Jeff Stein on Spycraft
Former VVA Veteran editor Jeff Stein had an interesting article in the February 12 edition of The Washington Post Magazine . In “What Makes a Perfect Spy Tick?” Stein examines the lives of intelligence operatives in several wars. He also delves into his experiences working in Vietnam in Army intelligence during the war.
“I spent a year living undercover and running a spy net, ” Stein writes. “But other than connecting briefly with a secret courier on a deserted beach every few days and slipping into decrepit hotels for meetings with my top spy, it wasn’t anything like the scenario we had been trained for, to dispatch agents into Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe from West Berlin.”
Nevertheless, Stein writes, his service in the Vietnam War “was the most interesting, and perhaps meaningful, thing I’ve ever done. The mission, to prevent or disrupt rocket attacks on [Danang] or U.S. troops, was important. The war stunk, but I wasn’t shooting at anybody, and I was good at being a spy. I won a medal and came home relatively unscarred.”
A free-lance writer, editor, and author, Stein writes the SpyTalk blog , subtitled “Intelligence for Thinking People.”
When you think of entertainment for the troops in Vietnam during the war, you naturally think of the…
Fay Torresyap, a photo researcher for French magazine GEO is working on an article about a hotel…
Michael Herr, the journalist and author best known for his Dispatches , his 1977 stylized book of Vietnam…
The Writers' Circle is a nonprofit on-line magazine that showcases authors, poets, artists, and photographers. It is published…