The Company by
Robert Littell
hbk out September 02
Published by Pan
at £16.99
There aren’t too many 900 page books you wish were longer, but this is
one of them. A hugely ambitious novel from Robert Littell, a Gold Dagger
winner with his first ever novel, The Defection of A.J.Lewinter, back in
1973, The Company is a kind of Once Upon a Time in the CIA (with all the
epic overtones of the Leone masterpieces). It takes in 45 years of Cold
War history, the Central Intelligence Agency a murky presence at each
event: Berlin after the 1948 air-lift, Philby, Burgess and Maclean, the
Hungarian uprising of 1956, Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, the Russian
occupation of Afghanistan, the (unforeseen) putsch against Gorbachev and
the rise of Yeltsin.
The key narrative device is a brilliant (if obvious) one. After
plunging into classic espionage territory (a Vatican luminary is
murdered, a file abstracted, a defection that goes wrong) the key
players are introduced; Jack McAuliffe, Leo Kritzky, Elliott Winstrom
Ebbitt II, all recent graduates of the recently formed CIA–along with
one or two from the Principal Adversary like Yevgeny Tsipin (prepare
yourself for some portentous sounding Russian dialogue!).
It’s 1950, the opportunities (if opportunities they were) for some
form of détente with Soviet Russia outlined in Shattered Peace, Daniel
Yergin’s influential book, long past, and with Cold War attitudes firmly
in place. This is a book where the good guys are pretty good and the
author’s seemingly liberal views are apparent in the bad guys– flawed
but human. Reacquaint yourself too (or learn anew), the jargon of
espionage, some standard Le Carré, some Littell-specific: watchers,
walking back the cat, barium meals, the file names, full of foreboding,
spelt out in capital letters on the page.
And so our heroes are deployed, brilliantly, throughout the flashpoints
of the Cold War, intersecting with a huge cast of real individuals from
a stuttering Adrian ‘Kim’ Philby, a young Lyndon Johnson, various heads
of the CIA, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, an ailing Ronald Reagan, Boris
Yeltsin, along with bit parts for Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, even a
young Robert Redford at the Hungarian border.
Most of all, there is the brooding figure of James Jesus Angleton, once
Philby’s regular dining partner in Washington, obsessed with his
friend’s betrayal, and seeing a double, nay triple agent in every
Russian defector, his paranoid scenarios involving both Harold Wilson
and Henry Kissinger. Meanwhile he slowly builds incontrovertible
evidence of SASHA, a Soviet “mole’ at the heart of the CIA, set up by
Starik, Angleton’s opposite number and a weird fan of Lewis Carroll with
a rather more explicit liking for young girls–and a real-life equivalent
to Le Carré’s Smiley and his adversary Karla.
And lest you think you cannot stand all this history, real or imagined,
rest assured that Littell will find the human angle: loyalties tested or
broken, lovers stranded by events, families fractured by mistrust and
deception. Prepare too to be shaken and moved by the real heroism of the
participants, notably the superb section devoted to the Hungarian
freedom fighters as they defend their fragile revolution against the
brutal repression of the returning Soviet forces (probably the first
Cold War event to impress itself on your reviewer’s 14 year-old
consciousness).
There are faults of course. In such a tightly organised book, there is
little time for the introspection of Le Carré, the shades of grey. This
is a populist book (and none the worse for that) partly aimed at a
generation that did not grow up under the mushroom shadow, written in
bold strokes and occasionally reminiscent of those Hollywood yarns in
which Bach or Chopin would show up at a party to be greeted with “Hey,
Johann” or “Hi Fryderyk.” (Film rights are already sold!)
Its choice of historic events is perhaps pretty obvious. Why not the
‘success’ of Chile to balance the numerous ‘failures’ covered here? Why
not Vietnam where Graham Greene observed CIA activity long before John
F. Kennedy committed the US to a military presence?
No matter. Beautifully constructed, and even if you know your history
well, this book will have you racing through the pages to discover what
happens next. Clear the decks for a superb read.
