The Mole

Winston Bates is without training or talent, the very definition of anti-spy. Yet this failed poet in postwar Paris is recruited by a foreign power and sent undercover to Washington. Somehow he makes his way onto the staff of the powerful Senator Richard Russell, head of the Armed Services Committee, and from that perch gains extensive and revealing contacts with the crucial players in the American political game. The Dulles brothers, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson,...
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Winston Bates is without training or talent, the very definition of anti-spy. Yet this failed poet in postwar Paris is recruited by a foreign power and sent undercover to Washington. Somehow he makes his way onto the staff of the powerful Senator Richard Russell, head of the Armed Services Committee, and from that perch gains extensive and revealing contacts with the crucial players in the American political game. The Dulles brothers, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, Joe Alsop, Walter Lippmann, Roy Cohn, Ollie North--Winston befriends them all and haplessly betrays them for a quarter century.

A comedy of manners burrowed within circles of power and information, The Mole is a witty social history of Washington in the latter half of the twentieth century that asks the question: How much damage can be done by the wrong person in the right place at the right time?

Written as Winston's memoir, The Mole details postwar America from an angle uniquely off-center. From the Suez Crisis to the U-2 Crash, from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam to Watergate, the novel is richly and factually conceived, marvelously convincing, and offers the listener a slightly subversive character searching for identity and meaning in a heady time during one of history's most defining eras.