The Liar

How a Double Agent in the CIA Became the Cold War's Last Honest Man

By: Benjamin Cunningham

Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright

The Cold War meets Mad Men in the form of Karel Koecher, a double agent whose shifting loyalties and over-the-top hedonism reverberated from New York to Moscow.

In the mid-1970s, the CIA and KGB were both watching Karel Koecher closely—and they were both convinced he was working for the enemy. They were both right. Traveling with his wife, Hana, Koecher posed as a Czechoslovak asylum seeker and arrived in the US as a Communist sleeper agent. After parlaying a doctorate from Columbia into a job at the CIA, Koecher proceeded to operate as a double agent at the height of the Cold War.

Shunning a low profile, the Koechers embraced Manhattan’s high life — with cocaine, swinging and parties emblematic of the times and their penchant for risk. Hana, who was no more than a shy teenager when she arrived, grew into a sophisticated international diamond dealer that relayed messages to Karel’s handlers. Riding a wave of euphoria, the Koechers felt unstoppable. But it was too good to last.

Using newly declassified documents, interrogation tapes and extraordinary first-hand accounts from the Koechers themselves, Cunningham reconstructs their double lives and the fading Cold War, where a strange moral fog made it hard to know what truth was being fought for, and to what end.

Story of a nihilistic narcissist

Disappointing. Book never really covers specifically what was stolen in the spy years - more a psychological profile of a real loser along with the author’s personal views on the Cold War and politics in the 1980’s. There is some helpful historical background going back to what happened in Czechoslovakia in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

a great telling of a previous life.

awesome story, so glad to hear it.
told well
gets a tad into minutiae for an audio book at times but I still liked it

Great detail on events of the time

This has really great detail about the economy of the United States and the Soviet Union. I like the detail about the famous riot at the Democratic convention in the late 1960s. The mayor even had undercover CIA agents. I thought the book would just be about the main character of the book. What a great tour de force