(Scott) Murphy's Laws of Spying.

(Scott) Murphy's Laws of Spying.

1.MURPHY WAS AN OPTIMIST
2.A relaxed spy is a dead spy.
3.Keep your head on your shoulders, or someone else will keep it…mounted on their wall.
4.The worse the weather, the more you are required to trail someone through it.
5. When your target drives to work every day like clockwork, the day you arrange for a car bomb, he'll walk.
6.If your mission is going really well, it's a trap.

7.Throw rocks before grenades— it desensitizes the reflexes of who you're throwing them at.

8.And remember: five second fuses are three seconds long.

9.The easy way is always booby trapped..

8.When in doubt: improvise. It's hard to trace a bomb when it's made out of Bisquick.



10.Make it tough for the enemy to get in.... and you can't get out.



11.Even paranoids have real enemies.



11.The shortest distance between two points is money.



13.Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.



14.Control the situation. If you can’t handle the variables, the variables are going to handle you. The moment that happens, they will handle you right into a jail cell if you’re lucky, and a field execution if you’re not.



15.The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.



16.Guns may be nice tools, but they leave behind other problems. Bodies are messy and hard to dispose of unless you plan in advance. Try not to kill someone unless you really have to. And if you have to, invest in plastic wrap, gloves, and hefty bags (see: Dexter).



17.The closer the synagogue the better the bagel.



18.The spy who plans for everything to go well is usually the one who will be shot in the back with his own gun. Conversely, the spy who plans for everything to go to hell from the first minute will never have to use a single contingency plan.



19. Invest in people. If you rely solely on a multimillion dollar piece of equipment, the more likely someone is to circumvent it with something found at Wal-Mart.



20.“Guns make you stupid. Duct tape makes you smart.”

Corollary 1: Tracers work both ways.

Corollary 2: The seriousness of a gunshot wound is inversely proportional to the distance to any form of cover

Corollary 3: The complexity of a weapon is inversely proportional to the IQ of the weapon's operator.

Corollary 4: Friendly fire – isn't.

Corollary 5: The day you need to clean your gun is the day the SWAT team arrives to kill you.

Corollary 6: A gun is hard to explain the security. A magazine you can roll up into a tactical baton, isn't.

Colorful terrorists.

July 4th, 1976. Sayaret Metkal, Israeli special forces, parachute into Entebbe airport. The objective: rescue over a hundred hostages on a hijacked Air France plane. For over a week, the terrorists had demanded the release of dozens of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.



Israel's response was to send in a team. All the terrorists were killed, and the Israelis lost one man: the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu.



The terrorists were from two groups: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Baader-Meinhoff, a German Red Army Faction.

Those of you who have read the description of A Pius Man have seen that it involves a Red Army terrorist. There were dozens of “Red Armies”-some of them were spin offs of each other, some went by slightly different names, but they were usually Communist in ideology, and Soviet in monetary backing. One popularly known member of these Red Armies was Illich, Ramirez Sanchez, popularly known as Carlos the Jackal.



In Italy, which is the focus of A Pius Man, the Brigate Rosso—the Red Brigade—had a habit of killing policemen, kidnapping, bombing, and generally making an all around nuisance of itself. They rose in prominence on the world Terror scene during the 1970s. By the end of the decade, they had murdered two politicians—a Christian Democrat and a Union leader.



This was more or less the beginning of the end of the Red Brigade. In the 1980s, there was a major crackdown, bordering on all out war, between the Italian police and the Red Brigade. By the end of the decade, they were dispersed. Many of the arrested...



So, it does sort of makes you wonder why, in A Pius Man, one of their former gunman has been hanging out with a Vatican priest. Or, why he was busy shooting a respected academic researching the Vatican archives. Or what he was doing being blasted out of a hotel window to land on the hood of a passing car.