They tend to think of the feasibility studies drawn up by Matsushita as being a good deal more solid than just a best guess about an operation's chances of success.

ECONOMIST: Matsushita??s Chinese burn

That's the conundrum posed by this weekend's sting operation in which the News of the World, Britain's best-selling Sunday tabloid, set up a group of people who, it says, wanted to buy bomb-making material on behalf of a Saudi backer.

ECONOMIST: Red mercury

And of course there was "Argo, " the year's best picture winner, which followed a secret CIA operation to rescue six American diplomats during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980.

CNN: Oscars 2013: Hollywood gets political