The Spy's Guide: Office Espionage - How to Bug a Meeting, Booby-Trap Your Briefcase, Infiltrate the Competition, and More

A tongue-in-cheek office-espionage manual that repackages real intelligence-agency tradecraft, from bugging a conference room to reassembling shredded documents, as workplace tactics for getting ahead. H. Keith Melton and television producer Craig Piligian wrote it with Duane Swierczynski, with a foreword by retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin.

Its premise, stated in the publisher's copy, is that information is the currency of business, and no one gathers it more effectively than spies. Illustrated, step-by-step sections cover planting bugs, tapping phones, disguising your identity at a trade show, sending untraceable e-mail, photographing confidential documents, encrypting an address book, and piecing together shredded paperwork. Each section pairs the technique with a real anecdote of the CIA, the KGB, or a Fortune 500 company using it. The tone throughout stays closer to a novelty gift book than a security manual, part of the same Quirk Books line as its companion, The Action Hero's Handbook.

Melton is a historian of espionage technology, the author of Ultimate Spy, and a board member of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. The Hudson Street Library also holds his The Secret History of KGB Spy Cameras, 1945-1995, co-written with Vladimir Alekseenko. Piligian is an Emmy-winning television producer who has made several documentaries on espionage tradecraft. Swierczynski, credited as a contributing writer here, later became a bestselling and twice Edgar-nominated crime novelist.