Wesley Wark began his introduction to the October 1990 issue of this journal with this sentence: 'From the beginning, the spy novel has enjoyed a special licence to thrill'. 1 The pun was intended since the James Bond film, Licence to Kill, starring Timothy Dalton, had just been released the previous year. Wark and his fellow contributors produced what is still one of the finest introductions to, and discussions of, 'Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence', as that issue of the journal was titled.

The articles in this issue of Intelligence and National Security were, with two exceptions, given at a conference on a similar topic. And given the prevailing theme of most of the papers presented in this issue, one might say (paraphrasing Wark) that from the beginning, spy fiction and, especially, spy cinema, has also enjoyed a special license to lie another day. Or, given the inflation adjusted net profit of the already released Bond movies of about $11 billion US dollars, one could even say that the misrepresentations of how intelligence is actually conducted have constituted a golden-lie.