Customer Reviews

Know Thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran

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"Know Thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey Into Revolutionary Iran" has a misleading subtitle. It really should be called "A Former Spy's Journey Into Post-Revolutionary Iran." That criticism aside, however, this fictionalized account of former CIA case officer Reuel Marc Gerecht's (writing under the pen name Edward Shirley) real-life travel in Iran is a very good book. I can't think of other authors, aside from Robert Kaplan, who deftly weave history and international relations (like the Safavid dynasty's legacy to the modern Middle East) as well as Gerecht does here.

Replete with history, criticism of the CIA, and musings on espionage, Gerecht takes the reader from the Turkish border all the way to Tehran. Although the book is more of a travelogue than a plot-driven story, Gerecht manages to keep the reader entertained with a sharp writing style and highly-informed narrative. Among the best parts of the book are Gerecht's observations on his former profession and the peculiar task for him to use his knowledge of a country he loves to gets its people to betray their government.

Recommended.

Mr. "Shirley" (whose identity is now well known) was not quite as high in the CIA's Iran section as he implies, and almost all of what he learnt in Iran was already well known and widely reported. One wonders why he didn't just get a visa and travel there like all the other tourists who visit that country regularly.

I have read Mr. Shirley's Know Thine Enemy, an accomplishment that seems to separate me from the the four or five other recent reviewers of this book.

In fact, those other reviews (mostly unsigned) so obviously miss the point of the book that one wonders if they were not actually written by the shills of a certain three letter government Agency who was skewered so mercilessly by Mr. Shirley in his recent Atlantic cover article and forthcoming book. Since representatives of that same Agency have been quoted as saying they'll 'get' Mr. Shirley for daring to reveal that the Emperor has no clothes, I wouldn't put those reviews past them. Lord knows they were poorly-written enough to have been crafted in the halls of Langley.

But let's stick to the book itself, shall we? In my opinion, it's a neat little gem and it provides a fascinating insight into a foreign culture, one vastly different from the world that the American Mr. Shirley was born into. The author's journey into Iran gives us a peek behind the forebidden curtain of that Great and Powerful Iranian Oz, so that we can see the harmless little old man back there pulling levers. As a result, it's an anti-Bond kind of book and it does not have a spooky ending. That's the whole point, of course, and it's a wonder to me that most of the other reviewers seem to have missed it.

For example, several of these shill reviews ask 'Why didn't Mr. Shirley simply buy a plane ticket to Iran instead of sneaking in in the floorboards of a truck?' The answer is found in the book, of course (as are the answers to all of their other off-the-point and uninformed criticisms). At the time Shirely went in (years ago) it wasn't possible for gringos like himself, especially gringos KNOWN to Iranian Intel as CIA agents, to fly into Iran. He had to sneak in if he wanted to see the country that he had studied for so long from a distance. Now things are different, but they weren't back then and as a result those shill reviewers are essentially saying, 'Gee Gary Powers, why risk getting shot down in a U2 in 1960 when any dummy can fly into Moscow today and hire all the cheap vodka-drinking hookers he wants?"

Things change and only when they change do we find out that our prejudicial attitudes were often in error. That's Mr. Shirley's point and it's not so hard to figure out from the book itself unless your real purpose is to discredit the author with cheap, inaccurate shots. It's certainly the point that any real reader without a frontal lobotomy will get because Mr. Shirley FULLY DESCRIBES what a big joke all his 'penetrate the forbidden city' preparations were proven to be when he gets inside Iran. He tells you how the Iranian people welcome him with a no big deal shrug of their shoulders. It's just the purposefully-paranoid-so-it-can-perpetuate-its-own-existence CIA who taught him to fear what lay behind the Persian Curtain. To miss that point, in this very well written book, is to be either an adipated, humorless drone or a CIA employee, or both.

No, I take that back. It's impossible to be EITHER an adipated humorless drone OR a CIA employee. If you're one, odds are you're already both.

Ed Shirley is a former CIA employee who, after leaving the agency, embarks for reasons of his own on a journey through modern day Iran. A fluent Farsee speaker, he hires a guide in Turkey and is smuggled across the border. He visits and talks with everyday Iranians--merchants, professors, people he meets in the coffee houses. He encounters no hostility, open curiousity, and a generally warm attitude toward "the Great Satan." The Iranian people, he discovers, still like Americans--although they don't always agree with the views of our government. A wonderful travelogue and an excellent source of understanding of the complex Persian culture.

