So You Want To Be A Spy looks past the typical movie clichés and explores the real world of intelligence work: languages, codebreaking, observation, analysis, teamwork, and critical thinking. Why was it important to show espionage as thoughtful, analytical work rather than nonstop action?

The book actually opens with the idea that intelligence work is the world’s hardest puzzle — pieces arriving from everywhere, in dozens of languages, from hundreds of sources, some reliable, some unreliable, some deliberately false. And most of the pieces are missing. You have to assemble what you can, acknowledge what you cannot, and give the best honest assessment of what the puzzle shows, knowing that decisions will be made based on what you say. That, far more than any chase scene, is what intelligence actually is.

The Hollywood version is fun — I’m not above enjoying it myself — but it locates the drama in the wrong place. The real drama is intellectual. It’s the moment you find the thread that connects two apparently unrelated pieces of information. It’s the discipline of writing exactly as confidently as the evidence allows, and no more. It’s also the courage (quieter than dodging explosions, but no less real) to hand a powerful person a report that says the evidence does not support what they want to do.

If we tell children that espionage is only about action, we accidentally tell them that the quiet, methodical kid — the one who reads everything, asks the unusual question, notices what others miss — doesn’t belong in that world. She does. He does. They are precisely what intelligence services have always needed most. The book argues, and I genuinely believe, that the most important skill in this profession isn’t combat training. It’s the ability to earn someone’s trust, to think clearly under pressure, and to tell the truth when it would be easier to tell a comfortable story instead. That’s a more honest story than the one the movies tell — and I think ultimately a much more interesting one.

Q2. I liked how the book encourages kids to notice details that other people miss. Why do you think observation is such an important life skill for young readers today?

We’re raising kids in the most attention-fragmenting environment humans have ever lived in. There has never been more competing for a young reader’s notice, and there has never been less reward for slowing down. Observation is the antidote to that — the discipline of looking at one thing carefully and asking what is actually there rather than what you assume is there. The book asks readers to train this skill like a muscle: walk into a room, look around for 30 seconds, close your eyes, describe everything you remember. Then do it again tomorrow. And the day after that.

The skill matters far beyond espionage. Observation is the foundation of science — Darwin watched finches. Doctors learn to notice the symptom the patient didn’t mention. It’s also the foundation of empathy, because you cannot truly understand another person if you have not really seen them. And it’s the foundation of critical thinking, because you can’t evaluate a claim if you haven’t first grasped what the claim is actually saying. The book pairs observation with four questions every reader can practice for the rest of their life: Is this true? How do I know? What am I missing? What would prove me wrong? Those questions don’t just produce future intelligence analysts. They produce careful citizens, kind friends, and honest thinkers. And the wonderful thing is that any child, anywhere, can start practicing today.

Q3. The book covers wartime codebreaking, spy networks, and pivotal secret operations. How did you select which historical moments to include, and what made each of them earn its place?

I had two primary filters. First: did the moment show something true about intelligence work that the action-movie version obscures? Second: would a young reader walk away with a transferable insight — not just “this happened,” but “this is what thinking looked like here”?

Virginia Hall earned her place because she ran circles around the Gestapo in occupied France with a prosthetic leg, was hunted as the most dangerous of all Allied spies — and then, having escaped over the Pyrenees in winter, went back. That’s the word that matters. The world had handed her an honorable exit and she refused it. She belongs in the book because she teaches what showing up looks like after every reasonable person would have stopped. Her disability is part of the lesson too: the Gestapo searched for an able-bodied operative because they couldn’t imagine the threat was the woman with the limp. Sometimes the very thing the world thinks should disqualify you is the thing that makes you invisible to people who lack imagination.

