American Spy begins, in all-too-American fashion, with an attempted murder. Upon the first sound of an intruder, our protagonist, a young mother, shepherds her young boys to safety. Then, she turns the tables on the predator, who realizes too late they have become the prey.
It is a great intro to Marie Mitchell, the spy from the title. Yeah, sure, it says that in the back cover-summary, too. But in action, we feel that this is more than just a descriptive or job title, for Marie, it is a vocation. In that first chapter, in the wake of a violent assault, Marie must navigate the always treacherous waters of police interaction. That she is a licensed gun owner, a citizen-landowner, and the daughter of cop matters little to the police because Marie Mitchell is also a black woman in America, a perpetual outsider in her own land, a foreigner in her own home.
Told in jumps from the distant to the immediate, American Spy takes us on a mad-dash with Marie as she escapes the states for her ancestral home of Martinique. Then as she chronicles the events leading to the attempt on her life. In that harried exodus, the reader sees that Marie was always supposed to be a spy. Indeed, she is a spy born of spies.
Before she is recruited by a CIA officer, before she becomes a fly-under-the-radar FBI agent, before she even has an inkling of what it means (mostly gleaned from her older sister’s tutelage) Marie has been set on the course to be a spy. Her mother was sent from Martinque to reconnoiter the still-highly-segregated American social strata, undercover of complexion. Her father, a second-generation American, serves as a pathfinding for other men and women of color from within one of the institutions intended to keep people of color under institutional thumb.
By the time Marie meets Ed Ross, she is primed for the work her sister dreamed of—working intelligence to stave off the very real threat of global nuclear annihilation. Mostly, Marie has been prepared by the soul-crushing tedium of FBI administrative incompetence and a growing impatience with skud work. Still, when she is offered a plumb crossover position with the CIA, Marie declines.
She’s smart enough to know a dead-end assignment—get close to a newly-elected head of state for a newly-independent African nation—when she sees it. Her sister taught her the difference between an asset (or pawn) and an officer (operates the pawns) before she was out of college. Plus, Marie knows she needs leverage to get what she ultimately wants: answers about her estranged sister. The only way to get that leverage is to turn down the offer.
The old street saying “game recognizes game,” could be Marie's mantra. She recognizes Ross’ charm offensive, fresh on the heels of her suspension from the FBI. While rocking with his roll, she negotiates her terms, ever on the verge of walking away. And then he offers her the brass ring, access to a CIA officer named Slater. The man who recruited Marie’s sister. Ross also gives her an “obscene amount” of money. But no contract.
Recognizing a deeper agenda hidden in the stated scheme, Marie takes the assignment, determined to pursue her own goals and not be used. Mr. Ali, her mentor and one of the few black men in the bureau allowed himself to be used. As Marie reflects, he has a nice office and no career prospects. Long since resigned to limited prospects, Marie wants answers and holds herself separate from white politics and national agenda.
Then she meets Thomas Sankara.
Lauren Wilkinson’s brilliance is in her depiction of Sankara. Driven, intelligent, and rarest of all, principled, the president of Burkina Faso has his own agenda and is well aware of the tight window he has to enact his agenda. This is, after all, just twenty five years after the CIA assassinated Patrice Lumumba.
The tawdry history of the CIA’s misadventures in the Third World haunts the pages of American Spy as surely as Lumumba’s ghost dogs Sankara’s every step. While Wilkinson gives a nod to Fleming and pays due respect to le Carré, she writes with the price-of-gasoline grasp of African nations I’ve only otherwise seen in Forsyth’s novels. It’s telling that Sankara recommends a book by that old “freelancer.” Where Wilkinson exceeds Forsyth is in immediacy. There is no white-man filter in American Spy.
The heat off of colonial roads and the steam through mosquito netting around Marie’s bed is personal and compelling as Sankara’s attraction to the trap he identifies almost immediately. The attraction between Thomas and Marie is as dangerous as CIA Officer Daniel Slater’s ambitions and deadly as the details surrounding Marie’s sister Helene.
Slater represents the insanity inherent to the intelligence community, especially in the wake of the Church Commission. The eventuality of the independent contractor supplanting the company men is matter-of-fact here. It’s nearly too cut-and-dried. But the map from there to where we are now tracks clean as CIA flight plans out of Columbia and Bolivia.
Equal parts debriefing and confessional Marie’s narrative is for her young sons, Wilkinson lines up her chess pieces for an ending I did not want. But in the best spy-literature traditions, the author leads the reader in more a judo flip than a twist. I won’t spoil it but the deliciously ambiguous ending left me with a HUGE smile on my face.
If, like me, you've ever wondered why all spies are depicted as white men, you'll get your answer here. If you've ever wondered why a woman of color would get involved in this seedy underworld, you'll get WAY more than you barganed for. Check out Lauren Wilkenson’s American Spy. It is fast, seductive as the kiss you never expected, and as delightfully painful as your first broken heart.
The photo above, yours truly at too-early o'clock, is mine and used by my permission which I think is damn considerate of me.
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