"Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole"," is Evelyn Waugh's take on the gentleman naturalist in "Scoop" (1938) a role which Peter Matthiessen seems to have taken to heart.
It's a job. Somebody has to note the first cookoo of spring.
Eventually this... whatever it is, almost gets somewhere.
TL;DR: the CIA recruited people in the 1950s.
London Review of Books articles aren't allowed to discuss the book being reviewed for the first five paragraphs. It's an obscure British law or something.
Apparently it isn’t a rule as much as an implied norm. I didn’t know this, thank you for educating me. Explains a lot about the article.
I’ve always been fascinated with how governments operate their clandestine operations. This particular article felt more like an expositional adventure than informative.