The Company: A Novel of the CIA

"The Company is the book that is most obviously based on real events. He effectively writes a history of the Cold War. The subtitle is ‘a novel of the CIA’, and it really is the story of the CIA and the Cold War. It’s got this epic quality. Coming back to this idea of using fiction as a means of understanding real life, you could read this as a history student and end up with a really good knowledge of all the big events: the Bay of Pigs, the 1956 uprising in Hungary etc. It’s also a mole-hunt novel, which is a classic espionage fiction trope. There’s an intriguing side to all this, because there’s long been an idea that, just as Britain faced its challenges with the Cambridge Five, most notably Kim Philby, the US would have had similar moles buried deep inside its establishment. The CIA did uncover Soviet moles, but the nature of them never matched the ideological recruits who spied for decades in Britain. Aldrich Ames was one famous case, but he was recruited by being paid a lot of money and spied for a fairly short period of time before he was discovered. So whether or not there was a long-buried mole in the CIA who was never discovered throughout the Cold War is one of those things people speculate about. This book constructs an extraordinary narrative, drawing in a huge number of real characters—Robert Kennedy Sr, James Jesus Angleton, etc. There are a lot of fascinating characters in the book. And, in fact, some of the characters who are fictitious—as in their names are not of real people—are still closely based on real CIA officers whose stories can be found online. So it’s a really great book in the sense of being one of these epic stories that tells you a lot, but it’s also a brilliant mole hunt story. The way the investigators eventually catch the mole has got so much ingenuity to it. It’s got that fascinating element that great mole hunt stories have. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is perhaps the classic, but this book nearly measures up to it in terms of the ingenuity and the fact that that as you go along, you sort of know, or think you know, who it might be, but it’s still shocking when you find out right at the end. No, he’s a well-known American novelist who has written a number of novels about that world. I imagine he’s got lots of connections and reach into it, but to my knowledge, he himself hasn’t served in the CIA."