Houdini Was a SPOOK? (or Security Consultant?)

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Houdini Was a SPOOK? (or Security Consultant?)

Postby thurnandtaxis » Tue Aug 29, 2006 12:02 am

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I decided these articles were best<br>posted in full...<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.nysun.com/article/38654">www.nysun.com/article/38654</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Houdini Was a Covert Agent, New Book Claims<br><br>By GARY SHAPIRO - Staff Reporter of the Sun<br>August 28, 2006<br><br>The famed magician Harry Houdini guarded the secrets behind his<br>legendary escapes from handcuffs, chains, jails, milk cans, mailbags,<br>and water chambers. But the authors of a forthcoming book on Houdini<br>will be disclosing that he had another secret: his role as a spy. This<br>claim is already causing a stir in the magic community and will create<br>more buzz on October 31 - exactly 80 years after Houdini's death at<br>age 52 - when William Kalush and Larry Sloman's "The Secret Life of<br>Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero" rolls off the<br>presses.<br><br>The authors argue that intelligence agencies on both sides of the ocean<br>likely employed the Hungarian-born showman. The book notes that Houdini<br>canceled profitable contracts and abruptly headed to Europe in 1900,<br>and it surmises that he might have been spying in Germany, feeding<br>information to the Scotland Yard superintendent, William Melville.<br><br>Other claims in the forthcoming book, some of which were outlined in a<br>recent article in the Sunday Times of London, are that Houdini assisted<br>German police with information about wanted criminals, monitored<br>anarchists in Russia, and engaged in anti-counterfeiting activities for<br>the Secret Service.<br><br>"Some of it may be true," an author and collector of Houdini material,<br>Arthur Moses, said, "but it's hard to believe it's all true." He did<br>say what he has read of the book is meticulously researched and well<br>written.<br><br>A call to Mr. Kalush was referred to the publisher's publicity<br>department, which declined any interviews until closer to the<br>publication date.<br><br>"I'll believe anything that there's evidence for," a Houdini biographer<br>who is reserving judgment until he has read the book, Kenneth<br>Silverman, said. But he bristled at the suggestion that Houdini's quick<br>rise to fame was partly assisted by police. The new book apparently<br>claims that there was a quid pro quo whereby detectives in Chicago<br>would promote Houdini if he taught them lock escapes and other skills.<br>To the contrary, Mr. Silverman maintained, "He owed his huge reputation<br>to the work he did on stage."<br><br>The publisher of Genii magazine, Richard Kaufman, said Mr. Kalush had<br>viewed documents that appear to support the claim that Houdini, if not<br>actually a spy, helped the embryonic British intelligence service<br>gather information.<br><br>However, a historian at the Washington-based International Spy Museum,<br>Thomas Boghardt, who has not yet read the book, said British espionage<br>did not start in earnest until 1909. He also said William Melville, the<br>head of Scotland Yard, was principally involved in counterespionage in<br>England rather than spying abroad.<br><br>Throughout history, conjurors have engaged in espionage and police and<br>detective work. The French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin<br>(1805-1871) - whose name the young Ehrich Weiss invoked when he<br>renamed himself Harry Houdini - worked as an envoy in Algeria and<br>helped quell an uprising by showing that indigenous Algerian magic<br>could not match French conjuring. During World War II, the illusionist<br>Joseph Dunninger (1892-1975) advised the U.S. Armed Forces on<br>camouflage techniques, the magic scholar Robert Reiss recalled. The<br>sleight-of-hand master John Scarne (1903-1985) also worked for the<br>American Army during the war, showing traveling soldiers how not to be<br>cheated at craps, gambling, and cards.<br><br>In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency hired the thaumaturge<br>John Mulholland (1898-1970) to write a pamphlet on sleight of hand to<br>help operatives administer other substances clandestinely - for<br>instance, by slipping drugs into people's drinks. Defectors during the<br>Cold War were smuggled out of East Germany in cars that were built like<br>the magic boxes used in stage illusions. Magicians have also helped<br>security guards understand how sleight of hand can be used to steal<br>valuable items. More recently, a former acting director of central<br>intelligence, John McLaughlin, has performed magic in demonstrating to<br>intelligence officers how easily they can be fooled even after a<br>magician tells them he is going to fool them.