Lindsay Moran

John le Carre had a baby with one of those earnestly confessional 'smart young modern lady' memoirs, and it's a fun and interesting read.

Lindsay Moran was a 'Real Spy', a CIA case officer running around the Balkans in the late 90s doling out hundred dollar bills to the human wreckage thrown off by collapse of Yugoslavia. But as it turns out, being a real spy is far from romantic or fun. Moran chronicles how the Agency's obsessive secrecy destroyed her social life and moral center of balance, show more making her paranoid and cagy, trapped in destructive relationships with local losers, and ultimately spinning her wheels doing nothing in the lead up to 9/11.

The best parts of the this book are the descriptions of training at The Farm. The CIA training course seems like a lot of fun. Actually being a spy involves meeting assholes in smoky low-end diners and convincing them to lie to you for money. Moran quit the agency in 2003, disgusted by its inability to meaningfully do anything about Al Qaeda or the coming invasion of Iraq (fun fact: Case Officers were prohibited from meeting with people with terrorist ties in the 90s.) The picture of HUMINT that she paints is broken boys playing a pointless game with their foreign counterpoints. For a book published in 2004, there is some foresight about the CIA's transformation into a secret army (see The Way of the Knife), but overall, the biggest sense is that the whole CIA is crazy, and only does its job by accident. show less

I guess you could call this book breezy, because that’s the tone, with a fair amount of worrying about weight and the acquisition and disposition of boyfriends, but basically this is about how sexism and inertia make the CIA dumb. Sexism in treating women agents worse, assuming that they’re more at risk of betraying the country for a man while letting male agents do anything with women, while also sending women agents out on the assumption that heterosexual men of other countries are show more more likely to spy for the US if a woman is the handler. Stupidity and waste in paying out huge sums for worthless information, with no apparent procedures in place for sorting good information from bad. September 11, 2001 made them more frightened but not any better at allocating resources. If you like your downers with a side of wacky adventures in training and avoiding surveillance, then this might be for you! Here, have another one, this time about the FBI. show less

An entertaining enough airport book, an easy read. Moran has an attitude, writes fluidly and is often funny. BUT this book is not as billed: she had only one two-year assignment (in Macedonia), before resigning. We don't get to Macedonia until page 189. Once there, she doesn't provide much in the way of historical context.

The first two-thirds of the book cover the acceptance and then the training process a the CIA's legendary Farm. Wasn't there a movie about this place? Or am I thinking of show more SEAL training? Or does it just feel like there is? It was covered throughly enough for me in Bob Baer's first book. However, if you've already been accepted by the CIA and want to know more about the grilling training process, this is definitely the book for you.

Her account differs from Bob Baer's, though, in her attitude, which is probably close to that of most readers. A lot of the tasks strike her as pretty dumb, things she'll never need to do. And many of her peers in the exercise are obviously unsuited for any work entailing secrecy (so how did they get this far?). She also makes some nasty remarks about the looks and ages of fellow CIA employees, but perhaps in a clumsy way she is trying to puncture any notion that CIA agents resemble Angelina Jolie or Matt Damon.

She also eventually has reservations about the work and about lying, although I hasten to add she certainly is never in a position to kill anybody. She doesn't carry a gun in Macedonia and you get the impression she never had much facility with any weapon. They aren't even trained in martial arts. Like Bob Baer's book (and unlike the movie Syriana), the reader quickly learns that a case officer's work pretty much boils down to recruiting informers, which in turn entails a lot of party-going, meeting in grubby places (apparently the entire Balkans) and report writing.

Maybe it's just a sign of the end of the Cold War, but all the informers she encounters or knows of just seem to be after extra spending money. And, as you suspect, the CIA's pockets are way deep.Ideology barely surfaces; old-fashioned ethnic and religious allegiances just sometimes line up with getting an allowance.

For all that, Macedonia from 1999 to 2001 during the Kosovo crisis, when the Albanian Muslim Kosovars were infiltrating the country, makes for an interesting backdrop with the US foreign policy fumbling as usual. Funny how she doesn't ever bring up Clinton's name or indict him. Or Albright. But as always with these critiques, no alternative policy is outlined. I think if she thought about it, she'd start by saying that the overlords in Washington (CIA? State? the executive office? I have no idea) need to heed the reporting and recommendations in the field.

As with so many other government agencies, the kind of work the CIA should be doing probably can't be executed by a mammoth bureaucracy. show less

This is certainly no James Bond novel. James Bond novels involve villains plotting to take over the world. This book starred a woman who was plotting to take over my last nerve.

I was expecting some joking/ridicule of the CIA from this book. She painted the CIA more like "The Office" filled with horribly incompetent agents - especially herself.

She comes across as whiny and I felt more like I was reading a Sex and the City episode with Lindsay so preoccupied with rock climbing, boyfriends and show more quality time with her girl friends.

If Lindsay is the type of person gathering intelligence, I worry for the safety of America. If she's the type of writer that America is producing now ... well, she's a decent enough writer.

This is a 1.3 star book. show less