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BookBrowse Reviews An Ordinary Spy: A riveting and dramatic portrait of modern espionage

An Ordinary Spy
A Novel
by Joseph Weisberg
Paperback, Jan 2009,
288 pages.
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Joseph Weisberg, a former CIA officer, has said that he wanted to write "the most realistic spy novel that had ever been written," and so An Ordinary Spy portrays not the glamour and suspense of working for the CIA but the everyday tedium of slowly cultivating informants for tiny scraps of intelligence. The protagonist, Mark Ruttenberg, is also a former CIA officer, writing a memoir about when he was a new agent on his first overseas assignment, desperate to advance his career by recruiting his first informants. In Ruttenberg's world, the real gains for national security are minimal, the risks are enormous, and the opportunities for heroism practically nonexistent, as his actions are muffled by...
Beyond the Book
Redactions in Modern Literature

Though the memo at the end of the novel from the CIA Publications Review Board is addressed to the novel's protagonist, Mark Ruttenberg, thus revealing the redactions (blanked out text) as a fictional device to create an aura of authenticity, the novel did actually pass by the PRB—six times. Weisberg preemptively redacted his own work for security reasons as well as literary ones, but was obligated to...
This review was originally published in January 2008, and has been updated for the January 2009 paperback release. Click here to go to this issue.
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