<br><br>A professor of security management at John Jay College of Justice,<br>Robert McCrie, said there was a phase between roughly 1915 and the end<br>of the Cold War when celebrities liked to hobnob with spies and<br>international police. He also said that Houdini, as a world-famous<br>magician, had access to this world that most people did not have. But<br>the fact that Houdini might have passed along information to law<br>enforcement did not necessarily make him an operative. "It's proper to<br>receive credit for trying to be helpful, but the police department can<br>thrive without him."<br><br>One way that Houdini was helpful to law enforcement, Mr. McCrie said,<br>was by showing them that their restraints had limitations and could be<br>overcome.<br><br>A historian of American policing and a former Chicago commander of<br>detectives, Thomas Reppetto, said Houdini certainly knew police and had<br>a reason to travel. The claim that he was an agent for police "doesn't<br>sound impossible. They could certainly have made use of him."<br><br>But to call Houdini a secret agent "in the James Bond sense" might be<br>taking it a little far, a historian of magic, Richard Kohn, said. "He<br>may well have been an observer who passed along observations." But he<br>also said Houdini was very impressed with himself.<br><br>The magician and paranormal debunker James Randi cautioned, "If Houdini<br>had been a spy, that would have gotten out. He never would have been<br>able to sit on it." Mr. Randi said the story of Jasper Maskelyne<br>(1902-1973) - a magician whose skills at deception helped the British<br>defeat the Germans in North Africa during World War II - got out<br>quickly.<br><br>Don Stashower thinks Houdini makes a good private eye - but in<br>fiction. He has written three mystery novels featuring Houdini as a<br>detective. "The same skills that make him a good magician and escape<br>artist," he said, "also made him an interesting person to cast as a<br>detective because he was naturally good at solving problems and<br>figuring out puzzles."<br><br>---<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2278656.html">www.timesonline.co.uk/art...78656.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>And Now For My Last Trick...<br><br>His death-defying stunts made him an international man of mystery. But<br>did Harry Houdini lead a life of even greater intrigue - as a secret<br>agent?<br><br>By Tony Barrell<br><br>Secrecy was such a fixture of Harry Houdini's life, it should have<br>been his middle name. We remember him now as the greatest escape artist<br>who ever lived - a tough, squat Hungarian-born Jewish American who<br>freed himself from everything from handcuffs, chains and straitjackets<br>to coffins, iron maidens and torture racks - but he was basically an<br>illusionist; a conjuror. While millions may have swallowed the myth<br>that he achieved his escapes using nothing but brute strength, extreme<br>plasticity and superhuman self-belief, in fact there was often<br>something up his sleeve, so to speak - something he knew about and<br>the audience didn't. His equipment would be customised, rigged,<br>interfered with. The myriad containers that imprisoned him would come<br>apart in ingenious ways. To accomplish his famous escape from a big<br>milk can full of water, for instance, he could simply remove the top<br>section, whose ring of false rivets gave a convincing illusion of<br>indestructibility. Even when he leapt shackled into the Mississippi,<br>the Seine or Aberdeen harbour, there was something he wasn't letting<br>on about the ties that bound him, whether it be dodgy cuffs or<br>concealed lock-picks.<br><br>Enough secrets for one life, you might think. But now there are more<br>nails emerging from the strongbox that has preserved his reputation for<br>80 years since his death. Two American authors have suddenly announced<br>that Houdini was more than the world's greatest showman. In their<br>forthcoming biography, The Secret Life of Houdini, William Kalush and<br>Larry Sloman say he was a secret agent; a spy. They suggest that he<br>gathered top-secret information in Germany when he performed there<br>before the first world war. They say he could have been involved in the<br>surveillance of anarchists in Russia. And they maintain that without<br>his services to international espionage, Harry Houdini may not have<br>become the star whose extraordinary exploits are still the stuff of<br>legend today.