Inter-confessional espionage was extensive but mostly undocumented by design
Evidence
Another category of travelers related to war and its preparation is spies. In the nature of things, the surviving documentation regarding espionage is scanty and ambiguous. It has been well said that a secret service that isn’t secret doesn’t serve. There are indications, even pieces of evidence, and they give us some kind of a picture, but it is fragmentary and tantalizing. Obviously there was espionage between the Christian and Muslim worlds. We have sufficient references to in dicate that this was carried on a fairly extensive scale, but our information about it is very limited. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 751
Categorization
- QUESTION: How much of what looks like indifference or absence in the Muslim travel record is actually the deliberate opacity of espionage rather than lack of curiosity?
- XREF: connects to: Historical espionage between Christian and Muslim worlds was extensive but poorly documented.; CIA redactions in documents often obscure critical information — Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Secrets in the…, 161; Covert operations produce consequences publics cannot trace to their causes (+2 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Historical espionage between Christian and Muslim worlds was extensive but poorly documented.; CIA redactions in documents often obscure critical information — Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Secrets in the…, 161; Covert operations produce consequences publics cannot trace to their causes (+2 more)