By Patrick Anderson,
whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers@aol.com
Monday, May 1, 2006; C03
THE FAITHFUL SPY
By Alex Berenson
Random House. 352 pp. $24.95
Let's give New York Times reporter Alex Berenson credit for the year's most surefire thriller plot: CIA agent infiltrates al-Qaeda. It's such a sky-high concept that the film rights were auctioned off months ago, and Keanu Reeves may play undercover agent John Wells. If the idea is an inspired one in terms of commercial fiction, Berenson's execution of it is less so, but "The Faithful Spy" offers a well-informed, often chilling look at how al-Qaeda might launch a major new attack in the United States -- and how one intrepid undercover agent might do his darnedest to foil it.
We first see Wells in Afghanistan in 2001, leading a band of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters against the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance. Although an American, he has been with al-Qaeda long enough that his men trust him absolutely: "After years fighting jihad in Afghanistan and Chechnya, he spoke perfect Arabic and Pashtun. His beard was long, his hands callused. He rode a horse almost as well as the natives. . . . He prayed with them. He had proven that he belonged here, with these men." Of course, whether Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders trust him is another matter: "He could not truly prove himself except by dying for them, and that he did not plan to do."
They trust him enough to send him to the States, where he is to assist master spy Omar Khadri, who is putting together a massive attack, but Wells isn't told the specifics of the plan. When he makes furtive contact with his bosses at the CIA, he finds he is not trusted there, either. They fear he has been "doubled," won over to jihad; threatened with arrest, he is soon on the run, determined to prevent the attack on his own. At the same time, through the eyes of his friend and colleague Jennifer Exley, we are taken inside the CIA's frustrated efforts to piece together what new act of terrorism is coming.
Berenson is very good on all the things you would expect a skilled reporter to be good on. He gives a vivid picture of a U.S. Army raid on a terrorist meeting in Iraq, perhaps drawing on the three months he spent reporting for the Times there, and follows it with a persuasive portrait of how a captured Pakistani scientist is broken by torture at the hands of U.S. interrogators. He presents an all-too-convincing portrayal of how "sleeper cells" in the United States might acquire both a plague bacterium and a "dirty" nuclear device, and offers a detailed and bloody account of the explosion of two ANFO (ammonium nitrate-fuel oil) bombs that takes 336 lives in a major U.S. city -- and is just a diversion from the larger attack that lies ahead.
Berenson spices his narrative with caustic comments about those fighting on both sides of the war on terror. He says of bin Laden and his fanatical followers: "They wanted to take the religion back to the seventh-century desert. They couldn't compete in the modern world, so they would pretend that it didn't exist. Or destroy it." Of the CIA's difficulties in monitoring terrorists' e-mails, he notes: "In the race between the spies and the spammers, the spammers were winning. Penis-enlargement pills had turned out to be Osama's best friend." His scorn for much of the intelligence bureaucracy is seen in the fate of one talented CIA agent who predicted the Sept. 11 attacks -- and now is not trusted because he's clearly not a team player.
But Berenson stumbles when he shifts from terrorism to matters of the heart. We are told that Wells has been celibate during his 10 years with al-Qaeda. Even when he returns to the United States and is astonished by all the skin American women are now pleased to reveal, he aches for sex but vows not to pay for it or engage in one-night stands. His resolve is sorely tested by a woman he meets in a bar, but his purity is saved when her drunken ex-boyfriend bangs on the door.
The real reason for Wells's stubborn chastity is his continued love for the aforementioned Jennifer Exley. They met in CIA training, when both were married to others. There seems to have been a chaste flirtation before he went underground. She agonizes over her passion for a man she has only seen "for all of two weeks in the last ten years," asking herself: "Did he think of her the way she thought of him?" Well, yes, he does, but it's all pretty dippy, as is Wells's attempt to assuage his loneliness by buying two goldfish -- and even that ends badly: "Lucy had died, but Ricky was still alive, swimming listlessly."
Berenson even hokes up the cliffhanger climax of the novel -- when Wells will or will not prevent the deaths of several hundred thousand Americans -- by involving his beloved in it, against all logic. As long as Berenson sticks to the war on terror, "The Faithful Spy" is a first-rate thriller. If it fails to rise to the highest level of the genre -- that of Frederick Forsyth's "The Day of the Jackal" or Thomas Harris's "Black Sunday," to name two other works by reporters who turned to fiction -- it is because he has made his story a bit too slick and his hero a bit too good to be true. But his novel remains a timely reminder of the extremely precarious way we
live now.