The Liar: How a Double Agent in the CIA Became the Cold War's Last Honest Man [Hardcover]

The Cold War meetsMad Menin 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.

Benjamin Cunninghamis a Barcelona-based writer. He is a former correspondent forThe Economist, editor in chief of thePrague Post, and copy boy at theSaginaw News. In addition he contributes toThe Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Aspen Review, Le Monde Diplomatiqueand is an opinion columnist forSme, Slovakia’s main daily newspaper. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona.  
 “The glamour of espionage usually gets more attention than the flawed and fascinating people who practice it. By focusing his story on tl“+