Kalush and Sloman posit that the only reason Houdini would abruptly leave the United States in 1900, when he had finally achieved notoriety-and a paycheck equivalent to $45,000 a week-was because he was engaged in espionage. The greatest and most recent kerfuffle was the publication in 2006 of “The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero” by William Kalush and Larry Sloman, who conducted exhaustive research into the history of magic, eventually creating a fully text-searchable database of 700,000 pages of material, which contains thousands of references to Houdini. Since Houdini’s death, there has been an on-going debate among historians as to whether or not Houdini was ever a “spy.” It’s no wonder then that many historians of magic and intelligence have found themselves pondering the question: Was Harry Houdini… a spy? In fact, many of Houdini’s magical escape techniques are discussed in the now declassified manuals, as they have influenced later generations of clandestine officers as well as spy gadgetry developed during the Cold War.Īccording to the Trickery and Deception book, concealment devises like magic coins and the hollow Mokana shoe used by Houdini for hiding escape tools became popular among spies throughout the Cold War era.Įven the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s WWII predecessor, was inspired by Houdini when they created tiny tools that mirrored those first used by the magician in his concealed escape kits. Manual of Trickery and Deception,” which included illustrations of stage deception techniques, such as Harry Houdini’s walk through a wall. Then, in 2007 while going through some unrelated documents, Robert Wallace, a former director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, discovered references to the manuals and tracked down poor-quality copies of each that had somehow escaped the shredder.īelieving that the manuals merited publication in full, Wallace conferred with his co-author, intelligence historian and collector Keith Melton, to produce “The Official C.I.A. In 1973, when then-CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all documents associated with the MKULTRA program, the manuals were thought to be gone forever. In the 1950s, as part of the MKULTRA project, the Agency hired magician John Mulholland to teach young officers techniques of deception suitable for the field, such as smuggling assets out of East Germany during the Cold War in vehicles that resembled the magic boxes used in stage illusions.Īs part of his contract, Mulholland prepared two training manuals “Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception” and “Recognition Signals.” ![]() This book, created from two long-lost training guides designed to teach Agency officers how to integrate elements of the magician’s craft into clandestine operations, revealed that the CIA’s connection to the world of magic was decades old. “Magic and espionage are really kindred arts,” or so wrote former CIA Deputy Director McLaughlin, an amateur magician himself, in the forward to the book, “The Official C.I.A.
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