RIP: Peter Earnest

Peter Earnest, a veteran of the CIA’s Cold War clandestine operations who ran agents in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, then helped promote and preserve the history of espionage while serving as the founding executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, died Feb. 13 at a hospital in Arlington, Va. He was 88...

Mr. Earnest acknowledged that his personality sometimes made it difficult to spend years working undercover. “It’s hard when you’re an open person by nature,” he told Washingtonian magazine in 2013. “In some cases, people say, ‘You don’t seem like a spy.’

“The best spies don’t seem like spies.” 

In a video interview for the Spy Museum, Mr. Earnest described what he called “my Bond moment” at the CIA, in which he slipped out of a black-tie reception at the home of an asset and bugged the person’s office. Lying on his back, with a handkerchief positioned on his chest to catch the shavings, he drilled small holes in the bottom of the target’s desk and installed a recording device. more