Over the last 15 years, his Manhattan company, StreeTVision, has provided equipment and services for undercover investigations by CBS's "60 Minutes" and "48 Hours," NBC's "Dateline," ABC's "20/20," and public television's "Frontline" shows, among others.
"Issa" is really Christian Mazzari, an Italian citizen fluent in Tunisian Arabic who is recruited by the Italian secret service to go undercover as a Tunisian immigrant and infiltrate a possible terrorist cell.
In 1995, Mr. Donovan went to a service for an undercover narcotics detective killed in the line of duty, and there met Guy V. Molinari, the powerhouse of Staten Island politics.
Cars that might have been used in the commission of crimes are sometimes pressed into service as undercover vehicles, he said.
Another service told an undercover researcher: "We can't be seen to be telling you that you can hand it in because obviously that's not allowed … I will let you take from that what you will".
Payola has been around since the invention of money; it will always be around, because there will always be a new crop of alert characters willing to take money for undercover service.
Of the changes so far, many are likely to go unnoticed by travelers; for example, various federal law enforcement officers will be pressed into undercover service as air marshals.
McGoohan played a British spy who resigns in disgust from undercover service, is kidnapped by his own handlers and held at a peculiar seaside resort called the Village, from which he constantly tries to escape.
Just two novels in translation make the shortlist for this year's Impac: Israeli author Yishai Sarid's Limassol, in which an Israeli secret service agent goes undercover as an aspiring novelist targeting a Palestinian poet's terrorist son, and acclaimed Brazilian writer Cristovão Tezza's The Eternal Son, an autobiographical novel about a father whose son is born with Down's syndrome.
Decay-Hetu explained: "A crypto-market for illegal migrants and smugglers would have to somehow vet the people looking to use the service so that no undercover agent is sent as a fake illegal migrant.
Presley even went so far as to offer his services as an undercover agent to the FBI, though J Edgar Hoover never took him up on it.
