Held’s life was periodically in danger, as were the lives of his family members. Terribly traumatic.”Īs you might imagine, there are other difficulties that come with the job. “But it certainly happened to friends of mine,” he says. Or in the most terrible of circumstances: “Can you imagine if someone who you recruited was caught and executed?” Luckily, that never happened to one of Held’s recruits. “Imagine falling in love, and having to move, but you don’t retain contact,” he says. It also means that after years of working together, letting go of the relationship can feel impossible. He likens looking for a new spy to looking for a lover there’s a chemistry and inherent trust that’s necessary in the relationship between an operations officer and an agent, who may be risking his or her life to do the job. “In any population, there are about one per 1,000 of the people that might make a good spy.” “It’s a really deep relationship, really intense,” he says. There was a particular psychological makeup he looked for, and it included two key character traits: A potential spy had to like Held and trust him, he says, and they also had to believe spying would benefit the greater good. “In any population, there are about one per 1,000 of the people that might make a good spy,” he says. In his more than two and a half decades in the job, Held recruited about a dozen spies for the U.S. “People think it’s about blackmailing or bribing.” Most of the time, it’s about doing what’s right, sometimes with little to no monetary gain. “It’s very different than what people think,” he says. But beyond the obvious intrigue, he also says the book should provide some insight on the nature of espionage. Knowing there was no way to accommodate such a large crowd, he took a suggestion from his wife and wrote a book instead.Ī Spy’s Guide includes instructions for self-guided walking tours amid the scintillating history lesson, and Held says he hopes readers have fun with the exercise. Six hundred people signed up in a few hours,” he says. “I thought 10 to 15 people would be interested.
Co-workers asked him if he would give a walking tour to go along with the lectures, and he agreed. Held realized the potential for the book during talks he gave at Sandia, outlining some of those activities as a form of awareness-to show that spy activities did and still could happen here. The plan to assassinate Leon Trotsky? It was formulated in Zook’s, a Santa Fe drugstore.Crucial atomic information leaked to the KGB? It was passed to the Soviet Union by Los Alamos scientists. When he retired, he moved his wife and three kids to New Mexico, where he served as the head of counterintelligence at Sandia National Laboratories for seven years.Ī Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque details a number of spy activities that took place in the two cities before and during the Cold War. He worked as a clandestine operations officer with the CIA for 27 years, stationed around the world in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Held wasn’t a spy, but he was a spy recruiter.
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