Envoy Paperback – February 5, 2009

The author, Edward Wilson, has a unique background. A decorated special forces officer in Vietnam, he became a permanent expatriate after he left the army and lost his US citizenship in 1986. He is now a British resident.Interestingly, the main character's father, was always losing his job, described as going slightly batty, after doing something honorable and honest, but unwise politically. Certainly, Kit, the diplomat who is moved into the OSS after pissing off Joseph Kennedy, has a similar streak, and one wonders what might be the relationship between those activities and Wilson's own expatriation.Wilson is the ultimate cynic. At one point Kit describes espionage as a "sick place: a wilderness of mirrors inhabited by haunted minds that see only images and lies. The more plausible a truth the more cunning the deception."There are numerous caustic portraits of real individuals. In one piece the Dulles brothers, Foster and Allen are making fun of Edens, the Prime Minister. Kit notes that neither of the brothers had ever heard a shot fired in anger while Edens had lost two brothers and a son in the wars and won the Military Cross in 1916. They scorned his foreign policy of diplomacy and discussion while neither spoke a foreign language. Edens was fluent in German, Persian, and French and "could tell stories and tell proverbs in Arabic," not to mention converse in Russian.Kit's task is to foment dissension between the British and Russians and to subvert Eden's foreign policy. The U.S. wants to force Britain to accept hydrogen bombs on their soil. The U.S. also realizes that Britain might be the first to be vaporized in any attack. Kit is also haunted by his lust for his cousin, Jennifer, whose husband works for Britain's own bomb project and Kit wants Jennifer to spy on him. Soon things begin to spiral out-of-control as the labyrinth of lies, deception and blackmail become overwhelming. I won't spoil things by even hinting at more.Some great lines: ""Sorry," [he said] That's the thing about being born a Catholic: you always feel guilty even if it isn't your fault. You can stop believing--it's all infantile nonsense after all--but you can't stop the guilt.." There's a great scene when the Dulles brothers are trying to pry some gossip out of Kit. He tells them about this great looking woman he saw at a Washington party only to realize when he got closer and saw the hint of stubble that it was J. Edgar Hoover. Kit left the party and "heard that the party turned pretty raunchy and that the blond boys gave Hoover a hand job -- but I can't confirm that." Later that night Kit broke into the embassy's taping room and erased the tape of that portion of his conversation with the Dulles boys. Kit notes late that Foster Dulles "goes about international diplomacy with all the grace of a trained chimpanzee putting out a grass fire with a wet sack."Or this line that sums up the book. Kit is describing a painting he likes: "the beautiful eighteenth-century house was set in an early American Arcadia. The house lies on a slight rise above the Potomac River; the thickly wooded banks are turning autumnal; there are dogs and horse-drawn carriages in the foreground, boats with sails in the background. The house was demolished in 1949 to build a four-lane highway."An excellent read. I'm very surprised Wilson hasn't received more recognition. The book has a verisimilitude about it that's quite refreshing, if not totally depressing. Actual events and people are woven into the story. The author insists that even though real people and events are mentioned, the story is fiction. One event, for example, the crash of a B-47 into a storage shed housing nuclear weapons in 1956 theoretically had the potential to wipe out much of England. All the reports I read of it assured the reader there was no chance of a nuclear explosion; then again, given the prevarication and mendacity of everyone in this book, one has to wonder.....

