The Liar - How a Double Agent in the CIA Became the Cold War's Last Honest Man

"In the mid-1970s, the CIA and KGB watched Karel Koecher closely--they were both convinced he was working for the enemy. And they were both right. Traveling with his wife, Hana, Koecher posed as a Czechoslovak asylum seeker and arrived in the US as a Communist sleeper agent. After parlaying a doctorate from Columbia into a job at the CIA, Koecher proceeded to operate as a double agent at the height of the Cold War. Using newly declassified documents, interrogation tapes, and extraordinary firsthand accounts from the Koechers themselves, Cunningham reconstructs their double lives and the fading Cold War, where a strange moral fog made it hard to know what truth was being fought for, and to what end"--

About the author

Benjamin Cunningham is a Barcelona-based writer. He is a former correspondent for The Economist, editor in chief of the Prague Post, and copy boy at the Saginaw News. In addition he contributes to The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Aspen Review, Le Monde Diplomatique and is an opinion columnist for Sme, Slovakia’s main daily newspaper. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona.  
 

Summary

The Cold War meets Mad Men in the form of Karel Koecher, a double agent whose shifting loyalties and over-the-top hedonism reverberated from New York to Moscow

Foreword

The Cold War meets Mad Men in the form of Karel Koecher, a double agent whose shifting loyalties and over-the-top hedonism reverberated from New York to Moscow

Product details

• Authors: Benjamin Cunningham
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 23.08.2022
• EAN: 9781541700796
• ISBN: 978-1-5417-0079-6
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 154 mm x 240 mm x 30 mm
• Weight: 447 g
• Illustrations: B-W insert on text
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; USA, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Intelligence & Espionage, 20th Century, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, United States of America, USA, Espionage & secret services, History of the Americas, Espionage and secret services