Spytime: The Undoing oF James Jesus Angleton (Hardcover)

~ William F. Buckley Jr. (Author) "How is it I came by such a name, you might wonder?..." (more)
Key Phrases: covert agent, Tony Crespi, Soviet Union, James Angleton (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This fictional account of the life of James Jesus Angleton, founder of the American counterintelligence establishment, will make readers wish for the humor and high jinks of Blackie Oakes, William F. Buckley Jr.'s much more engaging fictional spy. As the novel opens, Angleton is being summarily locked out of the halls of power and plotting his final act: the unmasking of the famed Fifth Man involved in the scandals that rocked England when Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blount were unmasked as traitors. But before he lets the reader in on the identity of the Fifth Man, Buckley traces Angleton's career through his involvement in a number of espionage cases, all rooted in the cold war and apparently chosen to illustrate Buckley's ongoing (and already decided) battle with his favorite nemesis, Soviet communism.

Angleton's lifelong obsession with Philby is the engine that drives Spytime, but there are too many miles on it to make what passes for a plot hold the reader's interest. On the brighter side, Buckley's erudition puts a fine polish on the chassis. Cold Warrior, Tom Mangold's fine biography of Angleton, is a more evenhanded treatment of the life of this complicated man, but Buckley's is more fun to take to the beach. --Jane Adams

From Library Journal

Author of the best-selling "Blackford Oakes" series, Buckley here takes on the core of spying--recruiting, training, and deceit. Many former spies make cameo appearances in this profile of James Jesus Angleton, a real spymaster who ran the counterintelligence operations of the CIA for decades after World War II. The introduction of young agents gives Buckley a lot of room for sexy interludes, professorial expositions, and energetic episodes. Throughout the book, the intellectual appeal of espionage separates this from the usual cloak-and-dagger story. Sure to be a favorite, this novel successfully explores the enigmatic life of a Cold Warrior. For all popular fiction collections.
---Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt; 1 edition (July 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151005133
• ISBN-13: 978-0151005130
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,268,419 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An intriguing book, November 6, 2000

By	Mark Edward Bachmann (Westport, CT USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

William Buckley has in his later years developed a surprising talent for fiction, and he couldn't have picked a more intriguing subject to focus it on with this book than James Angleton. How does one portray a man like Angleton? The spy novel genre, as epitomized by writers like John Le Carre, tends towards heavily convoluted plots, language, and characterizations in the effort to force the literary vehicle itself into a representation of the dark and twisted ethos of espionage. And one might have expected Angleton, as the quintessential cold-war spymaster, to have inspired just such a brooding study. However, Buckley will have none of that with his book, and taking the opposite tack, he crafts his novel with the same crisp lucidity that animates his political commentary. Employing spare sentence structure, sprightly characterization and fast-paced narrative, he draws a portrait of Angleton that has nothing sinister or even particularly mysterious about it. The legendary CIA counterintelligence chief emerges from this as entirely human - flawed and quirky, but brilliant, loyal to friends and motivated by a sincere patriotism. Underlying the story, however, is a kind of sad commentary by Buckley on the tragic nature of espionage as a profession. Much like a good cop corrupted by the violence of a high-crime neighborhood, Angleton by the end of his career seems helpless against the pressures driving him into a paranoid pathology. Frustrated by his failures to detect genuine traitors in his own ranks, Angleton becomes suspicious of everyone and begins voicing reckless accusations. This being historical fiction, of course, we all know how the story ends. When the CIA comes under hostile scrutiny during the post-Watergate period, Angleton has few friends left able or willing to defend him from his detractors, and he is sacked from the Agency he had devoted his life to. In what must have been the bitterest of ironies for him, attacks on his own loyalty are among the charges that doom him. Buckley touches on all this only very lightly at the end of this short work, but the simple brushstrokes paint a poignant picture. Spytime is a very good book and I recommend it.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A GOOD READ, July 4, 2000

By A Customer

Ms. Jane Adams is off the mark on Spytime-in fact, I'm not sure we read the same book. The novel's well-written-as we expect: this is Buckley, after all, good at everything but sex descriptions (he writes of a woman's "malleable vulva"! , memorable phrasing, but, gosh!); it's nicely paced, an absorbing fictional portrait. Angleton's obsession with Kim Philby is not, as Ms. Adams has it, "the engine that drives Spytime." Rather the book starts at the moment of undoing which marks the end of Angleton's career, and which comes because his superiors feel a need to sacrifice someone to the Church Committee. The Fifth Man is on Angleton's mind at that moment-he believes he knows who it is. We then get a flashback tour of Angleton's career in counter-espionage, an important reminder of the Soviets' use of disinformation and misinformation against the US, and of the moves and counter-moves of the Cold War. Angleton's belief in the identity of the Fifth Man was a surprise to me, and I think it will be to most readers.

What Buckley does in this book, as in its predecessor Redhunter, is to tell the story of a flawed hero in an extraordinary time. These are not adventure stories like Day of the Jackal or Red Storm Rising, or the Blackford Oakes novels, but they are adventure stories nonetheless: unusual novels of the real people who helped shape and guide our country's life during the most dangerous period in history. If some of the excitement seems gone from these tellings, it's only because we think we know how the story ended. This is not a great book, nor one of Buckley's best (my list includes Unmaking of a Mayor; Cruising Speed; Stained Glass; Airborne, etc.--books which broke new ground); but it's an important book, a chronicle of a time unlike any other in history, and a very satisfying read. The oddest thing about it, given its grave subject matter, is that it's also a fun, fast read-I read it in a day-that lingers in the mind afterward. The only thing I wished when I put it down was that there was an epilogue, to tell me what happened to the people afterward. My CD edition of the Britannica doesn't give the rest of the story-perhaps Buckley can put that into the paperback edition.

I highly recommend it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In Search of the Infamous Fifth Man, January 7, 2005

By	Peter Kenney (Birmingham, Alabama, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton (Paperback)

SPYTIME is a fictional story which covers such historical events as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of Mussolini and the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia. Many of the book's characters are real. In spite of its title the novel is not a spy story in the traditional sense but is actually written more in the style of an expose of the inner workings of the CIA.

Jim Angleton remains in the background throughout much of the story while the bulk of the spy action is handled by his young protege, Tony Crespi, who is stationed in Beirut. Angleton's main obsession as Director of Counterintelligence is the search for the infamous Fifth Man who collaborated with Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Philby.

SPYTIME is an intriguing book for anyone who is interested in the Cold War and the CIA. Buckley writes with some authority about these subjects. The novel's greatest weakness is its lack of suspense and the ending is also a bit of a dud.