Présentation de l'éditeur
In this suspenseful and atmospheric spy novel in the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carr, Henry Bromell unfolds a labyrinthine tale of intrigue and moral ambiguity.
In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, CIA agent Mack Hooper arrived in the tiny middle-eastern kingdom of Kurash with a mission to befriend and protect its inexperienced young ruler. Now, forty years later, the country no longer exists and Mack’s son Terry is trying to piece together his father’s story. Was he a friend to the young king, or a diplomat-seducer sent to betray him? And what happened to the lost kingdom? Moving deftly between the feudal world of Kurash and the martini-washed enclaves of the American spies,
Little America is a riveting and unexpectedly moving tale of honor and betrayal as well as a brilliant evocation of espionage in the darkest days of the Cold War.
Extrait
1 One summer Saturday morning in 1957, almost five months before the events in question, the front door of a modest, two-story stucco house on P Street, in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., opened wide and out I stepped with my mother and my father. I was ten at the time, nursing a pompadour. We had been back from Syria for three years, and in five months we were to be stationed in Kurash, the subject of this story. My father was a spy, or, as he prefers to be remembered, an intelligence officer, with the C.I.A., from 1950 to 1978. He was recruited out of a Wall Street investment firm. He hated Wall Street, but, being a Wasp in good standing, he could only express his hatred indirectly and involuntarily. His neck used to lock in a rigid sideways staring position when riding the commuter train back and forth between Grand Central Station and Hastings- on-Hudson. We lived there—my father, my mother, myself, and a cocker spaniel named Winston—in a rented house on Clinton Street. I wouldn’t say my father, once in the C.I.A., became a happy man; melancholia being, I now realize, endemic, deep in my family’s genes. Rather, I’d say he swapped one kind of anxiety for another. His neck no longer seized on him, yet the acid drip of intelligence-gathering did eventually eat a sizable hole through his stomach and cause him to almost bleed to death.
On that hot summer morning, in 1957, my father and I headed off for Wisconsin Avenue at a leisurely pace. My mother waited for us to turn the corner, then gave chase. Up Wisconsin Avenue I walked. My father disappeared into People’s Drug Store. My mother hesitated, made a decision—she went after my father. A mistake. When she entered the chill relief of People’s air-conditioning and looked around, she couldn’t find him. He had vanished.
We were playing a game.
The game was called Spy.
My father and I were an agent and his control. He had to pass a message to me. My mother was counterintelligence. If she could catch us passing the note, she would win. If she couldn’t, we’d win. We always won. My father always won. Even in the pretend version of his life, he had to win. Looking back , I now see that my mother had to assume on a regular basis the role of a kind of spy’s whipping boy, losing over and over again to my father. But maybe this game, played on weekends since I was seven, helped prepare her for December 1958, when my father flew back to Washington for consultations and left her, to the consternation of all involved, in charge of the Hamra station.
I have several questions regarding what happened, exactly, in that year, 1958, in that place, Kurash.
Kurash was a small country wedged between the eastern border of Jordan, the rump of Syria, and the southwestern corner of Iraq. It no longer exists.
What happened, in history, inexactly, is this: in December of 1958, in Kurash, the young King, only twenty-three at the time, was killed as he stood in the garden behind Hamzah Palace smoking a cigarette. His reign, which lasted a mere five years, ended in the darkness of the garden, h
