Books

A CIA bureau chief named Hoffman and his Middle East field operative Roger Ferris are talking, about a third of the way through this masterly new spy novel by Washington Post journalist David Ignatius, about their plan to create a fictitious American spy who is found dead in al-Qaeda territory with documents on his body suggesting that the CIA has penetrated the terrorist organization.

CRAIG LAROTONDA/Special Contributor

"Do you remember the KGB mastermind guy Karla in the le Carré novels?" Hoffman says. "Well, I've decided that Suleiman [the terrorist master planner who is the target of their plot] is al-Qaeda's Karla ... "

After finishing this book, the sixth (and finest) by one of the country's most gifted journalists, I'd like to turn that statement around and say that David Ignatius is Suleiman's John le Carré. He has written a spy thriller so terrific that it will both chill you with the murderous inevitability of its convincing plot and cheer you with the hope, because the novel ends on a positive, fablelike note, that life might also be like that.

The character of Ferris is the tightly wound spring that drives the novel. After he is nearly killed in an insurgent ambush in Iraq, the CIA agent with a somewhat hazy family history and a sexy high-powered Washington lawyer spouse, roars full throttle into a ruse to create the "poison pill" that would "burst every node and capillary in the body of the enemy... "

Inspired by a famous British WWII disinformation ploy in which the spies of Bletchley Park, England's espionage headquarters, invented the masterly lie that duped the Nazis and helped win the war, Ferris sells Hoffman on his idea, and novelist Ignatius closes the deal with us readers, as well.

He skillfully creates the sights and sounds and emotions of wartime Middle East, and its deceptions and desires, taking us on a tour from Jordan to Iraq to Germany to Turkey and Washington even as he pulls us deeper into Ferris' anti-terrorist scheme and deeper into Ferris' life and desires.

Surrounded by a nicely drawn group of secondary characters, Ferris rides high for a good long while, keeping the affection of the powerful chief of Jordanian intelligence even as he works to deceive him, and finding new passion in his liaison with an attractive American woman whose work brings her, and then Ferris, to the Palestinian refugee camps in the darkest corners of Jordan.

In Mr. Ignatius's good company, lovers of thrillers and students of current Middle Eastern affairs will want to go with them.

Author Alan Cheuse talks about books on National Public Radio.

David Ignatius

(W.W.Norton, $24.95) Read an excerpt from Body of Lies. GuideLive.com/Extra

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