toyman'

Ultimate Spy 

By H. Keith Melton

(New York: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2002), New Revised Edition, 208 pp., color photos, glossary, index.

Forewords by Richard Helms, former Director of Central Intelligence and Markus Wolf, former head of the East German Foreign Intelligence Service (HVA).

In 1992 the editors at Dorling Kindersley [DK] Limited, began planning a book called Special Military Forces.  As with other DK books, this one would use exquisite color photographs as the primary descriptor of the entries.  The accompanying parsimonious narrative would provide the official nomenclature and essential detail.  The decision to include chapters on military intelligence, wartime secret agents, espionage and codes, sent the staff in search of the defining hardware in these categories.  While they didn’t realize it at the start, their destination was the private museum of the Naval Academy graduate, McDonald’s entrepreneur, and première private collector of intelligence toys, H. Keith Melton—known to his intelligence colleagues as The Espionage Toyman.

Only a relatively few of Melton’s toys [approaching 20,000] appeared in the book, but its success and the existence of all those artifacts that were not used—KGB surveillance cameras, Dutch cigar concealment devices, invisible detection powders and encryption machines to name a few, unique KGB assassination weapons—aroused the DK editors’ interest.  Clearly, there were enough espionage toys remaining in the Melton collection for a separate volume.  A new book was soon commissioned and in 1996 The Ultimate SPY Book was published.  It enjoyed phenomenal success in many languages.  In 2000, DK decided to publish an expanded edition and the result was the Ultimate Spy.  The name change was the consequence of DK policy to make the book part of a new Ultimate book series covering many topics.  The new cover was also A DK decision to make the new edition distinctive.  The rest of the book including the content of the 32 new pages is all Melton.

Discerning Features

The dual forewords by former adversaries, the Richard Helms and Markus Wolf, make clear that what follows is still a precedent setting book that couldn’t have been written before the end of the cold war.  Ultimate SPY does not claim to be comprehensive, but it is intriguingly selective with examples of espionage equipment used in various forms by many famous intelligence services.  There are some references to Chinese, Japanese and Israeli espionage organizations, but the emphasis is clearly on the cold war and posts cold war adversaries.

Structured in a rough functional-chronological order, the first three parts discuss what motivates spies, how they do their job, and what can be expected from them in the future.  Here we find some familiar case exemplars — George Blake and Aldrich Ames —and some less well known as for example Canadian professor Hugh Hambleton and Hitachi engineer Kenji Hayashi. 

These are followed by brief chapters on selected Famous Spying Operations from the history books.  Then come chapters on the Equipment And Techniques spies use on the job.  The final section, How To Be A Spy looks at recruitment and training [CIA and KGB], networks, cover, legends, and the fates of spies once caught.  There are toys pictured on every page [excepting the index and acknowledgements] and the accompanying historical narrative covers the intelligence agencies that produced them and in many cases the agents involved in their use.  Careful attention is paid to definitions—no calling Aldrich Ames a double agent here, he was a mole, nothing more.

Cases and Toys

There are a number of espionage toys that appear in Ultimate SPY for the first time, several from the former KGB.  Perhaps the most unusual example is the KGB rollover camera—shown concealed as a book—with its built-in light source that copies up to 40 pages before reloading.  Then one finds the microvideo camera that records through cotton shirts, the microdot equipment used by KGB agent Robert Thompson, the buttonhole movie surveillance camera, and a Bulgarian Umbrella developed with the help of the KGB like the one used by a Bulgarian assassin to end the life of Georgi Markov.  Also included are the emblem of the KGB First Chief Directorate [foreign intelligence]; Cheka, OGPU and SMERSH credentials; the ‘single-shot cigar;’ the lipstick pistol, rectal concealment devices, and the robot camera mounted in a briefcase that was used to keep track of CIA defector Philip Agee.  There are two new sections on concealed cameras which include a clever cuckoo-clock concealment.  Other new sections cover concealment devices, dead drops, microdots, sabotage devices and techniques, listening devices—the bug in the shoe, subminiature cameras, and the new Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR.

In the sections on WWII and the Cold War, Melton has included some familiar faces and cases as well as several that will be new to many readers.  In the former category we find commentary on and pictures of Admiral Canaris (head of the German Abwehr), Violette Szabo member of the French resistance, Alan Turing of Enigma fame, the Cohens/Krogers with their trap door in the kitchen.   The post cold war era includes, inter alios, the Falcon and the Snowman, John Walker, Aldrich Ames and now Earl Pitts, Harold Nicholson and of course, Robert Hanssen.

The less well known Cold War era group includes ‘Anna,’ the codename for West German Alfred Frenzel, coerced into spying for the Czech StB and caught by the German BfV when his free spending drew suspicion.  Here too is Willis George, the OSS surreptitious entry and furtive letter opening expert,shown with the tools he invented.  Likewise, there is Major John Brown pictured with the suitcase radio [MK III] he invented.  There are also photos of and commentary about Jacqueline Nearne the radio operator for the SOE in France; Maria Knuth, recruited by Polish intelligence to work against West Germany using her seduction skills; young Peter Deriabin the KGB major who defected to the CIA in 1954; Mordecai Louk, the man in the trunk; and Walter Zapp inventor of the Minox camera.

Implicit Provenance

At some point the reader of the Ultimate SPY is going to ask, is all this true?  How does one know that these toys didn’t come from Sharper Image or that the Delco 5300 radio, for example, really was used by the CIA in the 1960s?  There are neither footnotes nor a bibliography, nor is there a discussion of how Melton acquired his toys.  The answer to these tantalizing questions is straight forward.  As with any reputable collector, Melton has a paper trail for each item—receipts, drawings, training manuals and the like—but that isn’t always enough.  How can he be sure, for example, that the Minox camera he bought from John Vassall, was the one given to Vassall by the KGB and used in his espionage?  In this case, Vassall made the sale to Melton in person and explained that he had asked MI5, through his lawyer, to return it to him after his release from jail, they did, and the serial number was correct.  Further checks by Melton with knowledgeable authorities confirmed this account. 

When it comes to KGB toys, Melton has been able to have their authenticity verified by former KGB officers and in some instances by personally comparing his items to those in the KGB museum at the Lubyanka [he has some early KGB shields that are not in the KGB collection].  A similar approach applies to former Stassi toys and those of other services, including OSS and CIA.  Questions concerning particular toys should be directed to the author.

In sum, despite the exclusion of detailed documentation, Melton has gone to extraordinary lengths to make his collection and this book authoritative and he has succeeded admirably.  Ultimate SPY is a wonderful historical reference guide to important intelligence operations and equipment—an unusual combination.  There is much here for professional and amateur alike.  If one were limited to a one book espionage library, this would be it.

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