Word: agent
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...target and the schedule of the security men, if there were any." Headquarters' approval was qualified: "As long as full security is assured, go ahead." According to the official, this meant "go ahead, but if you're caught, it's your ass." Afterward, in the field agent's report to Washington, the information gained from the break-in would be attributed to a well-placed informant...
When Congress appointed an envoy earlier this year to negotiate for badly needed French arms, it did not know that the task was already nearly completed-by the French themselves. The man behind the move: French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes. his agent extraordinary: Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, author of the popular comedy, The Barber of Seville. Together, they have been maneuvering for well over a year to win greater support for the American Patriots...
Vergennes's undercover agent, Beaumarchais, 44, is the brash son of a watchmaker. By charm and ability, he worked hi way into the salons of French aristocracy, and he won Vergennes's confidence in two previous secret missions to London. He first bought up and destroyed the alleged memoirs of Madame du Barry, mistress to the late King Louis XV. He returned to London last year to negotiate for the return of some incriminating documents about a proposed French invasion of England. One of Louis XV's secret agents, the Chevalier...
Beaumarchais's dispatches from London on the American situation, backed up by reports from a French agent in Philadelphia, argued that French aid could be decisive for the colonial cause-and yet not force a war between France and Britain. "It is the English, Sire, whom you need to humiliate and weaken," Beaumarchais wrote to Louis last winter, "if you do not wish to be humiliated and weakened yourself on every occasion." Without French help, he warned, the Americans might give up their fight and join with the British to take away France's rich sugar islands...
...Agent in Place, Maclnnes...