An inside look at a spy's world

There is something in this book for every one – it reads like a thriller, but is based on facts

Larry Kolb was a natural. He was barely eleven years old when he learnt to eavesdrop on his father, himself a CIA counter-intelligence officer during the Cold War; ran his first covert operation when he was twenty two and even had the luck of James Bond with pretty women. Kolb’s fast paced book “Overworld-the Life and Times of a Reluctant Spy” has shades of the Le Carre style and keeps you guessing about ‘the what and where of events’. Like telling the reader quite late into the book that he is a little younger than Nawaz Sharif; until then one is left guessing his age. The CIA preferred to recruit its hard core officers from among sons and daughters of its own officers. This was because background checking was easier, the material was trustworthy and all he or she was required to have was the aptitude and willingness. Kolb had the aptitude but spurned the first overture and instead chose to be sports manager of several professional athletes. He seemed to have dabbled in gemstones also.

Later he says he succumbed to the wiles of Miles Copeland, considered to be one of CIA’s all time greats, who worked from London after “retiring from the service” and trained him. The jargon is the same, the training techniques familiar. Only our friend gets to live in a suite at Brown’s in Mayfair along with Copeland, while lesser mortals got their training in a basement in South Delhi and plodded the corridors of Connaught Place in Delhi’s summer. Kolb hobnobbed with the likes of Adnan Khashogi, the wealthy Saudi, whose daily expenses were calculated by Kolb to be around US $ 477,000. Depending on his whims, Khashogi could cancel his board meetings and take off for Rome to have Italian spaghetti. Kolb obviously did well to marry into the Khashogi family and like a typical Arab, Kim, the wife figures in the book only fleetingly. Even before he met Kim, Kolb has a life style that required the dollars to roll without interruption, possibly from the Muhammed Ali(Cassius Clay) kitty. He was his promoter and financial advisor. He talks of friends who confide in him how much of a dunderhead Dodi Al-Fayad was but then Dodi (Khashogi’s nephew) belonged to the rival family of Muhammed Al Fayad. Kolb tells of how he and Muhammed Ali went on a secret mission on behalf of White House to negotiate the release of an American hostage in Beirut.

Kolb talks of espionage as a life of befriending and betraying the same person; of converting a patriot into a traitor; of making an honest man dishonest; of living two lives, both lonely; yet of being men of honour, like his father and his mentor, Miles Copeland. All this takes a lot out of any person. Eliciting information, one of the techniques also starts with sharing of information or the art of saying “nothing, and lots of it, with an air of secrecy”. Then later he talks of surveillance or how to beat it. Kolb says, it is not that a man can be caught simply because of an elaborate surveillance operation. It is because of one or two people saw you doing something suspicious.

Kolb jet sets (usually First Class) from Nicaragua to Libya to Saudi Arabia, to Pakistan to India, (not necessarily in that order) meeting with the wealthiest and the powerful, with such remarkable ease that it seems unreal. Sometimes it seems just too easy, just like in the novels.

There is something in this book for almost everyone. Those looking for something that reads like fiction, this is it. Those who wish to understand how the spy world works this is the book. For those who wish to understand what foreign intelligence collection and covert operations are all about, the intricacy of international intrigue, the stakes and the scale of financial commitments, the long term planning and the patience required, this is an eminently readable book; it is a story entertainingly told; absorbing but perhaps best read in installments provided that the intervals are not too long.

It is much later in the book that Kolb runs into the enigmatic Swamiji at Khashogi’s digs in Monaco. From then on, it is about Mamaji, the Sultan of Brunei, Mobutu, Elizabeth Taylor, St Kitts, V.P. Singh; of Adnan Khashogi’s apartment in New York for Swamiji; of Swamiji’s special love for the 427 carat blue sapphire from Burma, an interlude when Swamiji is used by Kolb and Copeland to suborn Daniel Ortega, and then back to India…. It was this escapade that landed Kolb into trouble and no-one knows if this was his last escapade. It is best that those interested in this find out for themselves.

Source : Hindustan times 9th Jan 2005