Tradecraft
Real espionage is a craft: turning a stranger into a source, passing secrets in plain sight, living under a false name. Tradecraft takes that craft apart, method by method, and tests each one against a real case. Built only from court records and declassified files. No myths. Just how it was actually done.
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The Problem
Espionage is remembered by its endings: the arrest, the trial, the defector at the airport. Those are where the cameras arrive. But they are the last link of a long chain, and not where the real work is done. The work is in the method. How a stranger is turned into a source. How two people who must never be seen together exchange a package. How a message crosses a hostile border without being read.
And the method is built to leave no record. So much of what is confidently known about famous operations turns out, on inspection, to rest on a single uncorroborated account, copied from book to book until it hardened into fact. Tradecraft goes back to the record, and says plainly where the record runs out.
Training in Japan under Grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi
The Manual
37 chapters in eleven parts, following the lifecycle of an operation from the first approach to the final reckoning. Each chapter takes one method, explains what it is and how it works, then examines a single documented case, with what the record proves kept firmly apart from what is only alleged.
Who It's For
Meet Rob Baard
Rob Baard's life pointed him at this subject; his nature made him research it to the ground. He came to it through films, Batman, Bond and Bourne, which sent him into ninjutsu, a tradition rooted in espionage itself. He has trained in it for over thirty years under Grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi in Japan. He is a licensed private investigator who has run surveillance, and a documentary filmmaker who has directed Danny Glover. He brings a working eye for cover, observation and evidence to a story he has taken apart from the record up.
On Set with Danny Glover
Rob Baard — Instructor & Licensed Investigator
Get the Manual
Physical Book on Amazon
Methods of espionage from the historical record. 37 chapters, nine documented cases, every source named. The films gave you the version you wanted. This is the other one.
Get it on AmazonQuestions
Is this a spy manual?
No. It is a study of the historical record. Each chapter explains a method at the level of principle and tests it against a documented case. There is nothing in it that would teach anyone to carry out an operation, and nothing that pretends to certainty the evidence cannot support.
How do you know what's true?
Every claim rests on graded evidence. Court judgments, official inquiries and declassified files are the firmest ground. Reputable scholarship and corroborated memoir are attributed and weighed. Unverified memoir is used only when labelled as recollection, and never as the sole basis for a fact.
Which cases does it cover?
Nine cases run through the book as a spine: the Cambridge Five, Oleg Penkovsky, Greville Wynne, George Blake, Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, the 2010 illegals, the Farewell material and Oleg Gordievsky. Each appears where its method belongs rather than being retold as biography.
Does it repeat the famous stories?
It examines them. Where a dramatic claim rests on a single account, such as the Siberian pipeline explosion, or where historians disagree, the text says so and keeps the dramatic version and the documented version apart.
Do I need any background?
No. The tone is deliberately plain. Every method chapter runs the same four steps: the method, the case, the outcome, and what it reveals.
Start Here
Not ready for the full book? Start with the free guide: nine documented cases, each with the famous version set beside what the record will actually bear.
Shihan 14th Dan · Japan-licensed Shidoshi