Two examples of dirty tricks targeting foreign powers in the 21st and 17th centuries.
“The US government is investigating a series of health incidents in the Austrian capital Vienna involving its diplomats and other administration staff. More than 20 officials have reported symptoms similar to Havana Syndrome – a mystery brain illness – since President Joe Biden took office in January. The syndrome is unexplained, but US scientists say it is most probably caused by directed microwave radiation.” (BBC News)
”To return to the matter of spectacles – Harcourt-Smith in his study of Alberoni paints a fascinating picture of the Spanish aristocrat of the seventeenth century. Spectacles then connoted wisdom, gravity, superior rank. … the higher the rank, the greater the size of these glasses – with a grandee they were worn large as tea-cups. And it is to be learned from the same pages that once the Spanish State Council was pleased to receive a presentation of exquisite spectacles from the Venetian Government: but the sinister Venetians had instructed the makers in Murano to insert into the frames not optical lenses but cruel burning glasses of the most powerful manufacture.” (Pleasures Strange and Simple, William Sansom)
The quotation in First Catch Your Hare is also from Pleasures Strange and Simple, published in 1953 by The Hogarth Press.