Summer reads

"Body of Lies"
By David Ignatius
Norton, $24.95

Car bombs are going off in Rotterdam and Milan, a new offshoot of al-Qaida is on the rise, and a CIA officer is about to turn up dead in a remote Afghan province. But not all is as it seems: The dead CIA officer will be delivered there by the agency itself, the handiwork of a double-super-secret shop deep inside Langley, Va.

In David Ignatius' latest spy novel, "Body of Lies," the worldwide terror war is getting scarier by the day, a chaotic Iraq its flourishing crossroads. U.S. intelligence has failed to penetrate al-Qaida with an agent, so why not create a virtual one? The "black op" hatched by our hero, earnest CIA station chief Roger Ferris, aims to fool the terrorists into believing that their newest ringleader, a shadowy figure known as "Suleiman," is a double agent working for U.S. intelligence. If the CIA can get the terrorists to swallow the illusion -- offering the meticulously prepared body as a Rosetta stone to betrayal -- the terror network might just implode as a result.

A plan daring and brilliant, or arrogant and desperate? Ignatius toys with that question as Ferris toys with shady Iraqi operatives, a cunning Jordanian intelligence chief and a clumsy bureaucracy back in Washington, and gets in way over his head. The backdrop for this hall-of-mirrors tale is, of course, all too real, and news junkies and conspiracy theorists alike will find the political undercurrents rather familiar. But Ignatius, also a respected columnist for the Washington Post, keeps the pages turning with punchy prose and wry distillations of the global conflict at hand. The Milan bombing has everyone on edge from the outset, as evidenced by two "well-dressed Arabs" Ferris overhears while rushing back to Amman, Jordan, on a flight from Berlin: "It was the work of Al Qaeda; no, it was the Shiites, pretending to be Al Qaeda; no, it was a new group, more terrifying than any of the others. They had no certainty about anything, except that it was America's fault."

The novel's requisite love story is less convincing, if not tedious at turns (though perhaps true enough to the life of a covert CIA officer). But Ferris' pursuit of a nubile American aid worker he meets overseas is serviceable enough for an otherwise artfully layered, gripping story line. And Ignatius maintains a sense of humor when it comes to Ferris' lusty, Machiavellian wife back home, a right-wing lawyer on her way up at the Justice Department who isn't afraid to use Ferris' dark past, or a blow job or two, to keep him in line.

But perhaps the book's most darkly amusing moment comes not between the covers but on its dust jacket, from the man who helped Team Bush take the case for a war on Iraq to the rim. "Fascinating," declares George Tenet, the former CIA director who presided over the vivid, and later vividly bogus, intelligence used to launch the invasion. "Body of Lies is fiction but reads like fact."

-- Mark Follman

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