<br><br>By 1894, the year he turned 20, the struggling magician Ehrich Weiss<br>had a wife, a new act and a new name: Harry Houdini. He and his<br>beloved, Bess, joined an American travelling circus and performed as<br>the Houdinis, attracting limited attention with a magic act. But<br>Houdini still needed a lucky break - and it was a Minnesota beer hall<br>in 1899 that apparently served as the escapological equivalent of<br>Liverpool's Cavern Club in 1961, where one Brian Epstein chanced upon<br>a performance by the Beatles. After Houdini made short work of some<br>cuffs brought to him by the impresario Martin Beck, Beck offered him a<br>headlining vaudeville gig and the princely fee of $60. A full contract<br>was to follow, with Houdini playing smart theatres in big cities from<br>Chicago to Los Angeles, and his fame suddenly began to grow.<br><br>According to Houdini's latest biographers, William Kalush and Larry<br>Sloman, the steep fame curve that the showman enjoyed in the early<br>years of the 20th century wasn't simply the result of ingenuity, hard<br>work and showbiz karma. They maintain that Houdini formed a secret pact<br>with top American detectives in Chicago, whereby they would help him<br>achieve stardom on the condition that the great escapist teach them the<br>tricks of his trade.<br><br>If this extraordinary claim is true, it provides a possible solution to<br>one of the many mini-mysteries within the enigma that was Harry<br>Houdini's odd career. He would frequently turn up at police stations<br>to demonstrate dramatic escapes from handcuffs, manacles, straitjackets<br>and prison cells - all in the name of free publicity. "I defy the<br>police departments of the world to hold me," he would boast. At best,<br>this behaviour was wasting police time; at worst, as he casually<br>chucked off the shackles designed to restrain the most psychopathic<br>criminals, he was advertising the inadequacy of police equipment. But,<br>of course, they would have to grin and bear it if they had been<br>instructed to indulge every whim of a covert police adviser. If a<br>performer such as David Blaine were to ask for this level of police<br>co-operation nowadays, would he receive it?<br><br>But Houdini's new biographers go further. They say that Houdini was<br>probably employed by the intelligence services - on both sides of the<br>Atlantic. When Houdini sailed to Britain in 1900, at the midpoint of<br>his life, he met the Special Branch superintendent William Melville at<br>Scotland Yard, escaped from some regulation cuffs and passed on some<br>lock-picking secrets. Shortly afterwards, they claim, Melville became<br>head of the Britain's secret service and recruited Houdini for<br>espionage work.<br><br>It was in the same year that Houdini pitched up in Germany, where he<br>captivated theatre audiences in Dresden and Berlin. This was a time<br>when diplomatic tensions were building: both Britain and America saw<br>Germany as a growing threat to the world order. There were real fears<br>in the US that the Germans were scheming to invade American waters and<br>seize colonies in Latin America. And not only was the German ruler,<br>Kaiser Wilhelm II, pushing ahead with a plan to increase the power of<br>the German navy, challenging Britannia's maritime supremacy, but he<br>had supported the Boers fighting the British in South Africa.<br><br>One known spy who definitely was operational in Europe around this time<br>- and these were the days before the existence of the CIA, MI5 and<br>MI6 - was Sidney Reilly, on whom Ian Fleming modelled the character<br>of James Bond. Reilly posed as a German in the Netherlands to uncover<br>the truth about Dutch aid to the Boers. He may even have been the same<br>age as Houdini - one of the slippery spy's possible birth dates is<br>March 24, 1874: the day Ehrich Weiss was born in Hungary.<br><br>According to Kalush and Sloman, Houdini may have been snooping into<br>German weaponry secrets. During a three-week run of shows in Essen, in<br>the industrial Ruhr district, he was challenged by the Krupp company to<br>escape from some of its most fiendish handcuffs. Krupp didn't just<br>make hand restraints: it was a big munitions manufacturer, and Houdini<br>was allowed to visit the factory.