Noor Inayat Khan earned her place because she was the daughter of an Indian Sufi musician, a gentle young woman who wrote children’s stories — and she became the last Allied radio operator transmitting from Paris after every other operator in her network had been captured or killed. She kept transmitting. When subsequently captured, tortured, executed, she never gave up a single name. Children are often told that brave people look a certain way. Noor teaches that courage isn’t a personality. It’s a decision available to soft-spoken people, gentle people, people who write fairy tales. The quietest among us can be made of iron.

Harriet Tubman earned her place because the skills she spent a lifetime developing under slavery — reading terrain, moving unseen, judging in seconds who could be trusted — made her one of the most effective intelligence officers in American history. She led the Combahee River Raid that freed more than 700 enslaved people in a single night, the first woman in the Civil War to lead an armed military expedition. The lesson is one I’d love every child to carry: nothing you learn is ever wasted, and the people best positioned to see how a system really works are often the people that system tried hardest to crush.

Juan Pujol García (codename Garbo) earned his place because he was a Spanish chicken farmer who hated fascism so much he taught himself to be a spy, was rejected by British intelligence not once but multiple times, and then started his own one-man operation out of Lisbon to prove he was worth hiring. He invented an entire fictional network of 27 sub-agents he had never met, and the Nazis paid him to run spies who did not exist. On D-Day, he convinced Hitler the real invasion would land hundreds of miles from Normandy. Garbo teaches two things at once: that imagination and conviction can defeat enormous scale, and that when the institution won’t let you in, sometimes you build the proof yourself until they can’t keep you out.

And then the operational stories: the inflatable rubber tanks of the D-Day deception, the British intelligence service quietly running a crossword puzzle in a London newspaper as a screening test for code-breaking minds, the KRYPTOS sculpture at CIA headquarters whose fourth encrypted message defeated codebreakers for 35 years. Every one of those stories teaches something the movies miss: that intelligence work belongs to women and men, to people with disabilities, to musicians and farmers and crossword fans, and that the pivotal moment is almost always quieter than you’d expect.

I left out plenty. Anything that glamorized violence, anything that required a level of ethical complexity I couldn’t honor in age-appropriate language, anything that was famous but didn’t actually teach. The test was always the same: does this moment make a thoughtful young reader smarter about how the world really works or, perhaps more importantly, about who they want to be?

Q4. What would you say to a history or civics teacher considering this book for a critical thinking or career exploration unit?

I’d say the book is built for exactly that conversation — and I’ve started building the next layer to support it.

For career exploration, espionage is a wonderful gateway because the field draws on almost every skill a school teaches — languages, math, history, writing, psychology, computer science, geography — and rewards them in combination. A student who has never thought of herself as “a STEM kid” or “a humanities kid” can suddenly see her interests converging in the work of an analyst. That’s a powerful invitation, especially for the students who haven’t yet found the subject that makes them feel seen.

For critical thinking, intelligence work is essentially applied epistemology for young people. The book hands students a small but durable toolkit: four questions for evaluating any claim — Is this true? How do I know? What am I missing? What would prove me wrong? — along with a working definition of confirmation bias, the practice of source evaluation, the discipline of red-teaming an argument, and a glossary of vocabulary they can carry into any subject. These are exactly the questions every citizen needs to ask in an information environment that is only getting noisier.

For civics, the book opens up important conversations about secrecy and democracy, about the tension between security and openness, and about the principle of analytic integrity — that the analyst’s loyalty is to the truth, not to a person, a policy, or an outcome. Students don’t have to arrive at any particular conclusion. They just have to discover that these questions exist and that thoughtful adults have wrestled with them.

And because I really do believe this material can be a springboard to so many deeper things, I’ve started producing Teacher’s Companion Guides for each title in the So You Want To Be A… series and posting them on my website. Each guide is built to plug straight into a classroom: discussion prompts, vocabulary work, hands-on activities, and connections to existing curricula. My hope is that the book opens the door, and the guide gives the teacher a clear, ready-to-use path through it — whatever subject they happen to teach. If a teacher wanted to start with Spy, I would be honored.

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