Sepia Saturday 210: "He is still moving Mr. Mu."

"Things found in old books" is the theme for this week's Sepia Saturday. Nancy told me about an exhibit of such items that the Fallbrook Library put together. Can you imagine the stories behind all the notes, photos, documents left in library books? 

I started going through Richard's old books because he has a habit of using interesting things for book marks; foreign currency for example.  He enjoys finding the bills years later and being reminded of times past, like when Zimbabwe was experiencing 89,000,000,000,000,000,000% inflation. 

 

He also uses old envelopes, receipts and airline tickets. My own books don't yield much flotsam or jetsam; I'm a book torturer and fold down the corners to mark my spot. I apologize for that. 

Peering at the line-up of books on the shelf, I could see something white sticking up from the pages of his  "Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern American Usage". 

Instead of the worthless but amusing 100 trillion dollar Zimbabwe bank note, this photo fluttered out.

When I showed it to Richard he started to laugh. "What's so funny?" I queried. The photo was marked DIA and bore an official looking number; I assumed it was probably something serious. As the laughter subsided, I asked all my questions, beginning with, "Who was Mr. Mu?".

My husband had a career working in various aspects of intelligence gathering: At one point he was on assignment in an east european country attending an exhibition of Finnish skiing skills and "watching" a Chinese diplomat who was also "watching" him. It's a long complicated story - too long for this purpose. The two adversaries ended up looking at each other face to face and camera to camera. It was a comic situation and my husband has a fine sense of humor. In a spontaneous flash of fun, they laughingly agreed to switch cameras and take pictures of each other. Guess who suggested this? Once "Mr. Mu" handed Richard his camera, Richard absconded with it. In that game there's little room for spontaneity. Shame on Mr. Mu; he should have known better. 

After the incident was over, one of Richard's associates at DIA slipped him this bucolic photo, with the added caption, of a Chinese man using some kind of instrument. Were Chinese intelligence agents so naive and inept; so unschooled in spy craft, like poor Mr. Mu, that they'd use a device on a tripod in the middle of an empty field and have an assistant? That's the joke of course. 

As you can see the photo is stamped unclassified and unlike most memories of those times, Richard was able to keep it and use it as a book mark. 

I love watching spy movies with my husband who has his best laughs when the crucial file (there's always one) is handed over from one person to the next and lest we, the great unwashed, don't get it, it's stamped in the most clandestine possible way: 

"TOP SECRET"  

Don a disguise!.... something low-key like a nose-and-glasses 

......and sneak on over to Sepia Saturday to read more stories.

Optional theme music by the great Henry Mancini.....