Former Director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service, a native of this area, is the author of a book on SPYCRAFT.

Robert Wallace, former director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service in Washington D.C. was in Lincoln Saturday for a book signing session for his new book, “SPYCRAFT.”

A native Kansan, Wallace was born and raised in Barnard, located just over the line into Lincoln County south of Beloit.

A steady line of people filed into Lincoln’s Village Lines Book Store throughout the morning and kept the author busy signing books and demonstrating technical devices used in the secret world of the CIA.

The book teams former director Robert Wallace and internationally renowned intelligence historian H. Keith Melton, as they come together to produce an unprecedented history of the CIA’s most secretive operations and the devices that made them possible. It tells the story of the critical roll the spy-techs in Technical Service played behind the scenes from Communism to Al-Qaeda and the terrorism of today.

Against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions, including the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the current War on Terror, SPYCRAFT, show how the CIA continues to carry out its missions deploying agents equipped with amazingly inventive tools invented by the spy-techs.

For anyone who enjoys watching James Bond movies and is familiar with “Q,” the intelligence techs who keep Bond equipped with hidden devices, the CIA’s Office of Technical Service, (OTS) is the “Q” of the real world.

Wallace graduated from Barnard High School, as well as, the University of Kansas, before serving in the U.S. Army as a Ranger in the Company E, 75th Infantry Division during the Vietnam War.

After discharge in May 1970, he obtained employment with the Central Intelligence Agency. In Washington, D.C. In 2001, he received a 30-year service pin. Wallace is now retired and lives in Virginia.

Wallace plans to be back in this area around Christmas time, when he will hold a book signing session at the Beloit Typewriter Exchange.