First, I digress…..Two elections in Texas yesterday shows the strength of Democratic candidates. The GOP can now only lose one House of Representative vote if they want to pass something on party lines, and a Texas state Senate seat went to a Democrat in a district Trump carried, I think, 17 points last year. It is odd that Dems are winning everywhere when the party still polls low, but it is because Trump is losing all of his support because he keeps making moves that are not only wrong, but dangerous.

Okay, to the main subject..

I started a new book last night, one that I have been wanting to read for some time. It’s called The Game of the Foxes, was published in 1971, is by Ladislas Farago, and concerns German spying during World War II. It is a well reviewed book, and there is only one negative: it is 675 pages long. Or maybe two negatives. Each page has more words on it than a readable page should have. So, we will see how this goes. The last book of comparable length that I read was Bill Taubman’s Gorbachev, and I did get through that one, so all is not lost. Yet.

Farago was a Hungarian born journalist, a non-practicing Jew, who wrote a large number of books. I read one of his earliest books, about a trip he took to Palestine in the late 1930s, which was fascinating, and I reported on it to my Thursday morning breakfast group six or seven years ago. I looked at the text of my report on that book before sitting down to this new one, and thought you would like to see the first page, which contains a fair amount of explanatory text. For some reason, I wrote it in the first person. Here goes:

“My name is Ladislas FARago. Or perhaps, it’s Ladislas FaRAgo. I actually don’t know how to pronounce my name. How to find out? I could ask my son John. He has just retired as a law professor at New York University. He would probably know, since he has had the same name for some time now. But I don’t want to bother him. He wouldn’t believe that, after all these years, I don’t know how to pronounce my name.

“So let’s forget that for now. But I do want to tell you a little about me. I was born in 1905 in Hungary, in the town of Csurgo – C S U R G O. Believe it or not, I don’t know how to pronounce that, either. It’s been a long time. Csurgo is on the border between Hungary and Croatia – the south of Hungary. A small town. Maybe 5000 residents.

“Oh, I forgot to say that I am Jewish. There was a long history of Jews in Csurgo, but never great numbers at any one time. Maybe a few hundred when I was living there. There was a Jewish school. There were rabbis. But, to tell you the truth, we were much more interested in being Hungarian than being Jewish when I lived in Csurgo. I really didn’t learn too much about being Jewish.

“I moved to Budapest for school, graduating in 1926. I didn’t really think much about being Jewish when I was there, either. Sometime later, I moved to the United States, and went to work for the U.S. Navy, in Intelligence. After the Navy, I spent all my time writing.

“What else is interesting about me? Well, on January 22, 1957, I was a contestant on the American TV show, To Tell the Truth. And, according to Wikipedia, although I died in 1980, at the age of 75, I was active until 1986. Go figure…….

“Over my career, I wrote a lot of books, some of which you might remember. For one, I wrote a biography of General George Patton. Maybe you didn’t read my book, but I bet you saw the film starring George C. Scott as Patton. The film was based on my book. I also wrote a book about Martin Bormann, the Nazi. This one caused a lot of controversy, because I said that Bormann was alive and well, living in Argentina. Everyone else seemed to think he was dead. I still think I was right.”

Farago’s first book was written about Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. On his way back to the United States from Ethiopia, he met a Palestinian from Jerusalem while in Cairo, who told him about the tensions between Brits, Arabs and Jews in Mandate Palestine. This raised Farago’s curiosity and, as soon as he got back to London, he set off on his next adventure. And an adventure it was. What I remember liking about it so much was the simple picture it set out in portraying what living in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and so many other places in today’s Israel was like in 1937.

In between The Wright Brothers and The Game of the Foxes, I read quickly through a short book, Breaking Cover: My Secret Life in the CIA by Michele Rigby Assad. I read it because, as I mentioned some time over the past week, we are re-watching Homeland, now on Netflix. Last night, we watch Season 4, Episode 3. I thought Breaking Cover might tell me a little more about how the CIA operates, and it did.

But, it is not what I would call a good book, and I am not recommending you read it. The most interesting part of the book was the first part, which told about the application for employment and vetting process the CIA uses, and about the year plus of training. The book also gives you some idea of how the agency is organized, and what the functions of its four main divisions are. The book falls apart when she actually goes into the field for about ten years, all in the Middle East, part of the time in Baghdad, and part in other countries which, for some reason, have been redacted. As to what she did in these cities as a CIA operations officer, I have no idea. She really didn’t tell us, probably was not permitted to. She did, however, talk about why some natives become CIA sources. I had not thought about it, but there are various reasons, often having nothing to do with supporting Americans. Some are sources so they can learn more about us and pass information back to the enemy, some are targeting political rivals back home, some out to make a name for themselves, some for money. I found all of this interesting, but would have liked to have been given a better idea of what she was doing for her country during those ten years.

But the book really falls apart, because it is in fact all about God. God led her to become a CIA agent, God let her pass the various tests to get to the field (she could not have passed them on her own), God failed to keep her out of harm’s way, but this turned out to be okay, and part of God’s plan, because it enabled her to learn so much. God, God, God, with just an occasional Jesus thrown in for good measure throughout the book.

God’s presence becomes even more palpable in the last chapters of the book, after she and her husband (also a CIA agent) resign and go to work as freelance consultants. They get involved in moving 250 Iraqi Chaldean Christians out of Iraq and into, of all places, Slovakia. This was undoubtedly a good thing, assuming her descriptions of how the Christians were being treated in Iraq are accurate. Their lives were literally saved.

So kudos to her for this good work, but please leave God out of it.