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A Novel
by Joseph Weisberg
Book Reviewed by:Joseph Weisberg, a former CIA
officer, has said that he wanted to write
"the most realistic spy novel that had ever
been written," and so An Ordinary Spy
portrays not the glamour and suspense of
working for the CIA but the everyday tedium
of slowly cultivating informants for tiny
scraps of intelligence. The protagonist,
Mark Ruttenberg, is also a former CIA
officer, writing a memoir about when he was
a new agent on his first overseas
assignment, desperate to advance his career
by recruiting his first informants. In
Ruttenberg's world, the real gains for
national security are minimal, the risks are
enormous, and the opportunities for heroism
practically nonexistent, as his actions are
muffled by bureaucracy. But Weisberg
compensates for the lack of heroism and
intrigue by filling Ruttenberg's narration
with the fascinating details of
"tradecraft," the methods and means of
espionage. The verisimilitude is,
paradoxically, heightened by omission. It is
Weisberg's conceit that Ruttenberg's memoir
has been redacted by the Publications Review
Board of the CIA, and that he has chosen to
publish the story with the redactions
intact, big black bars striping the page,
rather than deleting or rewriting the
classified sections.
At first, I was suspicious of An Ordinary
Spy, as perhaps one should be of a novel
written by an expert at deception and
secrets. Ruttenberg coins the verb "case
officering" to describe the way agents charm
and manipulate their recruits in order to
win their trust. Is Weisberg case officering
his readers? How much should I trust the
narrator with his too-careful prose and his
earnest naiveté? Is he a double-agent for
the author's hidden agenda? An Ordinary
Spy seems less like a thriller and more
like a metaphysical detective story in the
tradition of Vladimir Nabokov or Jorge Luis
Borges, which unfolds as a game between
author and reader. I found myself trying to
best Weisberg by outguessing the redactions,
like an agent trying to decode an enemy's
encryptions. I think I figured out the
country to which Ruttenberg was posted from
the climatological details, the scant
descriptions of his new city, and the length
of the redacted name.
I gradually realized that I'd been reading
the novel incorrectly. Weisberg does not, in
fact, mean to make a parallel between the
act of spying and the act of reading.
Ruttenberg's steady, careful narration is
not a front for a more cunning mind, and I
slowly became seduced by his thoughtfulness
about the craft of espionage. An Ordinary
Spy turns out to be not a puzzle but a
moral drama. Ruttenberg struggles with his
conscience over the danger to which he
exposes his potential recruits, people he
comes to care deeply about, asking himself
if their meager knowledge of national
secrets is worth the risks to their lives if
they get caught. The novel's suspense comes
not from wondering who did what and who
works for whom, as in a traditional spy
novel, but from sussing out the right choice
in a hazardous and culturally uneven social
terrain. Perhaps, then, Weisberg means to
make a parallel between the act of spying
and the act of befriending someone.
Ruttenberg and his recruits "case officer"
each other in utterly heartfelt attempts to
create lasting friendships. And so the
redactions symbolize the impartial knowledge
that perennially blinkers the relationship
between two people, and the intricate,
chess-like logic that Ruttenberg employs to
analyze the political scene mirrors the
logic that he must use to evaluate the
ethical landscape of recruitment.
My initial misreading, though, is revealing.
I think I misunderstood the novel because
Ruttenberg does not match the image of the
secret agent that I've come to picture from
recent nonfiction books, such as Tim
Weiner's Legacy of Ashes,
which describe the calculated,
self-interested, and nefarious deeds of the
CIA. Weisberg seems out to correct the
public image of the Agency, claiming that it
is neither as effective nor as evil as the
news would have it. Weisberg's agent is a
decent man in a cynical profession. Of
course, Ruttenberg lasts less than a year in
the CIA, bumped out precisely because he
lacks the ruthlessness for espionage, and
Weisberg has said that he left for the same
reason.
An Ordinary Spy is deeply engrossing
and gratifying, first for the details of
spycraft, but lastingly for the contortions
to which it puts the reader's mind as it
wends its way though its complex moral
questions.
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in January 2008, and has been updated for the
January 2009 edition.
Click here to go to this issue.
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