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Summary
Summary
By national best-selling author, Robert Littell, whose most recent novel The Company received rave reviews across the nation, The Once and Future Spy is finally back in print. This is Littell at the top of his form, constructing a tale of espionage and counterespionage revealing the dirty tricks and dangerous secrets about the subjects he knows intimately the CIA and American history, past and present. Littell proves beyond all doubt that he is a storyteller of inimitable caliber. As Stephen Coonts put it, "Eric Ambler invented the modern spy novel. Robert Littell perfected it. The Once and Future Spy is a classic spy story." At the center of Littell's plot is an elite plan, so secret and so dangerous that its existence is known only to a tiny group of specialists within CIA headquarters. There is virtually no paper trail but, somehow, the plan has sprung a leak. The plotters must urgently trace it or face deadly consequences. Meanwhile, at work elsewhere on another highly sensitive project for "the Company" is an operative known as "the Weeder" a man obsessed with American history and one of its heroes. When the Weeder's and Washington's clandestine worlds collide, the present faces the past and disturbing moral choices are weighed against a shining patriotic dream. What is the truth? Whose truth should be believed?
Author Notes
Robert Littell is the author of more than a dozen other highly acclaimed novels, many about the Cold War and the Soviet Union, including his masterwork, the New York Times bestseller The Company , and the Los Angeles Times Book Award winner for Best Mystery/Thriller, Legends . An American born in Brooklyn, Littell now lives in France.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Two more of Robert Littell's vintage spy novels are back in print. Set soon after the Cuban missile crisis, Littell's 1986 novel The Sisters has CIA operatives Francis and Carroll (affectionately known to their colleagues as "the sisters of Night and Death") manipulating the KGB's smartest agents as if they're so many puppets. They get "the Potter," former head of the KGB's sleeper agent school, to betray his best protg, "the Sleeper," sending the Potter on a cross-continent trek to rescue his student with the help of the Sleeper's ex-lover, a mortuary hair stylist. In The Once and Future Spy, originally published in 1990, the CIA plans to discredit the Ayatollah Khomeini in the early 1980s by blowing up the University of Tehran. The mission is threatened when a rogue operative, a proto-computer hacker obsessed with the Revolutionary War traitor Nathan Hale, gets wind of it. These will come as a boon to Littell's fans. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A CIA analyst--collaterally descended from Nathan Hale--does battle with an Iranamok-style governmental cabal planning to vaporize a good-sized chunk of Tehran. Silas Sibley's vocation is intelligence-gathering. He runs an experimental CIA computer capable of passively bugging countless telephones, as well as their surrounding offices, and electronically analyzing the information. Sibley's avocation is history. He's working on a startling analysis of his very granduncle's decision to spy for his country. Sibley's electronic ear is supposed to be picking up only Soviet chatter, but he's been unable to resist tuning in on his loathsome CIA training classmate, a slimeball named Wanamaker--which is how he overhears Wanamaker's plans to smuggle enough uranium into Iran to result in a very convenient atomic blast. A horrified Sibley thinks his beloved CIA is behind the scheme, but it's actually a renegade operation run by someone awfully close to the President. Sibley's anonymous threats to expose the plot lead Wanamaker to hire Admiral Toothacher, a retired spymaster, to ""walk back the cat""--spy talk meaning to discover the leak and plug it. When the Admiral gets too close, Sibley flees his New York hideaway and heads for New England--where he combines scholarly research with his private war and finds that his situation has become eerily like that of Nathan Hale. Littell (The Revolutionist, 1988, etc.) mixes pieces of the Hale biography with the brainy and amusing present-day spychase, but the distraction is not unpleasant. The eventual fusion is, however, a bit baffling. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Littell is still hot with the success of his recent title The Company, but this espionage novel dates back to 1990. It tells the story of a deeply hidden group within the CIA, whose secret plans suddenly aren't so secret. The book also has a historical tack as one of the operatives follows an obsession with a figure from American history. If fans of The Company ask for another title, recommend this. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.