A Certain Kind of Crazy

摘要

THE BOOK Vince Houghton, curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C, has written an entertaining chronicle of just how far military and intelligence strategists were willing to go during desperate times: an aircraft carrier carved from an iceberg, for example, and bomb-dropping bats. WHY THE AUTHOR DECIDED TO WRITE IT "It kind of happened by accident. I was doing research for another book, and was spending a lot of time in the U.S. Military, [Office of Strategic Services], and CIA holdings at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. I kept running into documents that highlighted operations, missions, and technologies I had never heard of. Some of them were quite extraordinary-enough for me to temporarily abandon my research for a couple hours (or days) to chase the shiny object. Then I would realize the reason I'd never heard of the operation was because, sadly, it was canceled. Eventually, I had enough for a book."