cover image The Cobweb

The Cobweb

Stephen Bury. Bantam Books, $12.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-553-37828-3

Several months prior to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, when Iraq was still seen as an American ally against Iran, low-level CIA analyst Betsy Vandeventer steps outside her bureaucratic territory in a meeting by observing that the Iraqis might be misusing $300 million in U.S. agricultural aid to develop biological weapons. Betsy's theory throws a wrench in the long-developed foreign policy plans of high-level diplomat James Millikan, who deals with it by creating committees to study the problem, i.e., he ""cobwebs"" it. Meanwhile, a small-town sheriff in Iowa begins to stumble across the possibility that local Jordanian students are actually Iraqis in disguise, sent by Saddam to develop a dangerous germ-warfare weapon where his enemies would least expect it--at a small Midwestern college. Another bureaucrat, this time an academic determined to advance his career by a steady flow of grant funds and foreign-exchange students, makes the undercover enterprise easier. Bury (Interface) is at his best creating an elegant, sophisticated portrait of Washington. His capital is not a place of action and suspense so much as a more realistic place of intragovernmental turf wars and bureaucratic stalemate. (Sept.)