BOOK REVIEW: VICTOR IN THE JUNGLE
By Alex Finley
Reviewed by Bill Harlow, The Cipher Brief Senior Book Editor
Alex Finley has an eye (and an ear) for the absurd. A talent that no doubt came in useful during the six years she spent as a reports officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Her time in West Africa, Europe and a bit at CIA headquarters served as inspiration and fodder for her first novel Victor in the Rubble about a male CIA officer who found chasing terrorists easier than dealing with his own agency’s red tape. That book was written for catharsis. Her second book she says, the just-published Victor in the Jungle, was written for “pure fun” and she delivers that to her readers.
The hero of both books is Victor Caro, a good-humored clandestine service officer who does not seem to be afflicted by the personality quirks of most of the other characters populating his world. In the latest book, Caro has acquired a wife, Vanessa, an FBI agent who took a leave of absence from her GS-14 position to accompany Victor and their six-year-old son, Oliver, to a posting in the dysfunctional South American country of Guayandes.
You don’t have to be a CIA veteran to recognize many of the sharply drawn personality types in the book. Anyone who has worked in a bureaucracy will spot familiar figures – overly ambitious newbies, overly timid leaders, social butterflies and hard-bitten and hard-drinking veterans. Although Finley’s relatively short career at the Agency exposed her to some frustration – it seems she has come around to a good place in an overall assessment of her experience saying that she set out to write about the fun and adventure of a CIA career “despite the absurd dysfunction of the bureaucracy and despite (or because of) the very real risks of the job.” Her aim (achieved I think) is to capture the “thrilling chaos and camaraderie” possible when you have the right people on your team.
While a lot of the characters in her book are familiar – you find yourself hoping that a few of them are entirely the product of Finley’s imagination. For example, an Assistant Secretary of State who sends poems and “edible arrangements” to the authoritarian leader of Guayandes and who praises the actions of an Edward Snowden-like character whose mindless mass dumping of American secrets makes the jobs of Victor and his colleagues much harder and more dangerous. Finley accurately captures real-world absurdity where State Department employees are forbidden to look at press reports about the leaked cables because the government still considers the material classified – even though it is in every newspaper on the planet. The real-world impact of large-scale leaks is tellingly illustrated by a bit of dialog between Victor and one of his assets: “Your government can’t protect your secrets. How are you going to protect me?”
Victor and his colleagues work at an embassy-based station – although the organization is referred to in the book as “CYA” rather than “CIA.” But there is no mistaking the outfit – starting with the CIA seal on the book’s cover.
Finley has plenty of fun with the day-to-day operation of the station – including the assignment of cryptonyms to assets like “VZSPARKLEPONY.” And there was a colleague who had difficulty getting a travel visa out of someone at headquarters who was on a “super maxi-flex schedule” meaning that person worked 24 hours straight but only on Tuesdays – getting every 87th Tuesday off.
Finley also demonstrates a real appreciation for some of the unique skills wielded by Agency colleagues – such as a headquarters imagery analyst who specializes in deciphering jungle pictures. “She can look at a series of images of blades of grass and tell you which ant just farted,” one colleague had told him.
More than half the fun of Victor in the Jungle comes from the day-to-day coping with life in Guayandes, a fictional country that could easily stand in for the real-world Venezuela or some other banana republic. But there is action in the book as well – as Victor, his wife, and station colleagues tackle threats from government-sponsored drug running to a terrorist control center hidden in a cacao field.
Her biography at the end of the book notes Finley’s past service at CIA and adds: “Before becoming a bureaucrat living large off the system, she chased puffy white men around Washington, DC, as a member of the wild dog pack better known as the Washington media elite.” Absurd situations are not the sole province of the intelligence community – so we are hoping that once Finley and Caro have had their fun – she turns her satirical eye to that experience as well. Victor in the Press Pool?
Victor in the Jungle earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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