The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.
With 'Urban Secrets,' I just really liked the idea of wandering around chatting to people.
The Onion Field, that one got pretty close to me because I was a cop when it happened. I saw some of the indifference that my police department showed to the surviving officer.
After the war, I went to the BBC monitoring service in Caversham, a suburb of Reading. It was a big aerial system to listen to radio programmes all over the world.
To this day, I've never figured out a single locked-room mystery.
No way, no how did I break into NORAD. That's a complete myth. And I never attempted to access anything considered to be classified government systems.
As an old reporter, we have a few secrets, and the first thing is we try the phone book.
The strange thing about hotel rooms is that they look familiar and seem familiar and have many of the accoutrements that seem domestic and familiar, but they are really weird, alien and anonymous places.
The studio rented a house for my wife in Los Angeles under a phony name to keep reporters away. Whenever I wanted to visit her and my children, I would have to sneak in the back door after dark.
I remember that in Baltimore, where I grew up, we would drive by the radio station and tower of WBAL, and I would try to picture the people inside and what they did there.