Today marks the second time I've been burnt by the Central Intelligence Agency. I just finished reading retired CIA 'Pathfinder' Antonio J. Mendez's second book, Spy Dust, a skimpy sequel to his first skimpy nonfiction, The Master of Disguise, with a secondary, revolting 'love story' bolted on.
The ostenisible premise of these books is that Mendez, a decorated CIA agent, recounts his work in the technical side of the CIA. Starting out as a document forger, he moves into unspecified disguise 'technologies', and ultimately works closely with active field agents incorporating all these Q tools in various hair-raising operations.
In reality, the books strike me as a cheap PR exercise for the benefit of the CIA, lulling us into momentary amnesia about their recent massive failure with hoary victories of the Cold War.
Assuming that the guy is modest, and the tales aren't aggrandized, the books still fail in three principle ways:
They reveal nearly nothing
It's true, they don't. In fact, they seem to go beyond respecting security rules, they seem downright tight-assed about giving you any color.
In Spy Dust, a significant part of the plot revolves around the Soviet's KAPELLE device. It's described so obliquely that you can only assume it is some sort of 1980's ENIGMA machine. But that's got to be wrong, because when you get to the end of the book, the device is somehow used for one last intelligence coup that is entirely orthogonal to encrpytion/decryption.
Why do they have to be so secretive about the details? This was in the 1980s, the Soviets know we have the technology (we stole one from an embassy in (if I read between the lines correctly) Nepal), and it must be antiquated now, anyway.
Similarly, the better part of Master of Disguise involves (of course)disguise. But the information is so sparse that it's not even clear what the disguise is or how it works. Is it a rubber mask? makeup? a laser-cloaking device?
They might as well be talking about a transistor or a code formula or rocket fuel when the only description of the disguises are sentences like, "Swazie had been the first officer to deploy the highly secret disguise technique I had created after Mary Peters had been ambushed in Moscow. We had named that technique DAGGER."
That's all you're ever told. What is 'the technique' ? When disguise is a principal subject of the book, how is such scant detail going to work???
The answer is, 'it doesn't work.' It's not just the paucity of information that makes these books losers..
...all the lousy boilerplate in the world wouldn't fill in the massive vacuum of these books.
These stories should be compressed into a single shorter book, or even better, a long Atlantic-style article. But alas, they're not. Consequently you regularly find yourself running laps of grey, boring, rote prose. Their ghost-writer is so, so unimaginative. About the only color provided is regular, breezy mentions of discussions held while 'finishing his second scotch' or 'over pitchers of beer.' I'm not sleeping, Antonio, just resting my eyes... Wake me up when you get there.
The Love Story
I don't want to make this review a slanderous attack, but the combination of the picture of the husband/wife author team and the passages inside the novel is totally nauseating.
I leaned over, put my hand on his shoulder, and kissed him lightly on the lips.
There was a moment of recognition by us both.
"Thats not a kiss," he said, putting his glass down on the side of the tub. He pulled me towards him, through the steam and bubbles. "This is a kiss."
I am not going to quote the passages where the two consumate their love in the empty upper-deck of a 747 Megatop...
Conclusion
There are a few nuggets here and there, but far, far too few to pay any amount of money for these books. Either wait till they hit the 'remainders' stacks, or better, when you visit us, give them the twenty-five minutes they deserve and speed read for the highlights.