Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Blowing My Cover, by Lindsay Moran
Sometimes you’re in an airport, looking for a book to read, and a book cover just tickles your interest. Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, by Lindsay Moran, was that right book at the right time. It’s a fast read that puts the CIA into the perspective that we long-in-the-tooth office workers suspect exists everywhere: it’s a bunch of workers who worry about things like employee reviews and paper pushing, who get budgets for some things that seem really bizarre while other necessities are denied them, whose corporate cultures claim to be one thing to the outside world while employees experience something completely different. The big difference, of course, is that most of us leave our dysfunctional workplaces behind at the end of the day, whereas Moran describes a bunch of workers who carry a world of deception around with them, weaving a world of lies and, more often, avoiding entanglements that would eventually expose them. It’s funny, in that cynical sort of way - just my type of humour.