RaveWashington PostOn Sept. 25, 1978, an unmanned sailboat ran aground on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay...The cabin was in disarray, and papers marked \'Top Secret\' were found, along with a phone directory filled with 351-prefix numbers, a classified CIA exchange...As veteran investigative reporter Howard Blum tells it in his intriguing new book, The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal, things then moved quickly...The boat’s owner turned out to be John Arthur Paisley, later described by the agency as a \'low-level analyst\'...A week later a corpse was discovered floating in the bay, identified by the chief medical examiner as Paisley...Cause of death: suicide...Never mind that the examiner’s office did not receive the corpse until the day after his report...the real pleasure of this book is not the solution but the puzzle...By going back and forth in time, Blum cleverly makes his pieces part of agency folklore, terrific stories in their own right...This is the Cold War at high noon, missiles loaded, when spies were the front-line troops...If you have even a passing interest in the period, the book will be catnip...It’s all here: the dead drops, the surveillance, the honey traps, the disillusioned Joes, the office politics, the martinis...The period details are so atmospheric and rich that it would be no surprise to see Kim Philby make a guest appearance.
John Pomfret
RaveThe Washington PostThe exfiltration [from Baghdad], complete with disguises (as Polish engineers), false passports and cartons of Marlboros to ease their way through roadblocks, is the dramatic centerpiece of From Warsaw With Love, and author John Pomfret makes the most of it ... Pomfret’s book is eye-opening in the best sense. We learn things we didn’t know. Pomfret, a former Beijing bureau chief of The Washington Post and the author of a history of the U.S.-China relationship, talked to a lot of people who had stories to tell — and, this being the secret world, they’re often colorful ... Pomfret is always alert to the human factor, the personal quirks of the individuals who made this special relationship happen ... As Polish politician Radoslaw Sikorski said, being allied with the United States is like marrying a hippo. At first, it’s warm and cuddly. Then the hippo turns, crushes you and doesn’t even notice. The most valuable thing about this informative book is that it might make the hippo take notice.
Adam Sisman
PositiveThe New York Times“The biography one imagines le Carré wanted: admiring without being toadying, detailed without being overstuffed, highly readable and, above all, knowledgeable about the work.”
