As surprises go, this was one for the diplomatic record books.
Since seizing control of Colonel Qaddafi's compound on Tuesday, rebels have made off with several of his prized possessions, including a gold-plated rifle and his golf cart, but perhaps nothing quite as personal as the deposed leader's diplomatic look book.
His name did not appear in the book for diplomatic reasons.
After the action on chrysotile, Jeffrey Simpson, a columnist for The Globe and Mail, wrote: "We mine asbestos, we ship it, we make money from it, and we'll use every diplomatic trick in the book to defend this odious practice.
While other countries, such as Britain, were raising public pressure on Kigali, the United States was using all the diplomatic contortions in the book to avoid public censure of Rwanda's support for M23.
This sense of responsibility eventually led Malcomson from the Times to a diplomatic job, and his book extends beyond those first weeks to a time when "the public memory of September 11" became "more useful to the powerful and increasingly useless to the rest of us".
Called "Orient Express" and published this fall in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry.
And at last fall's Frankfurt Book Fair, a diplomatic struggle emerged over the fair's invitation to two dissident Chinese writers to speak at its official program honoring China.
The final printed text was a credit to his diplomatic skills, just as the book was gloriously embellished by the drawings of Patience's then daughter-in-law Corinna Sargood.
Weeks before the Moscow operatives' recent arrests, Washington was already dusting off the playbook detailed in former New York Times diplomatic correspondent Craig R. Whitney's 1993 book, Spy Trader.
