Kim has excellent cover for action; even though he is Anglo-Irish, he assumes native dress and darkens his face so he can pass as an Indian. Creighton Sahib—his British employer in the Ethnological Survey, which provides institutional cover for British spies in India—uses him first as a messenger helping deliver news of troop movements along the Grand Trunk Road. After Kim is recruited to the service and sent to secondary school to become a surveyor, he acquires the skills to help perform surveys in the outback, where he can keep an eye on Russian and French intruders seeking to undermine British rule. In addition, Kim signs on as "chela" or manservant to a wandering Tibetan Buddhist holy man giving him freedom to travel anywhere in India to accompany his master's quest for spiritual salvation. Kim has excellent spy instincts. He is a watcher.  In 'Dr. No' and 'From Russia with Love' by Ian Fleming  James Bond is a hoot even if he isn't a very careful spy. What is noteworthy in these two books and movies is that in terms of good ops security, it does not pay to get too close to James Bond. In "Dr. No," Bond's Cayman Islands guide Quarrel is swallowed up by the swamp-eating protective machine that polices Dr. No's Caribbean hideaway, while Bond escapes. In "From Russia with Love," Bond's Anglo-Turkish sidekick, Darko Karim Bey, is similarly eliminated by a KGB assassin trying to gun down 007. Bond, of course, survives.  In 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' by John le Carré  Described as "small, podgy and at best middle-aged, he was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth." In other words, unless one knew of George Smiley's brilliance and connections, he could enter a room unnoticed, the best kind of position for a master spy to assume. He was a stickler for spy tradecraft: "And his fancy that he was being followed? What of that? What of the shadow he never saw, only felt, till his back seemed to tingle with the intensity of his watcher's gaze; he saw nothing, heard nothing, only felt. He was too old not to heed the warning. The creak of a stair that had not creaked before; the rustle of a shutter when no wind was blowing; the car with a different number plate but the same scratch on the offside wing; the face on the Metro that you know you have seen somewhere before: for years at a time these were signs he had lived by; any one of them was reason enough to move, change towns, identities. For in that profession there is no such thing as coincidence." While Smiley's operational awareness may seem quaint and romantic in modern days, it makes the point that spy games are for keeps. Alec Guinness plays a great Smiley in the BBC spectacular.  In 'The Day of the Jackal' by Frederick Forsyth  The Jackal's tradecraft and preparations before he sets out to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in this book and movie are remarkable. As the Jackal points out, a maximum of preparation is required when you intend to assassinate a heavily guarded chief of state and want to survive the attack. In this case, the Jackal steals the identity of a child who has died in infancy out of the parish records of an English country church in order to obtain a passport. Several other identities are stolen from unsuspecting passengers at Heathrow, who are surreptitiously stripped of their passports. In addition, he adopts the guise of a wounded World War I French veteran so that he can hide his murder weapon on his person and gain access to a building close to the monument where General de Gaulle is scheduled to decorate a war hero on the anniversary of the liberation of Paris. The Jackal's preparations are exhaustive—and then (spoiler alert) they fail due to the simple error of not counting on General De Gaulle to kiss the honoree on both cheeks.  Frederick P. Hitz, a lecturer on law and public policy at the University of Virginia, is author of "The Great Game" and "Why Spy?"
Frederick P. Hitz, former inspector general of the CIA, rates the spycraft of his four favorite fictional cloak-and-dagger men.