Customer Reviews

Company: A Novel Of The Cia

5 star:		(80)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

First let me say that this is an outstanding reading experience. It has raised the bar for espionage novels that I will be reading going forward. At approx 900 pages, it's an epic and demands the attention of the reader throughout. Get this book.

With that said, I was stunned to read other reviews for this book that ruin the reading experience. If it were possible to have someone's review removed...I would look to see how it was done. Harmless as it may seem, there are a few plot twists that come near the end and are profoundly important to the whole scope of the book. To be this careless, simply amazes me.

So please. Don't read the following reviews by other readers without some warning that you may be getting more information about the book than you really need or should want at this point.

Thank you,
islebyours

"The Company" is an big, engrossing novel that succeeds on several levels: First, it is as enjoyable as all get out. Second, it serves as a living history review of clandestine U.S. ventures going back to World War II. And third, no matter what political perspective you come from, you will come away a different take on the War on Terrorism.

Robert Littell takes several young men who joined the brand-new CIA after the war and follows their careers. All enter the spy game because their experiences with communism during the war have lead them to believe that it is a destructive element that must be halted. From the same war comes a young communist who as whole-heartedly believes that communism is the salvation of the world. They will fight on different battlegrounds throughout "The Company"--Berlin, Hungary, Cuba, Afghanistan--until communism collapses.

In many ways, "The Company" is a standard spy thriller, with ample supply of the requisite secrets, double-crossing, and triple agents. There's an unnecessary Alice in Wonderland theme throughout and some clunky writing. But what makes the book stand out is not just the skill Littell brings to the plot,
but the scope. This is a history of covert activities, and because we see so many major incursions represented, we can watch disturbing patterns develop. It seems that since WWII, the U.S. has entered a number of frays for all the right reasons and withdrawn before the matter could be resolved. "The Company" deals with the spies and civilians left dangling, and raises questions about earlier policies that may have left us vulnerable to terrorists.

This is a timely book that I hope will excite discussion and increase understanding. If readers don't agree with Littell's take on events, then I hope they'll do research on their own. "The Company" should encourage readers to take a look at the past, and is a whopping good read to boot.

Robert Littell has written some of the best books in this genre but for some reason he does not seem to have the audience of a LeCarre, a Ludlum, and others. If you enjoy any of the well known and widely read of this type you will certainly enjoy this man's work. "The Company", is a massive work of almost 900 pages, it still reads well and is in no way ponderous or excessive. As many books seem to continually shorten it is a pleasing exception that Mr. Littell took all the time and pages he needed to tell his story.

To any readers of Cold War novels all of the topics that are covered in this book will be familiar but not unwelcome. This book covers a very large portion of the CIA'S existence and presents familiar events as part of a continuum as opposed to focusing on a single event like The Bay Of Pigs, Kennedy, Suez, etc in isolation. There are very good books on all of these topics both documentary and in the form of novels. This work places them all in a larger continual historical context as well as a more realistic one. These historical events did not take place in solitary or in a vacuum, they were events that were planned and dealt with together with all of the other issues that were at hand for the agency at the time. They were also planned and executed by people who developed and created the atmosphere of the agency with their talents as well as their faults. By presenting the large picture as opposed to an isolated historical event, Mr. Littell gives readers the wide perspective that only an inclusive history can offer.

This is a novel and while not appropriate it is tempting to forget that what you are reading contains much truth albeit as presented in the form of literary fiction. Mr. Littell clearly has his favorites and those he thinks little of in terms of the players who conducted the operations at the agency. He gets close to the edge of editorial extreme with some of his depictions but I don't know that he really crossed any lines that readers will find difficult to accept.

If you have never read this man's work, this is not only a great place to begin, but also a grand tale told with the appropriate pace.

I am not a big fan of spy novels, in the same way that I don't tend to favour genre fiction. However, having read a shining review for this book in "The Economist", which is not a normally frivolous publication, I picked it up and read it from cover to cover in a few days. The book is a compulsive page-turner. The story is nothing less than that of the CIA from its inception in 1950 to the end of the Cold War in 1992, seen through the lives of several CIA and KGB operatives. The story is rigorously researched and the period details seem to be perfectly portrayed (I am a big fan of contemporary history, and did not find any significant flaws in the book). They follow our boys (mostly boys in this book, no big surprise there) from Berlin in 1950 to Budapest in 1956, to Havana in 1960, to Washington and Moscow in 1974, to Afghanistan in 1983, to Moscow in 1991, with a brief coda somewhere in Virginia in 1995. The main fictional characters are three CIA agents who join at the beginning and then rise through the ranks. They are two-fisted action man Jack McAuliffe, honourable attorney (sic) Winstrom Ebbitt III and efficient organiser Leo Kritzky. An additional character who plays an important role is drunken and deadly Harvey Torriti, the Sorcerer, head of Berlin base at the beginning of the Cold War. Their counterparts are a KGB operative named Yevgeny Tsipin and spymaster Starik (the Old Man). Each of the episodes follows all these characters as the CIA spooks try to outsmart the KGB spies, and vice versa. Many historical figures drop by, some of them in a clearly ficionalised take on their lives. Thus, Martin Bormann is introduced to Yevgeny as a Communist hero who fed Hitler's paranoia and led him to eventually lose the war, Pope John Paul I is shown to have been murdered by a KGB operative for stepping too close to the truth of the dreaded Kholstomer, a far-ranging operation to bring the West to its knees, and statesmen such as Harold Wilson and Henry Kissinger are shown to have been nothing more than KGB agents.

