Jonathan Stevenson (1)

A Drop of Treason: Philip Agee and His Exposure of the CIA by Jonathan Stevenson is a detailed and comprehensive account of Agee both before and after his controversial book on the workings of the CIA. A great book as both history and as nonfiction that almost reads like fiction.

I am of the age to remember Agee's book and might have a little more memory of it than many my age because my father was part of the intelligence community at-large (NSA and Naval Security Group, Fort Meade) so the book was discussed my senior year of high school at home.

This book is a perfect example of not being what I initially expected it to be, and my being thankful it wasn't. I expected the usual story of what he did at the CIA and what people thought of him, maybe a little about what he did after publication. But this did all of that and so much more. It is far more even-handed than most books about intelligence people who turn without sidestepping both Agee's positives and negatives.

I think what stood out for me was that even when it was largely a biography like any other, Stevenson made sure to keep everything in context. What Agee did, why (or at least why he said he did) he did it, and the repercussions to Agee and the Agency.

I think most readers will come away with a better and far more nuanced understanding of who Agee was and why he did what he did in the manner he did it. I will always have a difficult time with the naming of names, at least the names of field agents. That is putting people's lives at risk as well as their careers. I also grapple with the idea of whether he tried to do what was "right" because he believed that strongly or because he simply wanted to be visible (call it hubris, call it ego, whatever). But Stevenson has given me the information to make how I feel a bit better informed.

I hesitate to state explicitly how I feel toward Agee because the book does, I think, an excellent job of offering the reader plenty of pros and cons, sometimes told with a slant but not too often and not too slant. Where I ended up with my opinion may well be a different place from where you end up, so I don't want to make it sound like the book argued for the position I take. I think anyone interested in US intelligence, both in the Cold War era as well as today, will come away with new insight and maybe a new appreciation of what it took, right or wrong, for Agee to do what he did.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (plus d'informations)

Because I know a few of the people Jonathan Stevenson describes in Hard Men Humble, initially I was inclined to say he got them wrong. But after a second or two, I realized that that would have been missing the point. The people I know from the book do not match the people he writes about--today. That is because they have changed. People do not remain static in their opinions or attitudes--even when they have hit their late seventies and eighties. When you read this excellent series of biographical sketches, you understand that. The men Stevenson came to know towards the turn of the millennium, after all, were greatly changed from the men who had fought during the war, or the men they were before the war--at least that goes for most of them.

And this is a special group, veterans of the wars in Vietnam and Laos who simply discovered that America in the late twentieth century was not a place they were comfortable in. And this occurred for a variety of reasons, some being the way Americans chose to live their lives after the war but a lot having to do with a familiarity and comfort with Southeast Asia. I know that even in 2019, the suburbs of Bangkok are much more like the America I grew up in during the 1950s than is most of America itself. Of course, the surveillance state, especially as imagined in China, has enthralled a number of governments in the region who see it as the future--but that is another story. For now, Thailand and even Laos and Vietnam are not America, and that is a point in their favor.

Of all the people Stevenson describes, I must admit that Mark Smith, the "Major," sticks out and haunts me. (I hasten to add that Smith is not among the expats from the war I have ever known.) But his story is stupefying, astonishing, even among the stories of a group of people who mostly encountered danger and defied death on a daily basis. Twenty years on from Stevenson's interviews with these men, I would like to know what became of Smith and some of the others I don't know. A sequel to this story would be appropriate.… (plus d'informations)