Agents of Innocence

"This book is really interesting. It came out in 1987, and the events it depicts are from the early 1980s when the civil war in Lebanon was at its peak. People will remember there were two huge bombings that targeted the US in Beirut, one a Marines barracks, and another the embassy. The US Embassy bombing is the dramatic event at the heart of this story. Now, the book, again, is a novel. It depicts a fictitious character, Tom Rogers, who is a CIA officer working in the Middle East . But it is well attested that the book is based on a real CIA officer who died in the embassy bombing in Lebanon. It is also well attested that this book is given to CIA recruits as a training read when they first join the organization, as a depiction of the work of a human intelligence officer, someone whose job it is to cultivate and recruit sources. It’s a brilliant book and it’s no coincidence that it’s had a kind of official endorsement from the CIA itself. It’s a book that is all about nuance. It’s all about whether someone is working for you and whether you can believe them. What is intelligence about? What does it mean to have a recruited source? What might any of that mean, and what, in the end, does it deliver? If people are interested in the world of spying in its more classic sense, I can’t think of a better book about human intelligence. There’s a bit of a theme here, isn’t there? I don’t know. It’s certainly a bit tragic. It’s a book about moral ambiguity and perhaps one can be depressed by that. But there aren’t many goodies and baddies in real life. We waste so much time in this search for the morally right or the morally wrong—but we all inhabit a world where everything is in these complex shades."