Mulholland’s classified manuals were supposed to have been destroyed in 1973, but a copy was discovered in 2007 among declassified CIA archives by intelligence historian H. Keith Melton and retired CIA officer Robert Wallace, who wrote the historical overview for the book.

Rather than a dashing, James Bond-type figure, Mulholland described the ideal agent as anonymous, bland, and “so normal in manner, and his actions so natural, that nothing about him excites suspicion.”