The titular spook from Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, is a double agent. The novel’s protagonist, Dan Freeman, is the first Black officer in the history of the CIA, and to make up for being a token agent of the state, he takes his newly acquired intel and tactical skills to his community in Chicago to train up its working-class Black youth as freedom fighters. The 1973* film adaptation, directed by Ivan Dixon, was subsequently yanked from theaters for its radical content — or, in the words of cinema scholar Samantha N. Sheppard, for the way it “dramatizes, as revolutionary, the theme of African American freedom and equality being gained through a political consciousness of armed resistance.”