The Liar: How a Double Agent in the CIA Became the Cold War’s Last Honest Man

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. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. (Aug.)