Littell, a former NEWSWEEK writer who has been churning out spy novels for the past three decades, has hatched his most ambitious work yet, spanning the entire history of the cold war. As one of his characters explains, the split between the “two mentalities” of the CIA–the company of the title–dominates that history. “There are those who think we’ve been put on earth to steal the other side’s secrets and then analyze the secrets we steal,” he says. “Then there are others who want this organization to impact events, as opposed to predict them–rig elections, sap morale, promote rebellions, bribe officials… eventually eliminate political figures who frustrate us.”
Among the mix of fictional and real characters in this sprawling drama, Littell focuses on the risk takers. Harvey Torriti, known as the Sorcerer, learned his tricks during World War II when he lined up the mafiosi on the side of the invading Allies, and continues to play hard, rough and dirty in Berlin, Cuba and other hot spots. Recruited fresh from Yale, his apprentice, Jack McAuliffe, carries on his legacy. Jack’s three friends from college also go straight into the spy business. The trajectories of their careers are the vehicle that allows Littell to cover so much ground and intrigue, so many blunders and disasters–along with a few shining moments.
One of the Yalies is a Russian who becomes a KGB undercover agent in the United States. His mission: to run a mole, a company insider who betrays top-secret CIA operations with ruthless efficiency. That means relaying Moscow’s instructions to the American and then getting his information out. The reader knows the Russian’s identity, but throughout the book is kept guessing about who the mole is. The prime suspect surfaces. Is he or isn’t he?
Enter James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s infamous real-life mole-hunter. There’s a morbid fascination in watching his bosom-buddy relationship with another real-life figure, Kim Philby, whom he trusts to the point of compromising operation after operation in the early days of the cold war. A Russian tries to defect in Berlin and is made to disappear before he has the chance. The CIA recklessly drops Albanians, Ukrainians and other commandos behind the Iron Curtain hoping to launch national uprisings–only to have them caught and immediately executed. When Philby flees to Moscow to elude arrest, Angleton vows never to be suckered again–and launches a campaign against suspected moles that ruins the careers of countless loyal operatives.
But even paranoid spies have real enemies, and Angleton is soon in a frantic search for the American mole who continues to compromise both the dumb and smart ops after Philby is gone. In the most gut-wrenching section of the book, Littell retells the story of the Hungarian Revolution–not just for its pathos but also for a counterintuitive twist. While Washington’s rhetoric encourages the Hungarians to launch their doomed revolt, a courageous CIA agent seeks to warn them not to count on Western help. With no success. The mole passes on the same information to Nikita Khrushchev, who then feels free to mercilessly crush the rebels.
Littell is great about nailing the details that make his stories convincing. The Russian Yalie turned KGB agent gives his nationality away when he goes out the door, returns because he forgot something and looks in the mirror before leaving again–for good luck, as even educated Russians have been taught by their grandmothers to do. He’s less convincing when he takes presidents like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan and transforms them into caricatures–the former because of his mob associations, and the latter because of his supposed cluelessness. (Littell lives in France, which may explain his embrace of the Reagan dimwit theory.)
And what does he conclude about the spy business as he takes us through the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan, from the rise of communism to its last gasp with the aborted putsch in August 1991? This is an era when the KGB won many of its battles, but the Soviet Union still lost the cold war. After a lifetime of downing cheap whisky, Torriti, the Sorcerer, sums it up: “Well, what the hell–you win some, you lose some, in the end it pretty much evened out.” Not exactly what you’d call a satisfying verdict of history. But it may be more accurate–and it certainly makes for a far more engrossing read–than all the scholarly treatises on the subject put together.
