The Company

THE COMPANY is the magnum opus by acclaimed espionage novelist Robert Littell: a mesmerizing, dazzlingly plotted epic that tells the life and death struggle of two generations of CIA operatives during a long Cold War. With a sharp eye for the pathos and absurdity of the Cold War, Robert Littell crafted his first novel, the now legendary spy thriller The Defection of A.J. Lewinter, published in 1973 to enthusiastic acclaim. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times called it “a perfect little gem, the best Cold War thriller I’ve read in years,” and the praise kept coming with later novels such as The Debriefing and The Amateur, with critics hailing Littell as “the American le Carre” (New York Times) and raving that his books were “as good as thriller writing gets” (The Washington Post). For his fourteenth novel, capping a career, Robert Littell does for the CIA—“the Company” to insiders—what Mario Puzo did for the Mafia: create an engrossing, multi-generational, wickedly nostalgic yet utterly candid saga bringing to life, through a host of characters—historical and imagined—the fifty years of this obscure, complex and powerful organization. At the heart of the novel, a stunningly conceived mole hunt involving such rivals and allies as the MI6, KGB, and Mossad concentrates the action. Racing across a canvas that spans the legendary Berlin Base in the 1950s—the front line of the simmering Cold War—to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, the Afghan war, the Gorbachev putsch, and other major theatres of operation for the CIA, The Company tells a thrilling story of the passions and frailties of agents imprisoned in double lives, the heartache of those who know terrible secrets and dreaded terrible scenarios, and the rightheadedness and wrongheadedness of incredibly dedicated men and women fighting an enemy that was amoral, elusive, formidable. In a style that is intelligent, ironic and saturated with fascinating insider detail, Littell tells it like it was: CIA agents, fighting not only the good fight against foreign enemies, but sometimes the bad one as well, with the ends justifying such means as CIA- organized assassinations, covert wars, kidnappings, and toppling of legitimate governments. Littell also brilliantly lays bare the warring within the Company to add another dimension to the spy vs. spy game that absorbed the lifetimes of countless agents: the battles between the counterintelligence agents behind the desks in Washington, like the utterly obsessive real-life mole hunter James Angleton, and the covert action boys in the field, like The Company’s Harvey Torriti—the Sorcerer—a brilliant and brash rule breaker and dirty tricks expert who fights fire with fire, and his Apprentice, Jack McAuliffe, recruited fresh out of Yale, who learns both tradecraft and the hard truths of life in the field. As this dazzling anatomy of the CIA unfolds, nothing less than the world’s future in the second half of the twentieth century is at stake. At once a celebration of a long Cold War well fought, an elegy for the end of an era, and a reckoning for a profession in which moral ambiguity created a wilderness of mirrors, The Company is the Cold War’s devastating truth, its entertaining tale, its last word.