About book Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas (2000)
David Wise is well acquainted with the worlds of espionage and counter-espionage, and "Cassidy's Run" reflected that. While it's a fairly short book, it's probably the most detailed narrative of a long-term, counter-espionage operation I've ever read. Wise does a great job in putting the cloak and dagger action into the context of not only the Cold War, but also the 1970s post-Church Committee fallout on the Intelligence Community. If you find the non-fiction variety of spy stories interesting, this is certainly the book for you. It will hold your attention, amaze you at the capabilities of our security services, and probably also make you furious at some of the behaviors of bureaucracy.On the negative side, I felt a little sense of "bait and switch" with the manner in which Wise used the deaths of two FBI agents in this "secret spy war." Those deaths were certainly tragic, and they were certainly related to the FBI's counter-espionage operation. However, using that event as the start of the narrative seemed to imply the centrality of the event in the greater story; it was not. Nor were the deaths the result of KGB (actually GRU in this story) assassins wielding silenced weapons or poison-tipped umbrellas: they were the result of an airplane crash. I don't mean to minimize the tragedy of the deaths. I just think Wise shouldn't have tried to make it larger in his narrative than it was.
I wanted to like this one more than I did. While it was enlightening, and the time period it references has a lot of disturbing history in it, I couldn't get into the spy games when I feel strongly that neither side should have been developing better nerve gases to begin with. Add to that the usual grain of salt that you add when reading anything remotely recent on intelligence or national security -- you know you're not getting the whole story -- and it was worth reading once but not something I'll be eagerly passing on to my friends.
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