Some of the best parts of the book concern the author's obvious delight in spy craft. Many familiar devices such as cypher books, dead box drops, barium meals and all types of bugs turn up, and we learn a few new ones, such as walking back the cat (don't ask). Littell's spies are thoroughly professional and their work is hard, dangerous and unappreciated. Old spies such as The Sorcerer, the historic James Jesus Angleton or Starik die alone, forgotten by all, or almost all. The set pieces (the Soviet invasion of Budapest in 1956, the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1960 or the attempted coup in Moscow in 1991) are very well put together and hugely exciting. Political leaders, both American and Soviet (Eisenhower, Bobby Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Mijail Gorbachev) come out particularly poorly as they misunderstand the very valuable intelligence information they receive and abandon their agents and allies whenever expedient. A recurrent motif, in fact, is how US governments have usually abandoned local allies to the wolves whenever things got nasty (the Hungarians in 1956, the anti-Castrista Cubans in 1960, the Czechs in 1968, the Taiwanese in 1972, friendly Vietnamese in 1975 and friendly Cambodians in that same year).

The book is definitely a must read for any fan of conspiracy theories, as it sets out quite a few that are literally mindboggling. And the leitmotiv (Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) is apposite and never distracting.

Does the book have any weaknesses? Contrary to what may initially appear it's too damn short! Operation Kholstomer, which is built up very nicely as the standard issue mortal threat to global democracy unravels too quickly. Surely there could have been an additional chapter describing how it would have worked and specifying how it was defeated? Starik's perverted liking for pre-pubescent girls is probably unnecessary and contrived to make him the obvious baddy (although it is a nice touch since it shows a sort of malignant reflection on the historic Lewis Carroll). And the discovery of über KGB mole Sasha is too easy because Littell does not really create memorable characters and so his hints of the mole's real identity are somewhat transparent.

But these are minor quibbles. Markus Wolf once said that the only really competent intelligence services were East Germany's Stasi, Israel's Mossad and Cuba's DGI. They all turn up in this book, plus the big guys we love to see (KGB and CIA). How can you lose with this lineup?

"The Company" is simply the best spy novel that I have ever read.
As an alumnus of the CIA and an unabashed lover of spy fiction
in all of its forms,I also tend to be a tough critic. However,
Littell has created a masterpiece.He skillfully blends real-life
and fictional characters and weaves a story based around real events -- the Soviet invasion of Hungary,the Bay of Pigs,the
Able Archer incident that could have led to World War III,and
the attempted coup against Gorbachev that finally put an end to the Soviet Union. This approach easily could have gone awry.Since
most of the actual events and real-life characters are well-known,the book could have either been boring or incredible.
Instead,it is a compelling story in which the reader cares about all of the characters and gets completely caught up in even the
familiar events of the past.Littell treats all of his characters
-- even the "villains" -- relatively sympathetically,which makes
the whole novel more interesting and compelling.Most important,he
demostrates that he is a masterful story teller.I was genuinely
sad to finish this book.I would have gladly read another 900 pages!

Is it a spy thriller or a veiled history of the CIA mixing real players with substitute and made up characters? Littell should have picked one or the other and cut the book in half.

In the fiction story three Yale roommates go into the intelligence service in 1950. Jack McAuliffe and his pal Leo Kritzky go to the CIA while Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tspin, son of a Russian undersecretary to the UN, is pulled into the KGB. Unfortunately, these characters are merely painted into scenes from the Cold War. The substance it would take to make them believable is missing from Littell's journey through four decades of espionage.

