The Clandestine Education of Owen Roberts

 

The Clandestine Education of Owen Roberts is the first book in a trilogy by Richard Snyder. I had recently read the second book, Defector in Paradise, and I immediately knew I wanted to read the first one. Synder is a former intelligence officer who writes about the moral chaos of espionage. It is clear that this is a topic with which he is intimately familiar. This book starts as Owen Roberts graduates from spy school, or what the author referred to as the Schoolhouse. This was a school for non-CIA spies who were instead linked to the military intelligence operations. In fact, throughout the book there was great competition between the Agency and the Service.

 

While the new spies had been repeatedly told that an allegiance to the Service was an essential part of their assignments, from the beginning of his first assignment, the rookie spy Owen was repeatedly told by his senior partner that they would tell the Service what they wanted them to know, and they would sometimes make outright lies. There were always undercurrents to any information they were provided by the Service, and there was always the Agency who which was eager to take over their cases and always demanded to be kept informed about what they were doing and what they were planning. Owen and his partner Garret Langston, a senior operative were the protagonists of the story.  At the graduation from training, Garret had told the eighty newly minted spies that they would never figure out all angles of a case to which they were assigned. He said, “You never get the full story about anything or understand the full gauntlet of threats that await you as you sit alone in your hotel room far from the shores of the United States. Your agents will always lie to keep the money coming in so they can live the lift they think they deserve.” As Owen was being sent on his first mission, he learned that he was being sent to help an Iranian diplomat in Paris who wanted to defect.

 

In the course of the stories, there were murders and a suicide. Owen chose to help Garret settle an old score against a Russian agent, an action which was brutal and was far outside the assignment they had been sent to do. They kept this side hustle a secret from their bosses at the Service who demanded to know about every action they took. They encountered bad guys from the other side, one of whom had a beautiful sister that Owen fell in love with. I don’t need to give more away about the plot except to say that there were many twists in the story I did not see coming. It felt as if the reader was in the same position as the spies, not knowing all they needed to know in order to carry out their mission. Who was telling the truth and to whom were they telling it?

 

As this story came to an end, it was in a fantasy or hallucination that Owen had a conversation with his deceased cousin who had died on D-Day on the beaches at Normandy. As the adventure to rescue the Iranian diplomat was coming to an end, Owen struggled to justify his actions, and he heard his cousin say, “The horror in this world never stops coming at you. It’s a human avalanche of misery that never ends…. But horror, and the evil that comes with it, is like the devil, it is always there, full of grandiose deception, smiling faces, and powerful rhetoric, always changing as it hides behind injustice and grievance, using them as shield and sword. It uses those things to cloak the evil it does while wearing robes of white.”

 

I found author Snyder’s prose to be remarkable and he presents the dilemmas of the clandestine world in a perspective that makes me know he’s been there. Richard Snyder is a master storyteller, and now I eagerly await the third book in this trilogy about Owen Roberts.