What will be on my nightstand before the week is over...

Beyond the cold, sometimes dull, realities of spycraft, The Great Game is about our cultural perceptions and conceptions of spies and spying, and of the merits of intelligence-gathering, and the literature and stories which we have produced to reflect these understandings. Apparently, when Hitz began to write the book, he considered (and even planned) to pen another book dissecting the problems within America's intelligence community. Certainly as the former inspector general of the CIA (among many other roles), he would have had the experience and insight to justify such a book. Apparently, his literary agent can be thanked for dissuading him, and for refocusing his energies, because the resulting book - which contrasts fiction with fact and culls the literary spies of Kipling, le Carre, Maugham, Greene and more for comparisons by which to examine the realities of actual intelligence operations.

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