Book Report: Telefon by Walter Wager (1975)

This book is the source of the Charles Bronson movie of the same name (soon to be remade with Shia LeBouef, no doubt). I have it in the movie tie-in mass market paperback and have picked it up a couple times without actually reading any of it until recently.

It’s a Cold War era spy thing with a twist: The Soviets placed hypnotically controlled deep-cover agents across the country with programmed orders to destroy bits of infrastructure. In the decades since their insertion, they’ve become model citizens who don’t even know they’re Soviet agents until a coded message delivered via telephone activates them. A failed coup in the Soviet Union sends a dissident to America with the complete list of these agents and their code phrases–the Telefon book–to seek revenge on the Soviet Union by creating embarrassment or worse. So the Soviets send in a world-wise, cynical secret agent who likes the ladies. When he reaches America, he cuts ties with the local KGB operations to keep himself free of interference and of control. As he hunts the dissident, his superiors start to question whether he can do stop his target or if it would be easier simply to kill all the sleeper agents and their agent-in-place.

A good book, not as tense as a Clancy novel, paced okay prosaically but the action plays out over months where many days the Bronson-agent spends in his hotel watching the news because he has no current leads. Given the nature of the author’s history, he probably had insights into what real intelligence work was like. But, as I said, it paces and reads well.

Books mentioned in this review:

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