<br><br>A German newspaper claimed that criminals were lining up to meet the<br>great lock-breaker and learn his secrets. And it was in Germany that<br>Houdini became tangled up in the legal system. He was hypersensitive to<br>criticism, and when a newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, claimed he was<br>a fraud who had, among other things, attempted to bribe a policeman<br>into secretly giving him a key to help him escape some fetters at<br>police headquarters in Cologne, he hit the roof. He sued his accuser<br>and, in a highly theatrical turn of events, ended up performing escape<br>routines in the courtroom to clear his name - which he triumphantly<br>did.<br><br>Feted by the public, buttonholed by criminals and known to the police,<br>Houdini could hardly have had a higher profile in Germany at this<br>point. If the German authorities got wind of any involvement in<br>espionage, they appear not to have acted on it. In fact, the new<br>biography notes that they were strangely co-operative with him. He was<br>to return to Germany for further shows before the first world war, and<br>he was so popular there that he was rumoured to be a German spy.<br>Houdini later wrote about his involvement in an international exchange<br>of police information: he gave the German police details of top<br>criminals, published in a book by a Boston chief inspector who was a<br>member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the<br>American-based network founded in 1893 to foster co-operation between<br>cops across the globe. In return, the Germans gave him some similar<br>material from their files to pass on.<br><br>Houdini's next great foreign adventure was in Russia. Arriving in<br>Moscow in 1903, he introduced himself in customary fashion to the<br>police and persuaded them to let him escape from a "carette", a<br>jail-on-wheels in which prisoners were transported to Siberia. But the<br>Russian police treated him roughly - Houdini later hinted they had<br>even subjected him to an anal examination before the stunt.<br><br>The writer J C Cannell, in his 1926 book The Secrets of Houdini,<br>claimed that Houdini somehow tore into the metal floor of the vehicle<br>to effect his escape.<br><br>Russia and Harry did not seem to get on at all. He found the heavy<br>police presence depressing, complaining of surveillance by "spy<br>detectives", and was shocked by the laws that meant Jews were barred<br>from entering Moscow's theatres - it was apparently this kind of<br>east European anti-semitism that had driven his father, a rabbi, to<br>emigrate to the US in the first place. Nonetheless, Kalush and Sloman<br>have another big surprise for us. They claim that the carette escape<br>was Houdini's passport to the Russian royal family, and that<br>overtures were made to encourage him to become an adviser to the tsar,<br>Nicholas II - a role similar to that filled shortly afterwards by<br>Grigori Rasputin. They also suggest that Houdini was on the lookout for<br>anarchist activity while he was in Russia, and was sending back<br>intelligence reports. Anarchist conspirators were the great<br>international menace of the period - only two years before, the<br>anarchist Leon Czolgosz had assassinated the American president William<br>McKinley.<br><br>If Houdini really was this international man of mystery, zipping around<br>the globe and oiling the wheels of history in the run-up to the first<br>world war and the Russian revolution, he would have relished the role.<br>In some ways he behaved like a spy, compulsively revising personal<br>details in a way that made him hard to pin down. "His indifference to<br>dates and facts encompassed virtually all but family anniversaries and<br>house receipts," wrote Kenneth Silverman in his 1996 book, Houdini!!!<br>The Career of Ehrich Weiss. "Photographs of himself that he dated<br>1901, for example, can be shown to have been taken in 1908. On various<br>passport applications... he gave his height hit-or-miss as five-four,<br>five-five-and-a-quarter, five-six, or five-seven; his eyes diversely as<br>brown, blue, and gray; his complexion as dark or fair; his year of<br>birth as 1873 or 1874 (for the 1920 census he decided on 1876). Almost<br>no date he supplied in a letter or newspaper article can be trusted."<br>Kalush and Sloman point to various gadgets developed by Houdini in his<br>spare time that have a suspiciously strong connection to the world of<br>spying, such as a form of invisible ink and steam-resistant envelopes.