Anonymous Male
A Life Among Spies
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A no-holds-barred memoir about identity, from a former Hostage Rescue Team sniper who left the FBI on 9/11 only to lose himself, moving deeper into a world of spies.
“Imagine if Hunter S. Thompson had been a CIA asset. That’s one way to describe Anonymous Male, whose author, Christopher Whitcomb, was an FBI sniper turned global-war-on-terror freelance intelligence agent.”—The Wall Street Journal
In September 2001, Christopher Whitcomb was the most visible FBI agent in the world. His bestselling memoir, Cold Zero, had led to novels, articles in GQ, and op-eds in The New York Times. He appeared on Imus in the Morning, Larry King, and Meet the Press; he was nominated for a Peabody reporting for CNBC. He played poker with Brad Pitt while contracting for the CIA.
Then one day in 2006, without warning, Whitcomb packed a bag, flew into Somalia, and dropped off the face of the earth. For fifteen years, he waged a mercenary war on himself, traveling the world with aliases, cash, and guns. He built a private army in the jungles of Timor-Leste, working contracts for intelligence agencies, where he survived a coup d’état only to lose his friends, abandon his family, and give up on God.
And though many stories might have ended there, Anonymous Male is a tale of redemption. While surfing the wilds of Indonesia, Whitcomb found himself trapped beneath a giant wave, where, at the edge of drowning, he came to terms with the chaos of his own clandestine life. He survived the wave to find his way home and rebuild the world that he had abandoned.
Anonymous Male is a riveting memoir about loss and recovery, a deeply intimate story that spans continents, war, politics and the media. It is a confession, and a cautionary tale of what happens to people whom the government trains to lie, even to themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former FBI sniper Whitcomb (Cold Zero) recounts life after the Bureau in this scattered memoir. Whitcomb resigned from the FBI in 2001 after publishing an account of his experiences at the agency. His final day on the job was September 12, and his desire to continue counterterrorism work after 9/11 led him to approach the CIA with an offer to use press credentials he had from his days as a journalist to gain access to tribal areas in Pakistan and share what he learned with the Pentagon. From there, Whitcomb delivers a discursive, often boastful account of life in the spotlight and out of it. He writes of becoming a public face of the "war on terror," including as the co-host of a CNBC show, and of his increasing obsession with anonymity, which drove him to start a private security firm in war-torn Timor and nearly drown off the coast of Bali. His wife helped straighten him out during Covid, insisting that "people who live unusual lives have an obligation to record them." Unfortunately, the narrative is marred by hazy through lines and abrasive prose (he writes that it's easy to hide in Asia and Africa because they're "giant expanses of nobody-gives-a-fuck"). In the author's note, Whitcomb concedes that his life is "quite difficult to explain." This rambling account won't leave many readers feeling he's succeeded.
