SMART MOVES?

The old television show’s combination of gags and, faulty gadgetry lampooned the previously no-nonsense spy-film genre. But the Smart message went beyond entertainment. Get Smart creator Mel Brooks once said that the bumbling Agent 86, whose antics aired from 1965 to 1970, spoke to a growing “credibility gap” between citizens and administrations that were less than honest about Vietnam.

But how far from that “idiotic enterprise” was Hollywood? And what did real spies borrow from TV?

Maxwell Smart’s signature gimmick was the shoe phone. Although the contraption wasn’t exactly covert, it did reflect the need of real spies in the field to communicate intelligence securely to headquarters. Intelligence agencies did use footwear for espionage purposes in the 1960s. East European services excelled in hiding bugs in the heels of Western diplomats’ shoes.

Would you believe that the TV spy’s reliably malfunctioning “cone of silence” triggered alarm bells at the CIA?

According to a former officer, the agency feared that the Get Smart team’s imagination ventured too close to reality, in regard to the cone, a device that the CIA had actually created. While the East German embassy in Rome did not have an acrylic cone of silence, its diplomats used a transparent desk made of the same material to ensure that no hidden bugs would record sensitive conversations. The CIA reportedly considered sending Get Smart producers a list of subjects to avoid but decided to refrain, for fear that the show would parody their effort.

Smart’s arch-enemy, Kaos (an evil organisation bent on world domination), once commissioned a double-barreled revolver operated by a single trigger. Too bad the manufacturer interpreted the request for a “stereophonic” pistol to mean that it should play stereo.

I’ve never seen a message get quite so muddled in my study of the actual serious business of covert action, but sometimes Get Smart calibre props do come into play. In 1978, the Bulgarian secret service used a modified umbrella that fired ricin pellets to kill a dissident in London. The CIA considered chemically treating Fidel Castro’s cigars to cause his beard to fall out. And the agency’s various attempts to kill the dictator with booby-trapped seashells and other gimmicks invariably failed.
-Thomas Boghardt