Word: hoax
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...Prescott nor Professor Morrison-both of whom, as it turns out, are as fictitious as a number of the book's minor characters. Rather, it is a fascinating chronicle of the cold war, valid in essence perhaps, fictional and caricatured in detail. It is a grand and eloquent hoax full of enigmatic private jokes like the consistent misspelling of Robert McNamara's name...
...story broke, leaving word that he was "hiding out where Daniel Ellsberg is." But he quickly returned to New York City with a smirk and a prepared statement that the National Review's papers had been "composed ex nihilo" (out of nothing). In short, it was all a hoax, which had "sprung full-blown in my mind like Venus from the Cypriot seas." The authors' "most arduous challenge was to emulate bureaucratic prose...
There is more glee than fury in the caricatures, and Green grinds his rubber axes in the midst of a Marx Brothers plot that parodies the standard spy novel. Unintentionally, Bloodworth gets mixed up with a pair of Hungarian scientists who perpetrate an elaborate mind-control hoax so that one of them can defect to join his old mistress. Bloodworth has a good time of it (readers will too), particularly during a brief moment of status when the literati look up to him as a CIA Scarlet Pimpernel...
...most pages, a slip of paper had been placed over the secrecy classification when the photocopy was made, blanking it out. But on a dozen pages Knight newsmen found the words TOP SECRET?SENSITIVE. At the Boston Globe, the pickup arrangements sounded so melodramatic that editors suspected a hoax. But they went along and received a bag containing 2,000 pages...
Actually, the President and Holton performed rather smoothly, considering that their meeting was an elaborate hoax. It was not Press Secretary Ziegler who phoned Holton but a mysterious practical joker who sounded like Ziegler and was ingenious enough to fake the electronic background sounds. Nixon may have been startled to see the unbidden Holton, but the two men handled the situation like pros, spending 30 minutes together. They thus denied the joker the satisfaction of causing any embarrassment or even publicity about the incident...