I’m ambivalent about this book. I like its scene setting in the 1950s Cold War, and the politics swirling around the hydrogen bomb’s development. Wilson does a nice writing job on it, evoking the landscape of Suffolk and East Anglia.I like less its relentless America-bashing. Wilson’s Kit Fournier is a high-ranking CIA agent - chief of station at the US embassy in London - but his character isn’t in keeping with what an American spook of that period was likely to have been. It’s more the character of a diffident, conflicted, peace-loving, ban-the-bomb European socialist.Wilson puts in Fournier’s mind every anti-American thought imaginable, some unlikely not only for a CIA agent of that period but for a Communist. He feels guilty that his family fortune traces back to slavery and doesn’t want to keep it? He’s not a Brandeis graduate of 2016 marinating in white-privilege guilt, he’s a CIA agent of 1956. They hadn’t invented the phrase yet.Wilson’s writing seems a cry from the British heart - that as Britain loses its empire postwar, it deeply resents America’s growing dominance not only in the world but over Britain. Some Brits seem to need to struggle more against the US than against the USSR.Fournier spends most of his time spying, not on the Russians, but on the British. The latter are working to get the H-bomb, and the US wants to block them, to keep Britain firmly dependent upon the US. Fournier has back-channel contact with the KGB’s London chief as he maneuvers, not against the KGB but against our closest ally.The 1950s CIA chief, Allen Dulles, is portrayed as a skirt-chaser with a clubfoot, blithely playing intelligence games whose human consequences he doesn’t appreciate or care about. His brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, is portrayed as a humorless, moralizing prig with bad breath. Bad breath? You can tell Wilson is really gunning for him. J. Edgar Hoover is a paranoid transvestite.Wilson gets nasty about the Kennedys. Near the outset, Fournier’s initial diplomatic career is wrecked because he happens to be the local man on the scene when Kathleen Kennedy’s plane crashes in France in the late 1940s. His having seen both her body and her wardrobe - sexy lingerie as the widowed Lady Hartington headed off for a fling with a married man on the Riviera - makes him PNG with the powerful Joe Kennedy. He’s transferred over to the CIA side and retrained. There’s a slap at JFK for having made a wrong turn, causing his PT boat’s famous collision and sinking.There's even a slap at American soldiers in general - the places that they allegedly "cut and run". I suppose soldiers of any country have had inglorious moments, but they didn't cut and run at Bastogne, at Normandy, at Iwo Jima or Okinawa, as they, among other things, pulled British chestnuts out of the fire. This was just sour grapes of the worst sort.The US is portrayed as a scary, bumbling, Curtis-Lemay-influenced menace, hurtling the world toward nuclear war, while the subtler, smarter Brits and Russians roll their eyeballs and try to keep them from succeeding.Newsflash to Wilson: Neither nuclear war nor major conventional war broke out under Eisenhower and the Dulleses. They must have been doing something right.(There are allusions to Graham Greene’s Saigon-located “The Quiet American” here, in which a British agent ultimately fingers a CIA agent for assassination by the VC because he was such a naive and dangerous fool.)You won’t find much negative about the Russians, barely emerged from the Stalin era. And if you were born yesterday, you might be convinced by Wilson that really, the Communists were just struggling for peace and a better world, and to try to keep the capitalist war-mongers from destroying it, as soulful KGB agents read Pushkin. (When not being shipped back to the Motherland to be shot for having screwed up.)Fournier becomes increasingly unmoored as the book goes on. He’s disillusioned by his work, and by the cause and country he serves. He’s killed and betrayed people. His only lodestar is his incestuous and unrequited love for his cousin Jennifer, now married to a British nuclear scientist, and therein begins the plot. Because while he’s in love with her, he also needs to turn her against her own husband, to spy upon him for Fournier.There are twists and turns right down to the last page. I’m not sure I buy it. No spoilers here, but the games-within-games become so complex you wonder whether, reasonably, anything like this could ever happen - whether balls of this sort could be kept in the air so long. This is an occupational hazard for spy novels, of course; Wilson isn’t the only author ever guilty of blinding his readers in halls of mirrors. But I found myself pondering whether the various double and triple crosses revealed at the end, all squared with the action we saw.Still, it’s hard not to like books of this flavor - the era, the background detail, the ambience, the moral ambivalence. It continues in the tradition of Le Carre, Deighton, Greene, Littell and other top spy writers. The background of narrowly avoided or hushed up nuclear accidents is sobering.

While the development of the history of this period is effective, the main character, a senior CIA official posted in the US Embassy in London, is an unlikely spy. While it is interesting to know that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suffered from terminally bad breath, other aspect of the story are little more than anti-American propaganda. The main theme of the story is that the United States was guilty of deceptions, murders, and other despicable activities. By contrast, the Soviets are presented as honorable, high-minded people motivated by a desire to improve the world. The story accelerated between compelling adventures and dreary passages in which the CIA officer feels sorry for himself. I thought this would be a good series but changed my mind when I was about half way through the book.

The author mesmerized me from the opening paragraph. The story had everything I loved from intrigue, suspense, utter disbelief and tragic romance to coincidence, collusion and collaboration. It settles at the completion, in my mind, as comprehensible emotive reality in the lives of any one of us daring to make choices, be damned of the consequences- because our heart or gut pushes, or pulls, or drags us, side-kicking with intelligible doubt, but we go then with it regardless and notwithstanding!

A surprising plot, interesting, catching, fun to read...

I read it

Spies, and more Spies. This is a cleverly written book. One almost forgets it is a story, rather than true history. The events and covert operations are brilliantly written. If you enjoy a good thriller, a good spymaster story, then this is one not to miss.

This book was for me like finding a hidden gem; despite being a longstanding fan of espionage books, I did not know the author and I stepped into his book by chance. And I liked it a lot: I thought this was a rather atypical spy book, I noticed some reviews suggesting it is close to Le Carré style, maybe as a way to distinguish it from the all-action spy stories; in reality, I found this novel quite original and different from both styles, a novel where the worlds of policy making, foreign policy, diplomacy and intelligence are connected in a seamless way; so it is more multidimensional than most of the spy books where espionage constitutes the one and only angle of the story, and the hero - Kit - is a more complex and multifaceted character than a classic spy.This is a cold war spy story, yet again it stays away from the mould of the typical set up (Berlin, the iron curtain, the wall, etc); it all takes place in England, mainly in London and in Suffolk, and Washington. This might take away some adrenaline, but the plot is such a subtle and elegant game that it keeps the reading quite engaging.Another distinctive point is the complex and intriguing way the author describes the anglo-american relationships in the 50's across all the above mentione dimensions (political, diplomatic, intelligence); the tension between the supposed allies almost prevails over the one with the eternal and classic enemy, the Russians, which remains almost in the background. By the way, the way the author depicts some cultural, linguistic and behavioural "peculiarities" of the British and American societies is hilarious at times, or bitter otherwise - never stereotyped.There is an underlying moralistic worldview disseminated along the story by its hero, Kit, culminating in a deep existentialist crisis leading him to self-annihilation, but this aspect never gets sticky so it is not too disturbing.The pace of the book is slow and steady, it is well written and very well documented; in this, it does remind the early Le Carré and Deighton. Wilson, though succeeds in putting up a pretty fascinating and sophisticated story with its own specificity and distinctiveness.