The Liar
How a Double Agent in the CIA Became the Cold War's Last Honest Man
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The Cold War meets Mad Men in the form of Karel Koecher, a double agent whose shifting loyalties and over-the-top hedonism reverberated from New York to Moscow
In the mid-1970s, the CIA and KGB watched Karel Koecher closely—they were both convinced he was working for the enemy. And they were both right. Traveling with his wife, Hana, Koecher posed as a Czechoslovak asylum seeker and arrived in the US as a Communist sleeper agent. After parlaying a doctorate from Columbia into a job at the CIA, Koecher proceeded to operate as a double agent at the height of the Cold War.
Shunning a low profile, the Koechers embraced Manhattan’s high life—with cocaine, swinging, and parties emblematic of the times and their penchant for risk. Hana, who was no more than a shy teenager when she arrived, grew into a sophisticated international diamond dealer who relayed messages to Karel’s handlers. Riding a wave of euphoria, the Koechers felt unstoppable. But it was too good to last.
Using newly declassified documents, interrogation tapes, and extraordinary firsthand accounts from the Koechers themselves, Cunningham reconstructs their double lives and the fading Cold War, where a strange moral fog made it hard to know what truth was being fought for, and to what end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cunningham, a former correspondent for the Economist, debuts with a poorly sourced and sloppy recounting of the bizarre espionage career of Czech spy Karel Koecher. Koecher joined his country's intelligence and security agency, the Státní bezpecnost, in 1962. According to Cunningham, who interviewed the spy five times more than 50 years later, Koecher, who'd been convicted of statutory rape, signed up to clean his record and afford him more of a future. In 1965, he and his wife traveled to the U.S., posing as defectors, and Koecher managed to be hired by the CIA in 1973. He used that position to feed the Soviet Union valuable intel, but was arrested by the FBI in 1984 and later freed in a swap for refusenik Anatoly Sharansky. Readers will likely question the veracity of the verbatim recreation—including trivial details—of conversations from the 1970s, apparently derived from interviews the author conducted in 2015 and 2016. Factual errors, such as describing mobster John Gotti as having been a neighboring prisoner of Koecher's in January 1985, imprisoned for a murder not committed until December of that year, further undermine what ends up feeling like an unreliable account. This odd story merits better.
