The Spy Who Loved Me

I have a varied taste in books. Growing up, I was a fantasy and science fiction nerd. I needed the escapism of those books, while enjoying the moral and philosophical challenges presented by that genre of fiction. From my college years, I have various philosophical works, biographies, modern novels etc.

In the last decade, I’ve picked up reading stories of real-life spies.  Not semi-fictional works of authors like Le Carre; but non-fiction spy stories. The first was The Billion Dollar Spy, a story of a how the CIA turned a Russian engineer to learn how their military radars worked. I also really enjoyed ready about how the FBI and CIA found two of our worse double-agents: Aldritch Ames and Robert Hanssen.

The book I am currently reading is Shadow Cell.  It is written by a husband-wife team of former CIA employees. It tells the story of how they were given free reign on creating new methods of securing foreign agents. They decided to use what they learned from the US’s decades-long work to dismantle Al-Qaeda. This was all in the context of the CIA learning it had another mole (like Ames and Hanssen), feeding information to the country they were tasked to infiltrate.

It’s a light read, with a conversational tone. I’m enjoying reading it in the evenings with some decaf or on a weekend-morning with my normal cup of joe.