“A Perfect Spy
By John le Carre (1986)
1. David Cornwell, who took the pen name John le Carre, worked for two British intelligence agencies -- MI5 (the domestic service) and MI6 (foreign affairs) -- between 1958 and 1964, before turning to writing full time. He had published several novels, including "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," by 1975, when his father, Ronnie Cornwell, died. Ronnie, a small-bore yet flashy fraudster who spent time in prison, becomes, in "A Perfect Spy," Rick Pym -- "a total crook. A con artist." Rick's son, Magnus, is an MI6 officer who has been passing the "crown jewels" of British state secrets to the Czechoslovakians. Shortly after Rick's funeral, Magnus -- now in his 50s and about to be exposed as a double agent -- holes up in a forlorn English seaside resort. He reflects on a life into which his father has intermittently appeared, each time with an outlandish scam.
The duplicitous parent has created a shape-shifting son, enabling Magnus to become the perfect spy. "So many lonely journeys and aimless walks in foreign cities led me here," Magnus reflects, "so much fallow, solitary time."
The Human Factor
By Graham Greene (1978)
2. During World War II Graham Greene spent about three years at MI6, working some of the time in the counterespionage section. That department was home to Kim Philby, one of the "Cambridge Five" double agents who fed British secrets to the Soviets. In 1963, Philby was identified as an enemy agent and fled to Moscow. Greene builds "The Human Factor" around a Philby-esque dilemma, as the personal loyalties of the world-weary MI6 officer Maurice Castle contend with his allegiance to queen and country. Maurice's weakness, apart from whisky, is his devotion to his South African wife, Sarah, and her child Sam. "A man in love walks through the world like an anarchist, carrying a time bomb," Greene writes. Years before, the Soviets saved Sarah and Sam from the apartheid regime in South Africa, and Maurice feels he must repay them with British intelligence. In the end his treason, like Philby's, will deliver him to a dismal retirement in Moscow. Greene's brilliance means we sympathize with the manner by which Maurice arrives there, rather than simply condemn it.
American Spy
By Lauren Wilkinson (2019)
3. "American Spy," set during the Reagan administration, shakes up the good-versus-evil Central Intelligence Agency thriller format. The CIA officers here aren't saving the world from Armageddon. Instead, they are doing what the agency did for much of the struggle with the Soviet Union: helping oust communist and left-leaning governments. In 1980s New York, Marie Mitchell is a black Federal Bureau of Investigation officer whose career has plateaued amid racism and sexism. Then the CIA asks her to spy on Thomas Sankara, the Marxist president of Burkina Faso. Marie agrees to move to West Africa as an agent under diplomatic cover. At first she is expected to seduce Sankara, with the goal of a scandal that will drive him from power. Later, she is instructed to kill him. But Marie begins to identify more with Sankara's politics than those of her own country. Lauren Wilkinson's novel borrows some characters from real life: President Sankara led Burkina Faso from 1983 until his assassination in 1987. Ms. Wilkinson makes this West African corner of the Cold War vibrant and real.
Funeral in Berlin
By Len Deighton (1964)
4. Set in 1963, two years after the Berlin Wall went up, "Funeral in Berlin" reflects the grit and occasional glamour of a divided, postwar Europe. An unnamed British intelligence officer is assigned to smuggle a defecting Russian scientist from the Soviet Union to the West in a coffin. Characters double-cross and second-guess each other in Len Deighton's sassy, pithy prose and labyrinthine plot. As our man drives through Czechoslovakia, where he will make arrangements for the defection, he observes that "the trees had just the last few tenacious leaves hanging on like jilted lovers." His own lover, the femme fatale Samantha Steel, lives in a quiet, suburban part of London on "the sort of road where driving schools teach people to turn round." Deighton, who was a chef before becoming a writer, brings a wealth of food knowledge -- such as where to find good bockwurst on West Berlin's famous avenue, the Kurfurstendamm -- in describing a conflict that unfolded partly in restaurants.
Transcription
By Kate Atkinson (2018)
5. On a summer evening in 1981, Juliet Armstrong lies seriously injured on a London street after a car runs her down. In "Transcription," Kate Atkinson unspools Juliet's life, beginning with her recruitment into the intelligence community during World War II, and following her into postwar work with the BBC. In 1940 she joins MI5 and is drafted from the typing pool into a counterintelligence sting (based on a real MI5 operation) that entraps Nazi sympathizers using a fake Gestapo agent. In 1950 Juliet is working as a BBC producer when she is asked to do one more job for the intelligence service: provide a safehouse for a Czech defector. Ms. Atkinson's intricate plot and shifting timelines gradually reveal that everyone is lying to everyone else. That includes Juliet's MI5 boss, Peregrine "Perry" Gibbons, who one day drops "like a penitent to his knees on the carpet in front of her" and proposes, for reasons that only later become clear. But the least-expected betrayal belongs to Juliet herself, and comes in a final twist.
By Charlie English” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books -- Five Best: Cold War Thrillers: Charlie English --- The author of 'The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature'. English, Charlie. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 27 Sep 2025: C8.
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