"This sketch of a butterfly contains the outline of a fortress, and marks both the position and power of the guns. The marks on the wings between the lines mean nothing, but those on the lines show the nature and size of the guns, according to the keys below."
"The marks on the wings reveal the shape of the fortress shown here and the size of the guns. The position of each gun is at the place inside the outline of the fort on the butterfly where the line marked with the spot ends. The head of the butterfly points towards the north."
---From My Adventures as a Spy, by Sir Robert Baden-Powell.
A detailed discussion of naturalists as spies is presented at the Opinionator blog at the NYT.
...over the years I’ve found that naturalists don’t actually like the connection at all. The suspicion that they may be spies just complicates the difficult job of getting access to habitats and specimens in foreign countries, which are often already leery of their odd collecting behavior. It can also get them jailed, or even murdered...More at the link, via The Daily Dish.
The most public of them was Sir Robert Baden Powell, better known as founder of the Boy Scouts. As a British secret agent, he thought it clever to pose as “one of the exceedingly stupid Englishmen who wandered about foreign countries sketching cathedrals, or catching butterflies.” His detailed maps of enemy fortifications were concealed within the natural patterns of butterfly wings and tree leaves...
Maxwell Knight, the British counterintelligence spymaster (and one of the models for James Bond’s boss M), actually worked on the side as a BBC natural history presenter and author. In the late 1950s, he hired a young man named David Cornwell to provide bird illustrations for one of his books, leading Cornwell into a stint as an MI5 intelligence officer in Germany — and later to a career as the novelist John Le Carré.
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