An avuncular account of a life spent uncovering deception for the CIA.
Memoir from a veteran of the arcane specialty of covert polygraph espionage interrogations.
A second-generation CIA officer, Trabue served from 1971 to 2011, directing both the covert-ops polygraph program and the CIA Polygraph School. His longevity seems attributable to his restrained persona. As he emphasizes, he is no James Bond, averring instead that "the threat of arrest and incarceration was real…the gentleman's game of espionage was really an extremely serious enterprise." Yet, he was drawn to covert examinations for the chance to travel abroad, satisfying the wanderlust remaining from his years as an "Agency Brat," noting, “a childhood filled with foreign travel made me attractive to Polygraph Section management.” Trabue's identification with the agency results in a circumspect account, even by genre standards. He steadfastly avoids identifying a single actual city or real-world case, relying on such obfuscations as “one of my favorite South American locations…a favorite for most visiting polygraph examiners.” He credits the previous generation of Cold War veterans for instilling in him rigorous respect for operational security, given that covert examination involves secretly bringing together the traveling examiner, the CIA case officer, the asset, and a 25-pound polygraph machine in safe houses in often hostile environments. Much of the text explores this basic challenge with anecdotal narratives, which become repetitive, although Trabue’s presentation of tradecraft, such as avoiding surveillance or utilizing hotels discreetly, feels authentic. Instead of historical narrative, the author focuses more on the psychological implications of his trade’s intricate probing of the human condition: "Whatever illegal activity people can do has been discussed during CIA polygraph tests." He emphasizes that his interrogations veered far from heavy-handed noir cliches: "The goal was always to snatch the information out of the examinee's back pocket without his knowledge through the use of persuasive and rational arguments."
An avuncular account of a life spent uncovering deception for the CIA.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06504-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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