With My Little Eye



Culture Vulture?

So, fiendishly clever Zionist Machiavellian conspiracy weirdness or overcooked paranoia? One way to judge is to try something radical like examining the facts:-

(a) the Israeli secret service Mossad are a ruthlessly effective intelligence outfit whose covert methods embrace everything from the beyond the pale to the frankly bizarre - tennis clad  assassins anyone?

(b) a  vulture, like the one pictured, has been arrested in Saudi Arabia after landing in  a rural part of the country complete with a leg bracelet identifying it as the 'property of the University of Tel Aviv' and a transmitting device allowing the creature's movements to be tracked.

(c) a spokesperson for Tel Aviv University revealed that the vulture was part of a study of avian movements and breeding patterns in the region.

(d) Saudi media outlets denounced the vulture as a spy. After all a pattern was emerging, recently two other birds - another vulture and a pelican - with similar Tel Aviv University number plates had been similarly accussed after nosing around in Sudan.

(e) Mossad doesn't generally identify its actual operatives when on active service such as the bomb attacks on two Iranian nuclear scientists last month which left one dead and the other seriously injured after passing motor cyclists slapped adhesive explosives onto their cars.

All in all it goes to show that paranoia doesn't mean that all too real spooks aren't out to get you. With such a disturbing thought ringing in our minds we offer a spy theme to today's quiz.   

Spies Quiz

1 What nationality was Mata Hari, executed by the French authorities in 1917 following probably false accusations of spying for Germany during the First World War? 

2 Which author created George Smiley, the fictional British spy who appeared in several espionage themed bestsellers, was famously played by Sir Alec Guinness in a number of TV adaptations of the books and is set to be brought to life by Gary Oldman in a forthcoming film version of the novel 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' due for release next year?

3 Agents of which country's secret police are generally believed to have murdered the writer and dissident Georgi Markov by injecting him with the poison ricin, administered from the point of an umbrella, as he walked across Waterloo Bridge in London in 1978?

4 What is the title of the German language Oscar winning film which traces the growing disillusionment of a Stasi officer conducting surveillance on his fellow citizens in cold war era East Berlin?

5 What was the surname of the American married couple who were executed in the USA in 1953 after being convicted of passing secrets concerning the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union?

Answers to our spy themed quiz will be published along with tomorrow's quiz questions.
Mountains Quiz Answers
The answers to the questions in our mountain themed quiz were:-
1 Mount Fuji.
2 Turkey.
3 Mount Olympus.
4 '127 Hours'.
5 Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.