Body of Lies
By David Ignatius
Norton
347 pp.
$24.95
Suspicion is the most powerful enemy. When more-conventional methods fail, rising CIA operative Roger Ferris, inspired by a British World War II ruse against the Germans, decides that only suspicion is potent enough to expose and bring down the elusive terrorist Suleiman, believed responsible for a series of deadly car bombings in Europe.
In David Ignatius’s sixth novel, the gripping thriller Body of Lies, Ferris, after recovering from injuries sustained in Iraq, is posted by his gruff boss, Ed Hoffman, to Jordan as chief of station. Shuttling between the Middle East, Washington, and Europe, Ferris concocts a plan to throw into the terrorists’ midst the corpse of an imaginary CIA agent, the literal body of lies, with a figurative body of lies around it that will entangle the jihadists in mutual distrust and violence.
Unfortunately, doubt and suspicion on a lesser scale plague Ferris’s life through and through. Hoffman is a mentor and a friend, to a point, but also clearly ruthless—an agency survivor who values loyalty just slightly less than he does a win. Then there’s the urbane Jordanian intelligence chief, Hani Salaam, who wears his authority quietly but absolutely. Ferris likes and relies on both men, and tries to act as a buffer between them without getting ground up in the vicious gears of their endless schemes.
Ferris’s personal life is no tidier. He’s grown distant from his wife, Gretchen, a high Justice Department official with the body of Angelina Jolie and the mind of John Yoo. The marriage has been a charade for some time, and he decides to divorce her. To dissuade him, she makes moves to destroy him, career and all. So, while trying to sniff out his lethal quarry abroad, Ferris now must also contend with the furious lioness Gretchen at home.
Fueling his hurry to divorce is Alice, a beautiful, earnest, liberal American living in Amman and working in Palestinian refugee camps. She knows Ferris as a State Department official, but is savvy enough to suspect what he says and doesn’t on that score. The intimacy they crave is impossible in the fog of lies and half truths that defines Ferris’s life, or rather lives. His operational and personal plans are in fundamental tension with each other, and both look like long shots.
Ignatius is a Washington Post columnist and associate editor who has covered the CIA, the Justice Department, and the Mideast, as well as editing the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He depicts the CIA as a viper’s nest of careerist malcontents with a few noble but reckless cowboys breaking out now and then, aided by some gung-ho defense personnel. He writes with a worldly assurance dipped in fatalistic melancholy. That compelling combination is reminiscient of Charles McCarry and John Le Carre, peppered with a special post-9/11 urgency.
Wins and losses, in Ignatius's world, are never complete, rarely what they seem, and hardly ever owing to those who are credited or scapegoated for them. Attesting to the book’s strength is the fact that the reader feels both implicated and invested in Ferris’s quintessentially American hopes and desperation and impatience. We fear that the real-life agents playing such high-stakes games with our lives and national reputation are really as rash, foolhardy, instinctual, and impulsive as Ignatius suggests. But we fear, equally, that they may not be, when our foes are clearly all that and more.
-A.C.K.
$24.95
Suspicion is the most powerful enemy. When more-conventional methods fail, rising CIA operative Roger Ferris, inspired by a British World War II ruse against the Germans, decides that only suspicion is potent enough to expose and bring down the elusive terrorist Suleiman, believed responsible for a series of deadly car bombings in Europe.
In David Ignatius’s sixth novel, the gripping thriller Body of Lies, Ferris, after recovering from injuries sustained in Iraq, is posted by his gruff boss, Ed Hoffman, to Jordan as chief of station. Shuttling between the Middle East, Washington, and Europe, Ferris concocts a plan to throw into the terrorists’ midst the corpse of an imaginary CIA agent, the literal body of lies, with a figurative body of lies around it that will entangle the jihadists in mutual distrust and violence.
Unfortunately, doubt and suspicion on a lesser scale plague Ferris’s life through and through. Hoffman is a mentor and a friend, to a point, but also clearly ruthless—an agency survivor who values loyalty just slightly less than he does a win. Then there’s the urbane Jordanian intelligence chief, Hani Salaam, who wears his authority quietly but absolutely. Ferris likes and relies on both men, and tries to act as a buffer between them without getting ground up in the vicious gears of their endless schemes.
Ferris’s personal life is no tidier. He’s grown distant from his wife, Gretchen, a high Justice Department official with the body of Angelina Jolie and the mind of John Yoo. The marriage has been a charade for some time, and he decides to divorce her. To dissuade him, she makes moves to destroy him, career and all. So, while trying to sniff out his lethal quarry abroad, Ferris now must also contend with the furious lioness Gretchen at home.
Fueling his hurry to divorce is Alice, a beautiful, earnest, liberal American living in Amman and working in Palestinian refugee camps. She knows Ferris as a State Department official, but is savvy enough to suspect what he says and doesn’t on that score. The intimacy they crave is impossible in the fog of lies and half truths that defines Ferris’s life, or rather lives. His operational and personal plans are in fundamental tension with each other, and both look like long shots.
Ignatius is a Washington Post columnist and associate editor who has covered the CIA, the Justice Department, and the Mideast, as well as editing the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He depicts the CIA as a viper’s nest of careerist malcontents with a few noble but reckless cowboys breaking out now and then, aided by some gung-ho defense personnel. He writes with a worldly assurance dipped in fatalistic melancholy. That compelling combination is reminiscient of Charles McCarry and John Le Carre, peppered with a special post-9/11 urgency.
Wins and losses, in Ignatius's world, are never complete, rarely what they seem, and hardly ever owing to those who are credited or scapegoated for them. Attesting to the book’s strength is the fact that the reader feels both implicated and invested in Ferris’s quintessentially American hopes and desperation and impatience. We fear that the real-life agents playing such high-stakes games with our lives and national reputation are really as rash, foolhardy, instinctual, and impulsive as Ignatius suggests. But we fear, equally, that they may not be, when our foes are clearly all that and more.
-A.C.K.
