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While Hitz's chapters are sometimes cluttered with too much information, they do provide an excellent sense of what carrying out intelligence is really like. He begins with recruitment—the effort by an intelligence service to engage a member of the opposing government or organization to work for your government clandestinely. It is the pinnacle of success to develop a clandestine human source within the government of the opposing country. Hitz also excels in showing the intricacies that necessarily accompany complicated human interactions. The intelligence officer wants the target to trust him, but the target feels as though he is walking on the razor's edge of betrayal. The best intelligence officers develop empathy with their targets, but the empathy must be real, not fabricated for the moment, and it must be developed over a long period of time. Successes from this type of recruitment are, in fact, rare.
The more common form of recruitment is the walk-in. This is a person from the opposing government who simply "walks in" (via letter, email, or a personal encounter in an office or on the street). The walk-in is saying that he is ready to be recruited. No long-term relational development is needed to get to the point of asking a walk-in to work for you. But once the relationship begins, great care is required to maintain the bond. Many of Hitz's cases feature the walk-in. In some, the walk-in developed into a long-term productive source, but in others, when human signals got mixed, the walk-in just turned around and walked out. The complexities of human nature that go into espionage are difficult to describe, much less fathom. But the selections chosen by Furst are about as good at exposing those complexities as can be found in spy literature, and thus they perfectly complement Hitz's analysis.
It is important to underscore that the best spy stories are adventures in human relations. Conventional spy novels often tell how a secret agent sneaks into a country and then exits through an even more devious route, often in another disguise. Such stories seldom touch the depth of human relationships that, in fact, make up real espionage—especially where those relationships combine boredom and exhilaration. To nurture a relationship with individuals who are totally depending on you for protection, even as they maintain their role in the opposing government, entails huge burdens of trust. Spy novels all too often promote the supposed excitement of espionage without highlighting sufficiently the grave responsibilities that one human assumes when recruiting another to commit treason—especially when the recruiter and the target have formed a bond of friendship. The intelligence officer has to be empathetic with his recruit, but that empathy often exacts a severe emotional cost. The reason that in real life there are so very few actual recruitments (as opposed to walk-ins) is almost certainly the huge emotional cost.
In espionage, human intelligence works hand-in-hand with technology, and spy novels are replete with a potpourri of gadgets (mostly made up). As a young FBI agent I once heard that the CIA employed someone whose only job was to read spy novels in order to check on how much real-life information about secret gadgets had seeped into publicly available fiction. It was, in several senses of the terms, a dream job. Hitz shows that espionage fiction sometimes turns out to replicate the truth. Yet usually it is the other way around. For instance, the grand technical achievement of breaking the German Enigma code could hardly have been imagined by a novelist. Real espionage technology is guarded closely, otherwise it would not be useful for espionage.
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