Richard Conniff discusses the link between naturalists and spies:
Spies have at times certainly pretended to be naturalists. The most public of them was Sir Robert Baden Powell, better known as founder of the Boy Scouts. As a British secret agent, he thought it clever to pose as “one of the exceedingly stupid Englishmen who wandered about foreign countries sketching cathedrals, or catching butterflies.” His detailed maps of enemy fortifications were concealed within the natural patterns of butterfly wings and tree leaves, and he sometimes showed off these sketches to locals, secure in the sad knowledge that they “did not know one butterfly from another — any more than I do.”
Rival nations and their spies have also frequently targeted natural history treasures. Persian monks visiting China in 552 A.D., for instance, brought back silkworm eggs concealed in a hollow cane. This pioneering act of industrial espionage established the silk trade in the Mediterranean and broke a longstanding Chinese monopoly. That kind of resource grab got repeated on the grand scale during the colonial era, for products from quinine to rubber, one reason international rules on collecting expeditions are now so strict.
Naturalists, or people with a naturalist avocation, have at times also had careers as spies. Maxwell Knight, the British counterintelligence spymaster (and one of the models for James Bond’s boss M), actually worked on the side as a BBC natural history presenter and author. In the late 1950s, he hired a young man named David Cornwell to provide bird illustrations for one of his books, leading Cornwell into a stint as an MI5 intelligence officer in Germany — and later to a career as the novelist John Le Carré. Likewise, the novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen worked briefly for the Central Intelligence Agency after graduating from Yale.