As for the expose, the controversial James Jesus Angleton is squarely in the author's crosshairs. If you don't know much about him (I didn't), do a Google search and read a couple of articles to set the scene. The details of Littell's fictional narrative are drawn from similar facts reshuffled enough to satisfy the publisher's lawyers. Even more interesting is the hard-drinking character of the Sorcerer, Harvey Toritti. Like the real William Harvey, he was a holdover from the OSS and the Agency's chief in Berlin in the early 50s. He also told Angleton that Philby was a spy long before he accepted it, was called America's James Bond by JFK and was the link to hitman Johnny Roselli and the Chicago Mob. Angleton manipulates and bumbles while Toritti swaggers through crisis after crisis until they're put out to pasture in the early 70s. The question is what's real and what isn't?

Thirty-plus years and hundreds of pages later the three Yale roomies retake center stage. The final act runs from the early 80s through '91 and the fall of Gorbachov. Jack cals on his long retired mentor Toritti who stirs up an improbable series of events to stop the coup they know is coming. It happens, of course, with Littell using this part of his saga to float the notion that Putin grew out of the dark unofficial operations that drew together CIA, KGB, Mossad and some well financed free lancers.

Littell did succeed in arousing enough of my curiosity to go back and review some of the history he touched on and some that he didn't. I doubt if I'll dig too deep into it, however. "The Company" pretty much wore me out.

I was sorry to finish this, as there was no more to read. You know the feeling: A book creates an entire world so well that you feel like you're being evicted when there's no more left to read. Books can't manage this without being long, epic and well done. "The Company" succeeds on all accounts.

"The Company" follows a group of CIA employees over the course of lives and careers paralleling and embodying the entire Cold War. And the Cold War's epic novels must necessarily focus, like this one, on spies. Because in the shadows is where this war mostly got fought over nearly half a century. Littell writes one of the few novels showing the spy game actually playing out, as it did, over decades.

We meet young spooks Jack McAuliffe, Leo Kritzky, and Ebby Ebbitt as they join the "Company" (or, to insiders in those days, "The Pickle Factory") in 1950. The Cold War is heating up with real combat about to break out in Korea amid worries that Western Europe may topple into Communism. Kritzky goes to work in the agency's Washington headquarters, while McAuliffe and Ebbitt are posted in Europe on the front lines. McAuliffe goes to work for the already legendary Harvey Torriti, "the Sorcerer", the rough-and-tumble, heavy-boozing Berlin bureau chief and the complete opposite of the three Ivy League rookies. Berlin is the epicenter of the early Cold War, with defections, penetrations and kidnappings back and forth across a city divided by power but not yet a wall. Ebbitt works elsewhere in West Germany, trying to insert agents behind the Iron Curtain to foment revolt. But too many ops are blown, sending to their deaths brave emigres who had trusted the CIA with their lives. The legendary James Jesus Angleton hunts for a mole among the British; history buffs know, of course, who it is. After Kim Philby's defection, though, he is replaced by a mysterious agent code-named SASHA, managed by the brilliant but perverted KGB spymaster Starik. Angleton, slipping into paranoia as the game's levels of deception mount, turns the Company upside down trying to find the mole.

Through the eyes of the spooks, and the women in their lives, we see Berlin, the failed Hungarian 1956 uprising, the Bay of Pigs, the secret world of American Communists, Afghanistan and the failed right-wing coup against Gorbachev in 1991 that sealed Soviet Communism's demise. The episodes involving the first three particularly bring a tremendous amount of detail to bear on a period now receding into history. Littell captures so well the flavor and tension of the times. He even brings some sympathy to bear on his Communist agents, who give up normal lives and human connections to live underground and fight their idealistic but misguided war for the triumph of socialism. And he shows the moral dilemmas involved in fighting this kind of war - a tension still felt today in the War on Terror. Through his characters' eyes we see, on one hand, the perils of fighting as dirty as our enemies do, but on the other hand, the moral and real costs of betraying foreign surrogates by failing to back them up.

Littell does a magnificent job of plausibly placing his characters close to turning points of the Cold War, tying it all together and resolving it within the contexts of their lives. For spy or historical fiction buffs, this book is as good as it gets.

I came to Robert Littell's "The Company" after reading two of his shorter, acclaimed novels, "The Amateur" and "The Sisters." While "The Amateur" is a good if pedestrian spy yarn, "The Sisters" injected both cynicism and oddball audacity that elevated it to the pantheon of "great spy stories."

Nothing in either book prepared me for the staggering scope of "The Company." Using Alice in Wonderland as a thematic device, Littell drops the reader down the rabbithole into the world of the CIA, where agents may be closer in spiritual terms to age-old adversaries than they are to friends and family.

Littell kicks off "The Company" with the recruitment of the first generation of spies into the new American government group, the CIA. From these formative years in the late 40s and early 50s, the American agents are tossed into some of the most heartbreaking and disturbing events of the Cold War, including the botched Hungarian anticommunist uprising of 1956 and the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion. Friends are lost, lifetime enemies are made, and double-crosses are a harsh fact of life.

