The Soldier Spy: The Covert Wars of an Army Colonel and the Tragedy of American Power
About this book
The larger-than-life exploits of Walter Patrick Lang—the Green Beret at the center of America’s covert conflicts from the Cold War to the War on Terror.
Army Colonel Walter Patrick Lang led the life that many men would love to live. He faced firefights on three continents and led a band of Pentagon ruffians who stalked some of the world’s worst villains. When America was losing the War on Terror, he leveraged the lessons of his life to correct the course of his country. Yet only after the action, as the tape ran back, did he question the stories that both he and his nation were living.
A decorated combat officer, founder of West Point’s Arab Studies program, and senior Pentagon counterterrorist, he built target folders on famous names. Guevara, killed. Khomeini, contained. Gaddafi, chastened. Saddam, nudged toward the gallows by a hand he never saw. But his gifts were not always rewarded. He chose the Army over Harvard, then was spit on as he shipped out to Vietnam. The same maverick streak that drove his successes led to his downfall.
Informed by a decade of conversations with Lang and his colleagues, The Soldier Spy is not only an epic of wars and spies; it is a moral reckoning with the vanity of spreading freedom by force, an elegy for ideals of manhood that formed an extraordinary warrior, and a warning flare for all who will inherit and defend the American dream.
Author: Mark Riebling
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2027-01-12
Pages: 592
ISBN: 9780679438939
Praise for this book
The Soldier Spy is written on a vast canvas and it is a vast achievement. The battles bring to mind Stephen Crane, the espionage Graham Greene, the politics Machiavelli, the strategy Clausewitz. Through the eyes of the one man who fought, taught, and thought with equal facility, Mark Riebling offers the definitive valediction to the American Century.
The Soldier Spy is mandatory reading for everyone in the professions of arms or intelligence and for everyone who wants to understand American power. Riebling masterfully crystalizes the national experience in this compelling life of a covert warrior who shaped the fates of foreign nations and America itself. You’ll emerge wiser for the time spent in these pages.
The Soldier Spy illuminates the triumphs and follies of U.S. military intelligence through the career of a truly heroic public servant. It is well-written, thoroughly researched, and worth every minute you spend with it.
A masterfully crafted epic, convincingly showing how America misapprehends its enemies through the prism of its national mythology—a chronic failure of imagination that has had brutal consequences.
Pat Lang was an important but ultimately divisive figure in defense intelligence. Mark Riebling has given us a beautifully written and richly detailed biography of the life, mind, and times of the man that will compel national security professionals and general readers alike to come to terms with it.
With the care of an archaeologist and the panache of a master painter, Riebling restores the buried biography of an American Achilles. The result is a triumph like The Right Stuff, The Power Broker, and A Perfect Spy.
Quoted in excerpt, with attribution. Follow a source link for the full review.
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