Our spooky spy friends Bob Wallace and Keith Melton—the guys behind the amazing spy-gadget bible Spycraft— uncovered one of the supposedly incinerated "magic" journals. Their new book, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, is in part a verbatim reproduction of that manual, but, thrillingly, it also shares the (declassified) history of CIA trickery from the beginning, including the formation of the double top-secret and sometimes sinister MKULTRA division. MKULTRA was supposed to have been erased from history in 1973, but—in true spy fashion—the few shreds of paperwork that remained ended up telling its whole story.

The discovered manual was penned by John Mulholland, the David Copperfield and/or Blaine of his day. Though Mulholland knew more than anybody since Houdini about pulling fast ones, his challenge was to teach people who were not necessarily pros to pull off tricks in front of an audience that didn't know it was an audience. Perform a lousy trick, and you don't get booed—you get beheaded.

Here Wallace and Melton have kindly shared some newly created illustrations of tricks from the book, CIA sleights you could employ to escape from a water-bottling plant, poison a friend, send messages with your shoelaces, steal single sheets of paper, look dumb, and of course, kill Castro. Not all of the tricks below come from Mulholland's original manual, but they were all devised at Langley, and are all lovingly described in the book—a $16 thrill of a read for anyone with even a passing interest in spyology:

Thanks to Bob Wallace and Keith Melton for sharing their book's illustrations with us. If you'd like to know more about the book, check out its sales page on Amazon (there's a Kindle version too), or visit the authors' new website, CIA Magic.

Here's stuff from the NYT article that we already knew:

Secrecy at Apple is not just the prevailing communications strategy; it is baked into the corporate culture. Employees working on top-secret projects must pass through a maze of security doors, swiping their badges again and again and finally entering a numeric code to reach their offices, according to one former employee who worked in such areas. Work spaces are typically monitored by security cameras, this employee said.

This stuff is common in normal companies even, and a good majority of tech employees have badges as a permanent fashion staple. But this, this is interesting:

Some Apple workers in the most critical product-testing rooms must cover up devices with black cloaks when they are working on them, and turn on a red warning light when devices are unmasked so that everyone knows to be extra-careful, he said.

That seems a bit over the top to me, but hey, you know what? It seems to be working for them. Waitaminute.[NY Times]

The drives were part of a group of 300 hard drives sold on the auction site, coming from the US, UK, Germany, France and Australia. Some of them were formatted, but it wasn't a destructive format and the files were easily recovered.

Fortunately for us, the buyers weren't the bad guys but British Telecom's Security Research Centre. They bought the drives for a security study in collaboration with the University of Glamorgan in Wales, Edith Cowan University in Australia and Longwood University, here in the US.

Other information found in the drives were patient medical records, including x-ray images, patient photos, and confidential letters. Others included security logs for embassies and confidential corporate information detailing a 50 billion currency exchange.

In other words: If you have to sell your drive full of naked photos of your lovers, please perform a destructive, all-zeroes format. Or better yet: Don't sell it, format it, and then smash it with a hammer. [Daily Mail]

It happened in a frozen bay a few miles near the base. The rescue job was extremely difficult, as the documentation and video obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act show. It took months for the government to collect thousands of pieces from the B-52—scattered all around the bay—plus 500 million gallons of ice, some of it radioactive.

For a while it was just a giant recovery operation, but then the real problems started. After trying to make sense of all the pieces they were able to gather, they discovered that something was missing. The new documents reveal that they were only able to find three out of the four nuclear bombs on board the plane. The possible reason: "Something melted through ice such as burning primary or secondary".

Nevertheless, the government said all four weapons were destroyed and everything was ok. Meanwhile, in April the US government sent a Star III submarine to find the bomb, making the Danish government believe it was a "survey of bottom under the impact point":

Fact that this operation includes search for object or missing weapon part is to be treated as confidential NOFORN [not to be disclosed to any foreign country]. For discussion with Danes, this operation should be referred to as a survey repeat survey of bottom under impact point.

The search was finally abandoned. According to William H Chambers, a former nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos: "There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components. It would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn't find them." There you go, people. If you are ever attacked by a 45-foot high shrimp, remember to call Mr. Chambers and tell him that, apparently, our new crustacean overlords didn't find it so difficult. [BBC News]

Just in case you're blanking out, here's some more information, courtesy of the LA Times and the Bush Administration's now not-so-secret Special Ops missions in Pakistan:

As part of an escalating offensive against extremist targets in Pakistan, the United States is deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

Super drones? See through walls? Something even crazier than that? You decide.

Winner gets a visit from men in dark suits and a trip to the Caribbean! [CNN, Bruce Schneier, LA Times]

UPDATE: Lots of legitimate leads (aka not guesses of anti-terrorist iPhone apps) in the comments. The "gadget" may really be a whole combination of technologies and techniques as opposed to some awesome James Bond weapon. Lame!

See? It is disturbing: this 18-in-1 Wiimote Complete Sports Pack looks like the perfect accessory pack for Nick Rivers' The Anal Intruder. Remember, "neverrrr plug 120V gadget into 220V powerrr socket." [Deal Extreme]