Rowan Richard Wilmer. The Story of Secret Service

Garden City Publishing, 1939. — 768 p.Spies, in short, are a veritable insecticide upon the Great-Man treatment of history, which of all treatments is the most romantic and most palatable. And the great men themselves, when composing memoirs or correcting the grade of their eminence, have been disposed to protect their spies and secret emissaries-even those safely deceased-by preserving their anonymity and resisting the temptation to divide with them the credit which otherwise must burden the narrator alone. Concern for the ultimate security of the spy is never so acute, it appears, as when the time comes to save him from his reckless, mercenary inclination to share in the public acclaim.