Rarely do spies, particularly chief spies, sit to write their experiences, but a few do. Among them are Britain’s former MI5 Director, Stella Rimington, in Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5, and CIA Director Allen Dulles in The Craft of Intelligence, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pointman in implementing the Eisenhower Doctrine, which deviated the CIA from its original 1947 purpose of collecting and centralising intelligence for the president into stressing ‘plausible deniability’; overthrowing governments and assassinating leaders.
In Africa, there is Nigeria’s Matthew Benabafa Seiyefa, who served for a very short time in 2018, and wrote Swimming Against the Currents: Memoir of a Spy Chief. Kenya’s Bart Joseph Kibati wrote Memoirs of a Kenyan Spymaster. Then came Brigadier Wilson Boinett’s Fixing Spy Craft to Serve National Interests in Kenya.