Why am I passionate about this?
I spent 21 years in the Central Intelligence Agency as a linguist, analyst, and speechwriter. It was a love-hate relationship. I found the culture of the place fascinating and sometimes maddening. The intellectual challenge was addictive. I met some of the best people I’ve ever known and a few of the worst. I learned about high stakes and moral ambiguity, intellectual integrity and bald careerism, selfless service, and rollicking arrogance. I discovered that the intelligence world is a world apart yet an eerily accurate reflection of broader society. I’ve chosen books written by authors who spent time in intelligence work and crafted novels that define and sometimes defy the spy genre.
Susan's book list on spot on spy novels by former intelligence officers
Why did Susan love this book?
Early in my career, I realized that 1.) Spy bureaucracies lend themselves to satire, and 2.) Inventing information to sell to a government is a line of work as old as espionage. Graham Greene leverages these truths in the grandaddy of satiric spy novels.
His protagonist, James Wormold, is a vacuum cleaner salesman who becomes a reluctant employee of MI6. Wormold fabricates assets, reports, and expense accounts to boost his lagging sales income and spoil his daughter. In the process, he trips over the uneven border between invention and reality and almost gets himself killed.
6 authors picked Our Man in Havana as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
MI6’s man in Havana is Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true…
First published in 1959 against the backdrop of the Cold War, Our Man in Havana remains one of Graham Greene’s most widely read novels. It is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire of government intelligence that still resonates today. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by…