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tablets made good candidates as concealment hosts because they were commonly carried and could be stored in a medicine cabinet at the agent’s home without attracting attention; when dissolved in water the pills created the ink. The agent dipped a sharpened wooden stylus or toothpick into the liquid and wrote on bond paper he had prepared by rubbing with a soft cloth in all four directions. Agents were instructed to write on paper placed on glass to prevent indentations and minimize the disturbance to the fibers in the paper. After the letter had been composed and the ink dried, the agent would again rub the paper in all four directions to eliminate any traces of the message in the paper’s fibers. Later the letter would be steamed and placed inside the pages of a thick book to dry.22 Agents would prepare a cover letter over the secret writing for mailing to an accommodation address outside of their home country.23

While it was most often used as an “agent-send” system, in some instances agents also received instructions by secret writing. To eliminate the complexity of developing the writing and minimize the amount of potentially incriminating reagents in an agent’s possession, OTS often recommended the “scorch method.” Polish military officer Ryszard Kuklinski received innocuous letters that contained hidden messages that became legible only when they were scorched with a household iron.24 With thousands of potential combinations of inks and reagents to select from, OTS produced hundreds of such systems. In an emergency, however, diluted blood, semen, and even plain water could be used as an invisible ink.25

Two weaknesses of wet systems were the requirement for the agent to possess the special ink and the near impossibility of removing all traces of damage to the paper’s fibers. Even if the secret ink was not detected, under close scrutiny the damage to the fibers of the paper sometimes became noticeable.

Dry systems began appearing in the late 1950s as a variation of carbon typing paper. Chemists impregnated special papers with small amounts of chemicals and bound them into common items like writing journals, endpapers of books, or the last few pages of notepaper in a checkbook. The agent would sandwich three pieces of bond paper on top of a piece of glass. The top and bottom papers were blank while the middle page was the special “carbon paper.” The agent wrote the operational message on the top page and the secret chemicals were transferred onto the bottom page. These dry systems quickly became the preferred method of secret writing in the 1960s.

Former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson described a modern dry system developed by the British service:

Using the Pentel Rollerball pen provided by Technical and Operations Support, Secret Writing, [I] wrote up the intelligence in block capitals in the standard format of a CX [raw intelligence] report. . . . It all fitted onto one page of A4 paper from my pad of water-soluble paper. Putting the sheet faceup on the bedside locker, I laid a sheet of ordinary A4 paper over it, then on top of both of them. . . . Five minutes was enough for the imprint transfer to the ordinary A4. The sheet of water-soluble paper went into the toilet bowl, and in seconds, all that was left was a translucent scum on the surface of the water that I quickly flushed away. Back in the bedroom, I took the sheet of A4, folded it into a brown manila envelope, and taped it into the inside of a copy of the Gazzetta dello Sport.26

The simple but effective system eliminated the concern of the officer being detected with spy gear since the Pentel Rollerball was commercially available and uncompromising.27 The technique allowed the agent to see what he was writing before making the offset copy. Tomlinson observed that “off-setis now used routinely by MI6 officers in the field for writing up intelligence notes after debriefing agents, and is also issued to a few highly trustworthy agents, but is considered too secret to be shared with the liaison services such as the CIA.”28

Tomlinson