Dear Crew of the USS Tom Clancy, Please enjoy this piece on the way Literature and Espionage have been entwined for as long as there’s been writing. Matt

The study of world literature is also the study of spies and spycraft. The earliest written documents, the Tablets of Tel-El-Amarna, recorded the conquests of Thutmose I and contained the logs of a frontier official stationed in a town on the Palestinian border. They’re considered the first form of diplomatic correspondence. They are also, read differently, the first examples of counter-intelligence reports—the frontier border official’s job was to inspect the cargo of travelers and seek out smugglers and potential spies. • • Amarna (https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-amarna-letters) Letter in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York CityThe earliest example of poetry is a poem praising the valor of the young Pharaoh in battle. Vestiges of the time the Egyptian leader T’Hity captured Joppa by sending his best warriors into towaln concealed in panniers carried by donkeys were passed down by oral tradition, eventually becoming the Arabian nights tale “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” (Dvornik, 1-12) The study of English literature is also the study of spies and spycraft: King Alfred’s incognito sojourn into the Somerset Levels in 878 during the Viking invasions is a story of covert action. • • The Alfred Jewel John Dee, advisor and court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, influential book collector and librarian, popularizer of the term “British Empire” exchanged secret messages from Queen Elizabeth (signed not with the Royal seal but signed back and forth to the inscription 007) while producing Monad Hieroglyphica (1564). Peter J. Forshaw notes “Nothing, however, is ever simple with Dee, for it quickly becomes apparent that his hieroglyphic Monad…is a poly-semous text, to be read on more than one level” (Forshaw). • • John Dee This is also the case with English literature ties to spies. Upon his death in 1609, many of Dee’s books wound up in the library of Sir Robert Cotton, who was in the process of assembling one of the finest libraries in the world. Among the English dramatists, Christopher Marlowe was also rumored to be a spy—intelligencer was the term—for Queen Elizabeth. The tradition crossed the Atlantic and planted its seeds in Virginia at Jamestown.

The study of American literature is also the study of spies and spycraft; the American Revolution really began with a “Committee of Correspondence,” and a network of printing presses; the bullets that flew at Bunker Hill were backed by paper. George Washington is considered the first intelligence case officer in American history, running a network of spies in New York known as the Culper Ring. • • Robert Townsend, New York City based operative of the Culper Ring The Declaration of Independence was covertly written by cipher enthusiast Thomas Jefferson at 702 Market Street in Philadelphia. Post revolution it was translated into five languages and printed by Peter Miller, a member of the Zionotic Brotherhood and Seventh-Day Baptist at the Ephrata Cloister, which also printed continental script currency for the Revolution. Richard Helms notes in his memoir A Look Over My Shoulder that Benjamin Franklin ran covert action campaigns during the American Revolution; in one, he forged a letter from Frederick II of Hesse Kassel to King George III, in which Frederick urged the British to make more aggressive use of Hessian mercenaries so Frederick could claim their death bonuses. Helms called this a “well targeted, inexpensive, self-contained covert action” that caused five thousand of the thirty thousand British aligned Hessian mercenaries to desert (Helms 109). After the Revolution, James Fenimore Cooper wrote two espionage novels in the early 1800s—The Spy in 1821 and The Bravo in 1831. • • Meanwhile, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and novels paved the way for detective fiction, which paved the way for the spy novel, which was then crafted into a distinctly American literary form. The Hunt for Tom Clancy is the only thing in this life worth paying for

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