<br><br>In other ways, he was arguably too sensitive and emotional for serious<br>spy work. He worshipped the two main women in his life: his wife, Bess,<br>and his mother, Cecilia. In the notes and billets-doux he sent Bess, or<br>left for her to find around their New York home, he referred to her as<br>"My Dear little Popsy Wopsy" and "Honey-Baby-Pretty-Lamby". And<br>he was a notorious braggart. He couldn't achieve any feat, from a new<br>escape to a victory in a legal battle, without advertising and<br>exaggerating it. So if he truly worked as a secret agent, he would have<br>found it a tremendous frustration that he couldn't trumpet his<br>espionage exploits to the world. But perhaps he did find a way of<br>trumpeting them and getting away with it: late in his career he became<br>the hero of a series of lightweight adventure movies, the last being<br>Haldane of the Secret Service (1923), a self-produced, self-directed<br>yarn in which "Heath Haldane" thwarts the bad guys using a talent<br>for escapology.<br><br>Do magicians make good spies? I put the question to John Bravo and<br>Dorothy Dietrich, two magicians who run the Houdini Museum in Scranton,<br>Pennsylvania. "Well, we certainly know a lot of techniques that are<br>not known to the general public," says Dietrich, who performs<br>Houdiniesque stunts herself, such as escaping from a straitjacket while<br>hanging from a burning rope 150ft off the ground. Both Bravo and<br>Dietrich say the Agent Houdini revelations are news to them. "It's<br>a possibility," says Bravo.<br><br>"I know he did some experiments with the navy and underwater survival<br>techniques. And I know for certain that he worked with our soldiers<br>before they went to war, teaching them how to get out of German<br>restraints."<br><br>"You know what," says Dietrich, "the more you study Houdini, the<br>more you learn."<br><br>It's true: a lot of people don't know, for example, that in 1910,<br>in his mid-thirties, he became a pioneer of the air, one of the first<br>people ever to fly an aeroplane in Australia. He bought a 60-horsepower<br>Voisin biplane, had some practice runs in Germany, where he was booked<br>for a series of escapology shows, and then set out on the long sea<br>journey. Previous accounts of his brief aerobatic displays down under<br>give the impression that he was a courageous and resourceful pilot.<br>What they don't suggest, and what Kalush and Sloman do, is that this<br>was not just an attempt at making the record books: it was a secret<br>campaign to promote the use of aeroplanes for defence. Harry Houdini<br>was on yet another covert, world-changing mission.<br><br>Houdini frequently whined that escapology was a gruelling business and<br>that he needed to find something else to pay the bills; and he<br>harboured ambitions to leave a more profound legacy, saying he wished<br>that "what brain and gifts I have should benefit humanity in some<br>other way than merely entertaining the people". If he really did<br>espionage work, that would have gone some way to satisfying those<br>desires. But by the time he had reached his late forties, having<br>amassed a substantial fortune, he had also found a new, very personal<br>crusade.<br><br>In the wake of the devastating first world war, spiritualism was on the<br>rise. Houdini had an intimate knowledge of the conjuring tricks that<br>"mediums" used to make ghosts of the departed appear to talk,<br>write, throw objects around and even manifest themselves during<br>seances. With the death of his adored mother as a possible catalyst, he<br>decided to expose the shameless fraudsters who were fleecing the<br>gullible and the bereaved. He visited seances, sometimes in disguise,<br>and used his vast knowledge of stage magic to establish what was really<br>going on when things went bump in the dark. He also employed a network<br>of trusted investigators to help him with his medium-busting - and he<br>invoked the language of covert intelligence when he described them as<br>"my own secret-service department". One of his staunchest opponents<br>was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, despite having created the<br>super-rational Sherlock Holmes, was an ardent believer. Houdini's<br>fellow magician Joseph Dunninger later recalled the spiritualists'<br>reaction: "Resentment was offered everywhere when he would attack<br>these individuals, who would often stand up at their seats in the<br>theatres, and attempt to denounce Houdini." Spiritualists filed<br>lawsuits against him. "They could not have won the case," says<br>Dorothy Dietrich, "because how do you get a ghost to come to court?<br>But they figured they could just tie up his money and keep him busy."