Uncovered

My Half-Century with the Cia

Uncovered is the life story of eighty-three-year-old cold war veteran John Sager. An operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, his postings to pre-revolutionary Iran, Gamal Abdel Nassers Egypt, and Nikita Khrushchevs Soviet Russia thrust him into the midst of Americas most tumultuous half-century since World War II.

The authors memoir reveals an up-close vision of the nitty-gritty of cold-war intelligence work: recruiting and handling agents, devising ways to insert them into the hermetically sealed Soviet Union, managing the CIAs Moscow station, and running intelligence-gathering operations in the United States. Over his fifty-plus years of service, he experienced much of the CIAs silent struggle with Americas principal adversary. Now he shares those reflections, through the eyes of a born-again Christian.

But the story is more than that. Sager combines his spy craft with a passion for fly fishing, an avocation that took him to Russias remote Kamchatka Peninsula, where he found the long arm of the Russian intelligence service waiting. And when he returned to the United States to stay put, he reconnected with the love of his life in a marriage that lasted barely five years, cut short by tragedy.