'You want a place where you're unlikely to be seen by known associates of the target, so you pick an out-of-the-way restaurant not near his place of work.

'During the 'developmental' stage of recruiting a foreign agent, you are typically meeting him or her for a meal or drink,' Moran told NPR. Mostly, they are planned to look accidental.'Īn equally emphatic endorsement comes from another former CIA operative, Lindsay Moran, whose 2005 memoir, Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, recounts her espionage work in Macedonia. 'Restaurants offer the opportunity to meet the people we most seek - those with access to a government or terror group that might be able to help us predict or prevent the next attack. Her memoir, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA, released this month, recounts her adventures as a clandestine CIA operative from 2003 to 2010 deployed to 16 countries to infiltrate terrorist networks in the post-Sept. 'Restaurants and cafés are in many ways the lifeblood of espionage,' is how Amaryllis Fox puts it. This observation is borne out by the lavish caviar-and-champagne dinners in this epicurean thriller that unfolds amid baccarat tables, bomb explosions and bitingly cold vodkas in a modish seaside town of France.īut what also becomes crystal clear is that the restaurant is a key piece in the mise-en-scène of another equally subtle and unforgiving game: spycraft. In Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, the taciturn MI6 lothario with the cold eyes and cruel mouth who would go on to become the world's most famous spy muses that the restaurant is a key piece in the mise-en-scène of seduction.

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