Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2014
384 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
Graham Weber has been the director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents' names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads.
Weber turns to a charismatic (and unstable) young man named James Morris who runs the Internet Operations Center. He's the CIA's in-house geek. Weber launches Morris on a mole hunt unlike anything in spy fiction - one that takes the reader into the hacker underground of Europe and America and ends up in a landscape of paranoia and betrayal. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it's drawn, The Director is a maze of deception and double dealing, about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones and nothing can be trusted. The CIA has belatedly discovered that this is not your father's Cold War, and Weber must play catch-up, against the clock and an unknown enemy, in a game he does not yet understand.
"Starred Review. Ignatius builds palpable momentum and creates engaging, fully human characters, notably the fallible and conscientious Weber." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Ignatius...effectively outlines a plausible hack that rocks the entire world economy. He's given readers another compelling and enlightening look at what might happen next month. Must-read twenty-first-century espionage fiction." - Booklist
"While Ignatius's earlier works are more compelling in their geopolitical impact, this thriller engages the reader deeply in the arcana of cyber trade craft." - Library Journal
"Although the subject is timely, Ignatius wades too far into the mechanics of malicious computer use to make this a compelling tale; he turns an exciting idea into a story that fails under the weight of dull and irrelevant detail." - Kirkus
"Another brilliant thriller from the Dean of International Intrigue. Deception, deceit, and dishonor - The Director doesn't let up and absolutely doesn't disappoint! I loved this book!" - Brad Thor, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Hidden Order
"The best part of The Director is watching Ignatius grab the history of American intelligence and use it to divine our technological future. Here's your chance to see inside the CIA. Sculpted with an insider's eye, The Director shows you real people, real espionage, and the real threats to our national security." - Brad Meltzer, best-selling author of The Fifth Assassin
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Ignatius is a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.
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