Isiac grew up without a father. His grandfather began teaching Isiac to hunt and fish when he was only 6 years old. That helped Isiac develop his skills of observation. Isiac acquired the ability to notice even the slightest changes in his environment and to interpret their causes. During the Great Depression, Isiac used his hunting and fishing skills to feed his mother, sister, and brother. Isiac's experience with and participation in bootlegging taught him the importance of planning. His skills in developing plans and contingency plans helped Isiac to anticipate potential problems. Isiac learned that it is much easier to avoid potential problems than it is to try to solve them once they occur. By the time Isiac was 15 years old, he had a black belt in Judo and was multi-lingual: He was fluent in English, German, Japanese, and Polish. When WW2 began, Isiac was drafted into the Army. Although unintentional, Isiac's childhood experiences, along with the skills he learned in the Army, became an integral part in “The Making of a Spy”

General William Donovan was the head of America's first centralized intelligence organization, Office of Strategic Services (OSS). J Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, was jealous of the amount of power that Donovan held as director of the OSS and worried that Donovan would try to usurp the power that he exercised as director of the FBI. Hoover, knowing that President Truman didn't like Donovan, used that as an opportunity to lobby Truman to abolish the OSS. When WW2 ended, President Truman, following Hoover's advice, did just that, and disbanded the OSS.

At the end of the Chinese Civil War, after Chiang-Kai-Shek retreated to Taiwan, his nationalist troops, the Kuomintang (KMT), in Western China, retreated to Burma. The KMT took control of a large portion of eastern Burma and used it to launch attacks into western China. The western democracies considered the KMT to be a valuable tool in their effort to prevent the spread of Communism. The Burmese government had a different point of view. They considered the Kuomintang to be an invading army that posed a serious threat to the survival of Burma as an independent country.

General Donovan's nonexistent intelligence organization expands its intelligence gathering operation in India. By providing information to the Indian government, Donovan's agents are able to help the Indian government in its fight to prevent the spread of Communism in India. Donovan's agents also provided information that helped India deal with gang violence and organized crime. Donovan's agents also increased their intelligence gathering abilities in Burma and China, and provided support to West Berlin during the Russian blockade.