But Littell extends "The Company" to multiple generations, where children inherit the virtues, sins, and prejudices of those who went before (and sometimes all three). What makes "The Company" especially poignant is the constant threat that the Soviet mole in the CIA, planted by the perverted, brilliant Soviet spymaster Starik, may be your best friend or your parent. This paranoia, sometimes justified, often not, follows the families of Littell's cast of characters up through the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Gorbachev revolution in the early 1990s.

Littell is no stylist like James Ellroy (whose "American Tabloid" and "The Cold Six Thousand" also offered a fictional yet realistic take on the same era). Instead, he adopts a conventional-yet-appropriate you-are-there straightforward prose. Intelligence agents are not poets, they are zealously focused on the facts of life. Littell's prose perfectly fits this mindset.

Be prepared for several long nights and accusations from your significant other that "you've had your nose buried in that book for too long." This epic spans almost 900 pages (and doesn't cheat by using a large typeface, either), and yet it never wears out its welcome.

Cheers, Robert Littell. You've written a magnificent book.

I confess to not having much experience with the genre of spy novels, but regardless, The Company was immensely satisfying for my first foray into the field. Make no mistake, this book is more like Thirteen Days than it is like James Bond. Littell relies more on the tension of a highly combustible political situation for the drama and excitement in this book, rather than straight on action sequences. For me, this formula worked.

The Company takes the reader through a series of events that were typical of the major events of the Cold War: (1) a failed defection; (2) the failed revolution in Hungary; (3) the Bay of Pigs fiasco; and (4) the attempted coup to overthrow Gorbachev. The in-depth looks into the behind-the-scenes events surrounding these historical events, albeit fictional, are still incredibly engrossing and read like non-fiction.

And unfortunately, that is one of the book's major failings as well. The characters never rang true for me. The speech patterns of each character is nearly indiscernable from the rest. Dialogue often seems unnatural or forced. While Littell tries to firmly root his story in real world historical events, credulity is strained when we're asked to believe that the same characters who start the book out as friends, eventually rise to take on the most powerful roles in the CIA, all the while placing their children in subservient roles. I don't know if the real CIA encouraged nepotism or not, but this rang hollow for me.

What was probably the most unnecessary evil of this book, however, was the many typos that appeared throughout its text. It was really quite maddening. The most egregious was on page 829 where the words "Unites States" appear. A proper editing job would have enhanced my enjoyment of this book immensely. This is not a knock on Littell, but rather, on Overlook Press. Hackneyed editing just make The Company appear amateurish.

Otherwise, however, this book was a fine attempt to draw fiction from the Cold War. With the perspective of the 21st Century, Littell shows with great realism what was probably taking place during the post-WWII era in the shadows and behind closed doors. A wonderfully entertaining read.

You know, when the Cold War ended, I thought that the spy thriller had likewise come to the end of the line. What would Le Carré and his mates write about now? What could they write about.

Le Carré has moved on, but Robert Littell remains, and with The Company he has firmly established himself master of the genre. This is an awesome book, a spy thriller of the old school, with moles and Joes, cutouts and dead-drops, plots and counterplots. There are the usual colourful characters - the Sorcerer in the seedy sleazy alleys of post-war Berlin is worth the price of the book alone - and thrilling if not romantic situations. It goes on for a satisfying length, a good solid read, and there are meaty plots and subplots and subsubplots to give the reader a generous fill as the story follows through the early days of the CIA and the freezing of the Cold War, past Hungary and Cuba, a long episode in Afghanistan and ultimately to the White House of Boris Yeltsin, where generations meet in a blazing conclusion.

There are plot twists and red herrings, tension and drama as the key players work against each other to uncover a high-level mole. I won't give the game away, but if you keep your wits about you right from the beginning, you should be able to spot the first seeds that will sprout shoots of doubt and ultimately grow to bear fruit many many years later.

The plotting (and I use the word advisedly) in this book is of a high level. It flows naturally, never forced, always thrusting the story along. Little details echo the moods and motivations of the characters, tieing in to one another and weaving a multi-stranded tapestry that gives the book so much of its satisfying flavour. It is hard to say what I enjoyed most, but perhaps the scenes that most impressed me were inside the Ronald Reagan White House, where the various political motivations of Washington institutions were dealt with in rambling code phrases in a sort of real-like movie shot in the mind of the President. Scary, haunting stuff.

But I guess I'm rambling too. Make no mistake. This novel is big, but it is no meandering time-filler. It is tightly written for all its size, and it will keep you turning just one more page until you get to the end. It is one of those rare books where you get to the end and want to start at the beginning again to read it again in a new light.

Highly recommended.