Charles Marley is an agent with the CIA.
We will find as we take brief looks into his career over the years that there are quite a few changes during those periods; we watch him as he is very new to the clandestine world and we watch him as he is a decade or so past retirement and numerous swathes of time in between. This will afford us the opportunity to see him as an eager, excited newbie and as a very tired not so enthused elderly fellow. And we will see him at points where he seems to be at the top of his game and others where he wonders why in the world he is still playing them.
Marley had, in his mind, been a bit surprised by his decision to join the CIA directly out of Princeton in 1961 but to ask his friends at college, it was a logical step. "They knew Charles liked having small secrets. The secrets gave him the sense of superiority that other students derived from having money. For a man like Marley, trading up to the larger secrets that came with intelligence work was like inheriting a bank." Marley is really quite good at learning secrets for his employer though he will on occasion keep a fair number of them to himself.
For several of the snippets of time we drop in on, Marley is very unhappily married to a woman who had worked as a secretary for a higher-up in the Agency and therefore had a good idea of what Marley did for a living and was either not that impressed or was just tired of the separation; she found comfort in the beds of a good number of men other than Marley. For his part, it must be said that Marley is no saint either though not very often as he "lacked the finesse to close a transaction". But we find a comment of Marley stating he "had been an inept seducer, except of other spies. He had been quite good at getting people to turn against their countries".
Since much of the time that Marley worked was during the Cold War and he did a good deal of that work in or near communist countries, he got to know the key players on the other side and they learned of him. One unfortunate side-effect of learning stuff that you were not supposed to was determining whether that intel was valid, as in "the Russians watched him and tried to guess whether the assets they occasionally uncovered were those he wanted to be discovered" and "was he penetrating their networks, turning agents, or creating a disruptive appearance?"
One relatively minor accident on ice resulting in Marley breaking his leg will have, again IMHO, interesting roles in much of what would come later for while the fracture healed properly as expected, his leg would suffer from the cold quite a bit and long walks would prove uncomfortable as would sitting still for extended periods. Both of those latter activities would be part-and-parcel to a field operative's life and much of Marley's 'turf' was in Germany and Russia where it can get nippy.
As mentioned, several of the tales we are allowed to follow take place after Marley has retired from the Agency. "He was neither bored nor in need of money, but he was nonetheless available for whatever [the] masters threw his way". I got the feeling that he did so because it was a way to keep his hand in somewhere he was never quite sure he wanted it to be but then again, it is what he had been doing for more than forty years so why - and how to - stop now.
Good Lines:
- Said by a self-described failure at journalism in the Soviet Union as to why he failed, "People decided the KGB files smelled better closed."
- Regarding a bank's possible involvement in money-laundering, a man notes, "The bank had to keep its business on the right side of a policy line that was etched in sand".
- Regarding a woman who had not responded to an advance, "She wasn't open to seduction that week".
- Discussing how no one can withstand intensive interrogation forever, a colleague tells Marley, "We're all very brave until the moment, then cry for our mamas".
- After finding a bomb wired to his car, Marley is assured it was not the KGB by a friend saying, "we don't blow each other up ... that would get out of hand".
- Regarding students protesting in Paris, it is said "they may end up with a revolution but they won't end up running it. Someone smart and ruthless will take over".
- Talking about how well he took to his work at the CIA, "Marley was a natural for work that allowed him to avoid being too well understood".
- To Marley, "women were agents of a foreign land, where he possessed at most a visitor's card".
- Of the reasons for someone to betray their country, Marley "understood betrayals that were about money or blackmail, of course. Belief made him uncomfortable. Belief was untrustworthy".
- After 16 years in the CIA (as of the time of telling) Marley would freely admit that "he liked a good liar".