Whoever cares about Iran or Persia can get something from this book. It's not much of a "journey" in the sense of a travelog, but the conversations and the few glimpsed scenes are worth the price. The author also provides lots of interesting, scholarly background, for example, on why Iranians feel so unlucky, and why the CIA is a sinkhole for good ideas. Maybe the saddest moment in the book was the brief chat the author had with an older Iranian, who practically begged to have US should bomb the mollahs. It's sad, not because the mollahs are human beings and should live in peace, but because the thought of the US doing something to rescue people is so old-fashioned.

The author was CIA employee who was merely in charge of interviewing Iranian "walk-ins" at the US embassy in Turkey but apparently felt like he was an Iran expert because he had a couple of Iranian girlfriends and learned the language from a CIA course or two (though he had never actually been to Iran.) So, apparently going no where at the CIA, he retires, jumps into a box in the back of a truck and "infiltrates" into Iran where, by his own account, everybody knew he was coming and nobody cared (His truck driver had already alerted everyone including his relatives) So the guy eats some kabob, walks around a bit at truck stops, fantasies about how the female relatives of the truck driver must really be sexually attracted to him, etc. Then, apparently unable to bear the pain of having been ignored by the authorities, he makes up a fantasy story about how unseen agents of the government must be chasing him. So he gets back in his box and returns to Turkey.

He claims that he couldn't just travel to Iran normally as other tourists from the US do because there was a risk that he may be idenitied on the street by one of the "walk-ins" he had interviewed in Turkey. Sure, but is getting caught hiding in a box any less suspicious? In fact, he apparently never considered for a moment the potential harm to US interests if the Iranians had wanted to make an issue out of the capture of even a retired agent of the CIA. But I guess self-promotion was more important to him.

But here's the more ironic thing: since then, the author (real name: Reuel Marc Gerecht) has gone on to join the right wing think tanks that advise GW Bush on foreign policy issues, and is treated by them as some sort of Iran expert: A very sad statement on the nature of US-Iran relations.

Somewhat interesting but one can hardly wonder how Mr. "Shirley" has come to be an expert on Iranian and Persian culture after a graduate degree, work in the Near East office of the CIA, two American-Iranian girlfriends and only a handful of days in-country. If he had been Iranian by birth and had spent years and not days inside the country, his insights may have been more credible. One never gets the feeling he was in imminent danger despite the constant references to his mode of travel. Why didn't he visit as a tourist?

Mr. Shirley sneaks into Iran, hiding in the box of a truck, where he should have stayed. He spends 3 or 4 days in Iran, most of it trying not to be seen. He walks around for a few hours. He speaks to 3 or 4 truckdrivers, 2 or 3 shopkeepers, and a few assorted others, from which he assembles a complete picture and understanding of the Political and Social infrastructure of Iran. Along the way he explains, on just about every other page, how the CIA is a complete failure in every facet of it's existence, how all the career people in it's employ are arrogant idiots who are devoid of all compassion and intellect. He explains each of the Cia's mistakes, along with his explanation of what they ought to have done. He is, of course, ex CIA himself, having left it because no one there understood anything about anything.

The book, it's true, is not a great travelogue, but it is a tremendous insight into the Persian mind and Persian history, as well as into the pathetic posturings of CIA lifers, and into the author's own connections with Persia. As one of Hosein's relatives implores, "Please bomb the mollahs." I would be happy for the Persians if this could happen. Reminds me of Solzhenitsyn's wish, while he was a slave laborer in the USSR, that the US would drop a bunch of nuclear bombs on Russia, even if he happened to be nearby.

This book is completely bogus.

It's basically about an ex-cia agent who becomes obsessed with Iran and goes on a journey to Iran.

Instead of going as a tourist or using the many other ways he must have learned as a CIA agent, he sneaks into Iran in the back of a truck, much safer than going legitimately isn't it? What an idiot.

The man who drives him tells his familly to welcome the guy by making kabob for him, a barbeque, what a secret agent indeed.

Throughout his short stay in the country (a few days) he makes stupid conclusions like: I was being followed by UN-seen forces, which I never saw. He has no proof that anyone was even after him but yet he says they were. He's been watching too much X-files.

On the other hand he says that ALL Iranian women secretly wanted him. Again, he has no proof, he just assumes this. What a moron.

He says the best undercover agents in Iran are those who speak English, they seem like Iranians to Iranians. The last time I checked the official language in Iran was Farse. His statements don't make any sense.

He always tries to make his work poetic by referring to himself using Persian, Iranian history and metaphores. It's just sounds ridiculous. At one point he says that he was called "The Angle" by people he had just met, but that angels have mercy and he would not. LOL.

This guy lives in this psychotic paranoid world thinking that he's James Bond or something when no one even cares about him. This guy needs to get out of this illusion he is living in and come into the real world.

As the title says: Read this book and laugh, it's really a joke, nothimg more.