Into the espionage fray jumps former Newsweek journalist Robert
Littell, who has written earlier spy thrillers, though never on
this scale. THE COMPANY is his bid for LeCarre glory, a long
multigenerational epic of the CIA from its inception at World War
II's end to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early
1990s. Littell introduces us to a bevy of fictional cold
warriors, scheming, unflappable patriots who operated in Berlin
and Vienna during the uneasy postwar occupation. These
stalwarts (all men of course, given the times) move with ease from
the ashes of Germany to the Bay of Pigs and the Soviet invasion of
Hungary, to Vietnam and Afghanistan and any other global hot spot
that threatens America's perceived interests. These
fictional characters are the anonymous pawns in the grand chess
game being played by yet another set of characters, real life
personages like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, William Colby and
JFK, Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Putin, who guide the intelligence
efforts of their respective countries. The frontline
operatives exhibit bravery and ingenuity, yet nothing seems to
work out quite as they had planned.
This is the point at which a novel can provide a more plausible history than the sketchy official record affords. Two real life figures who worked in the shadows of intelligence greatly influenced the course of Cold War history, but their feats will always remain official secrets, their names never intended to become familiar to the public. Englishman Kim Philby and American James Jesus Angleton were close friends after World War II and headed up their respective country's counter-intelligence services. Philby was covertly an agent of the Soviet Union during his time in MI-6, placed in a perfect position to alert the Soviets to the West's plans. His friend Angleton never suspected this until Philby's world started falling apart, and Angleton became persuaded from hints that Philby had dropped that the American CIA had been penetrated by infiltrating "moles." Angleton was tasked with smoking out any moles within the agency, and as such, had extraordinary freedom from supervision, because one never knew which supervisor might become a suspect. As internal affairs cop, Angleton could make no real friends nor possess an institutional history. Angleton's sense of betrayal when Philby's perfidy became known twisted him into a delusional paranoiac of increasing instability and drove him to destroy the careers of some of the most dedicated operatives the CIA had ever developed.
Angleton became a shadow Joe McCarthy, stalking communists long
after the senator from Wisconsin had been exposed by the glare of
public scrutiny. His dedication (some would say paranoid
obsession) destroyed the lives of innocent agents and also exposed
shocking intelligence vulnerabilities, all depicted in the fates
of the various fictional characters that THE COMPANY has carried
from 1945 into the present. A book I had reviewed earlier in
this series (THE SECRET
HISTORY OF THE CIA by Joseph Trento) attempts to tell this
same story as a nonfiction narrative, but is reduced to
speculation on many key points, as CIA secrecy still reigns.
By using its fictional characters wisely, THE COMPANY completes
the picture that THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA was trying to
describe. It also depicts an era of American
covert action that has pretty well been transformed by the crush
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzerseltzer@seltzerbooks.com
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