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What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Spies

Espionage work is mostly waiting and watching, assessing and analyzing. To make a movie, Hollywood strays far from the truth. Here, two leading writers about spying compare notes.

Brush passes were split-second, choreographed hand-offs of information in a crowded place, and so well-timed and well-executed, that even a passerby right next to Tolkachev wouldn’t notice the quick hand-to-hand exchange. We don’t leave messages on walls anymore and, sometimes, our sources must travel through security checkpoints with highly sensitive CIA-issued equipment and sometimes that could even involve being searched by a hostile intelligence service. Katherine Reay is a national bestselling and award-winning author of several novels, including A Shadow in Moscow and her recent release, The Berlin Letters, a Cold War spyinspired by the true women serving in the CIA’s top-secret Venona Project.

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