As any fan of Bond, James Bond, can tell you: spies wear tuxedos, drink well-shaken martinis, and know their way around a wine list. Is it any wonder they attract femme fatales with suggestive names? However, as beloved and enduring as the Bond mythology may be, it is a fantasy of espionage.
“James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up,” Ian Fleming memorably quipped to author and journalist Robin Bruce Lockhart, whose own father, Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, was a real-life spy.
And with all due respect to 007, the truth about the life of spies is both more mundane and far more fascinating than the Bond fictions. A good deal of espionage, including life under cover, tradecraft, and devices, is designed to mimic normality. The luxury pen that is actually a camera, the familiar can of name-brand shaving cream that conceals a digital storage device, and even the humdrum daily routine of a spy are all meticulously constructed to dispel suspicion and feed misleading assumptions. The same is true for those places that spies frequent—the restaurants, bars, and shops.
What builds suspense in a film will likely cast suspicion in real life. Meetings in dark alleys and deserted warehouses signal a spy is up to no good. In real life espionage, the less drama the better. This is particularly true when it comes to clandestine meetings, which often take place in restaurants.
For instance, take the case of Atomic Spy Julius Rosenberg. Although Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are almost exclusively remembered for passing details of nuclear weaponry to the Soviets, these were not the only secrets they revealed. On Christmas Eve of 1944, Julius (codename LIBERAL) met his Soviet handler Aleksandr Feklisov (codename KALISTRAT, who later operated under the cover name Aleksandr Fomin) at the Horn & Hardart Automat at Broadway and 38th Street
