Last night my friend Russell loaned me a book called Wilderness of Mirrors: How the Byzantine Intrigues of the Secret War Between the CIA and KGB Seduced and Devoured Key Agents James Jesus Angleton and William King Harvey. Yeah, I know…long title. The book was written by then Newsweek reporter David C. Martin in 1980. I’m already finished with the book. It’s one of the best I’ve ever read. Of course, I didn’t keep up much with breaking news today because I was engrossed in this book.
I have no idea if the book is still in print but it reads at least as well as the best spy novels ever written; and it has the added virtue of being non-fiction.
The book was written 26 years ago and yet I found very little (almost none) of it to have been superseded by new facts. It’s just a very strong book that lays out the careers of Angleton and Harvey and thus, the biggest events of the CIA during the early Cold War.
Yet, as great as it was for an historical understanding, it left me more paranoid than ever.
Very little is as it appears, and even within the CIA no one is really sure of what the hell is going on. The lesson I take away is that we should be skeptical of virtually everything we read. Well, that, and the cable news is so superficial and impressionable as to be a positive evil. What’s on your mind?
