The Director: A Novel - Hardcover

Ignatius, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393078140 ISBN 13: 9780393078145

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

In David Ignatius's gripping new novel, spies don't bother to steal information…they change it, permanently and invisibly.

Graham Weber has been the director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents' names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads.

Weber turns to a charismatic (and unstable) young man named James Morris who runs the Internet Operations Center. He's the CIA's in-house geek. Weber launches Morris on a mole hunt unlike anything in spy fiction―one that takes the reader into the hacker underground of Europe and America and ends up in a landscape of paranoia and betrayal. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it's drawn, The Director is a maze of deception and double dealing, about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones and nothing can be trusted. The CIA has belatedly discovered that this is not your father’s Cold War, and Weber must play catch-up, against the clock and an unknown enemy, in a game he does not yet understand.

About this title

About the Author

David Ignatius is a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.

Reviews

*Starred Review* Ignatius is now far better known for his novels (including Bloodmoney, 2011) than for his decades of insightful commentary on foreign affairs and the CIA. But his reporting and commentary, as well as his contacts at Foggy Bottom and Langley, always inform his fiction. This time his subject is the CIA and evidence that Agency computers have been hacked. It falls to a CIA director only a week into his tenure to deal with the crisis. Graham Weber has been hired to shake up an institution that has become sclerotic and is still reeling from WikiLeaks and Snowden’s revelations. To confront both crises, Weber turns to the Agency’s top computer savant, who is a former world-class hacker, while he confronts the myriad intrigues and intransigences inside the CIA and the vast national intelligence network. Ignatius is on new ground here. The hacker culture and ethos is an insular world, but he does a fine job in portraying it through the rollicking sketch of Def Con, the annual hacker convention that is a prime intel recruitment site. He’s similarly successful with Morris, the CIA computer savant: Morris is überbrilliant, a bit kinky, and spectacularly devious. Ignatius even effectively outlines a plausible hack that rocks the entire world economy. He’s given readers another compelling and enlightening look at what might happen next month. Must-read twenty-first-century espionage fiction. --Thomas Gaughan

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393078140
• ISBN 13: 9780393078145
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384