<br><br>An Indianapolis spiritualist "reverend" taunted that he knew how<br>Houdini did all his tricks, and would reveal all to the public. But<br>there were much worse threats. "I get letters from ardent believers<br>in spiritualism," he told a Chicago newspaper near the end of his<br>life, "who prophesy I am going to meet a violent death soon as a<br>fitting punishment for my nefarious work."<br><br>"He was getting a lot of threats on his life at the end," says<br>Dietrich. "In fact, several of his letters that I've seen in<br>collections, from the last year of his life, say things like, 'This<br>may be the last you hear from me - the threats are getting<br>stronger.'"<br><br>Houdini didn't drown hanging upside down in his famous "water<br>torture cell", as the 1953 Hollywood biopic starring Tony Curtis has<br>it. The apparent truth is that he developed appendicitis but went ahead<br>with a North American tour, and on October 22, 1926, in a dressing room<br>in Montreal, a student from McGill University asked if he could punch<br>him in the abdomen to test his strength. Three days later, Houdini was<br>hospitalised, in agony. He died of peritonitis - his ruptured<br>appendix having led to a severe internal infection - on Hallowe'en.<br>He was just 52.<br><br>Kalush and Sloman point to the spiritualists' crusade against the<br>escapologist and suggest he was murdered. "I have a feeling that that<br>student could have been a believer in spiritualism who wanted to punish<br>Houdini, teach him a lesson, and maybe even do him in," agrees<br>Dietrich. "In 1926, Houdini went to Washington and asked to have laws<br>passed against the spiritualists, and he did not win the case, because<br>they decided they would claim to be a religion. That was the year he<br>died - so he did not get a chance to go back and prove that they were<br>not really a religion."<br><br>Because he was both an escapologist and an enigma, writers seem<br>compelled to unpick more secrets with each new biography they write. In<br>1993, in her powerfully analytical work The Life and Many Deaths of<br>Harry Houdini, the British writer Ruth Brandon suggested he was<br>impotent, to explain why there was no patter of tiny Houdinis in the<br>marital home (Kalush and Sloman disagree, saying it was Bess who was<br>unable to have children). Three years later, Kenneth Silverman revealed<br>Houdini hadn't been as chaste as his sickly notes to Bess imply: he<br>had had an affair with Charmian London, widow of Jack London, the<br>novelist he had befriended in 1915; in her diaries, Charmian dubbed him<br>her "Magic Man" and "Magic Lover". And now Kalush and Sloman<br>appear to have raked through every known Houdini archive to produce the<br>most comprehensive and controversial biography ever written about the<br>man, with its contention that he was a spy who may have been murdered<br>by a cult.<br><br>What next for the Houdini revisionism industry? Is it really so<br>unrealistic to predict an obscenely popular novel, The Houdini Code,<br>alleging that the great man is tenuously connected in tantalising ways<br>to the world's greatest mysteries, from Lord Lucan to the tooth<br>fairy?<br><br>Houdini promised his wife that if he died before her, he would try to<br>contact her from "the other side". The theory was that if anyone<br>could free himself from the bonds of death, he could. As far as we<br>know, Bess never heard from him. But that doesn't stop the<br>biographies and the theories from multiplying, a whole century after<br>his heyday. While he may not have found an afterlife beyond the veil,<br>we may never be able to escape from Harry Houdini here on Earth.<br><br>-<br><br>The Secret Life of Houdini is published in the US by Atria Books on<br>October 31, price $27.95. It is expected to be published around the<br>same time in the UK. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: Houdini Was a SPOOK? (or Security Consultant?)

Postby Dreams End » Tue Aug 29, 2006 12:51 am

thanks for those. Even if he was a spook... he has my post facto blessings to spy in prewar Germany...even if was the FIRST world way. <br><br>He was a childhood hero of mine. Still at LEAST one or two good movies to be made out there about him.<br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: Houdini Was a SPOOK? (or Security Consultant?)

Postby Seamus OBlimey » Tue Aug 29, 2006 3:18 pm

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>even if was the FIRST world way.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>oops?<br><br>Or many a true word said by mistake? <p></p><i></i>
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