the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt one)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

As far as most people knew, Devlin was a writer for Fodor’s, a popular series of travel guides. The guides’ eponymous creator, Eugene Fodor, was a Hungarian native distressed to watch Eastern Europe fall into the Soviet orbit, and as a naturalized U.S. citizen, he considered it his patriotic duty to let the CIA use his company as a front. (The funding he received in exchange didn’t hurt, either.) The profession of travel writer was an ideal cover for a spy like Devlin, since it offered a ready excuse for ranging widely across Europe while taking extensive photographs and notes. The problem was that Fodor insisted on getting actual work out of his charges, telling the CIA to send “real writers, not civil engineers.” Devlin was credited as an editor in the early 1950s editions of Fodor’s guides to Austria, Britain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Scandinavia, and the Benelux countries. How did he manage to submit travel reports for Fodor’s while spying for the United States? He plagiarized.