It’s easy to forget that, outside the high-action violence and nifty guns disguised as fountain pens of Hollywood, that actual, real-life spies exist.
Warren Reed is one of them. The now-retired ASIS agent with MI6 training has spent a lifetime working in secret intelligence, getting into hairy situations that while at the time he handled with calm and collected manner, now he’s not sure how he did it.
Ahead of the home release of Atomic Blonde – which stars Charlize Theron as an undercover MI6 agent sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent – Warren took us through a little Spy School 101.
The main takeaways? Being a spy is a lot less catching the bad guy a lá James Bond, and a lot more convincing the bad guy’s disgruntled employees to talk.
There’s two things to being an intelligence agent, really: body language, and memory. The body language bit comes in so you don’t accidentally let an informant know how fucken’ huge it is that they just revealed the secret nuclear plans, and the memory bit comes in so you don’t forget all the vital info they’re telling you.
Body language is the easy (easier?) part. The biggest giveaways to stress are your hands and face, so if you can do something with your hands (put them in your lap, pretend to drink a beer), the job’s half done.
Memory is harder. Luckily Warren learnt a skill at MI6 to memorise pretty much anything.
“It’s simply known as association,” he says, although it’s also known as the method of loci (Latin for ‘places’) or the somewhat grander term, memory palace.
Warren recommends visualising your family home, as it’s usually a) a place you know best and b) bigger than whatever inner city shithole you’re currently paying through the nose for. (Our words, not his.)
You then work out a circuitry, visualising specific places throughout the home.
“You start at the front door – or start in the laundry if you want – and you go on a circuit around the house, placing whatever you’ve got to remember at that next point.
“So if I were in the bathroom of my family home in Hobart, and someone gave me a bank card number, I’d pick up the shaving foam and spray the number right across the bathroom. The more graphically you do it, the more it’s going to stick in your mind.”
Another example he gave was if you needed to remember ’26 limes’, in case you were making a shitload of key lime pies or something, you could paint the number ’26’ in lime green paint on your front door, with a basket of limes sitting underneath.
Physical objects are the easiest to remember (depending on your brain), as you can literally visualise the object. Numbers are trickier, since you have to visually draw them on your walls, which is enough to confuse and enrage us all equally.
Languages are harder still, for most people. There’s no shortcut to learning them, just an easier way to remember them long term.
For example, Warren says the Indonesian word for ‘fresh’, segar, is burnt forever in his brain because he imagined his sofa with a huge cigar (segar, cigar, geddit) lying on his couch like a torpedo, and someone’s looking at it saying, “It’s fresh, it’s brand new.”
“Until my dying day, I can’t get the Indonesian word for ‘fresh’ out of my bloody mind,” he says.
To be quite honest? So will we.
Atomic Blonde is out on home release now.
