Blowing My Cover: My Life As a CIA Spy and Other Misadventures by Lindsay Moran

I finished reading Blowing My Cover:  My Life As a CIA Spy and Other Misadventures by Lindsay Moran late last night and I was sad for it to end.

This is a true story of Moran who became a case officer (spy speak for "spy") with the CIA in latter part of the 1990s. She'd always wanted to be a spy but came to realize it was nothing like we read about in novels or see in movies and TV.

The bulk of the book takes up her training to be a spy with maybe a third covering the often dull and weird world of actually spying, which means finding and recruiting foreign agents (those who will turn on their own country and spy for the U.S.).

Moran was in Macedonia when planes attacked the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in 2001. This was the beginning of the end for her career, of her own choosing.

If you like spy thrillers even a little, this book is an eye-opener that I just loved reading!

Book Read:  Blowing My Cover:  My Life As a CIA Spy and Other Misadventures

Author:  Lindsay Moran

Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy's Daughter by Sara Mansfield Taber

I'm on a memoir kick. After reading Sissy's Spacek's memoir, My Extraordinary Ordinary Life, I started reading Born Under an Assumed Name:  The Memoir of a Cold War Spy's Daughter by Sara Mansfield Taber. This was just as interesting but in totally different ways.


This book is as much a history book of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s as it is anything else. Sara Taber's father was indeed a spook, a covert spy for the CIA and was assigned to Japan, Taiwan, Washington, DC, Holland, and Borneo during his children's young life. He and his wife didn't tell their children until they were in high school that he was a spy. 

If you grew up in any part of this era, like I did (she's a bit older than me but I could relate to much of what she experienced), I think you'll find this book fascinating.

Book Read: Born Under an Assumed Name:  The Memoir of a Cold War Spy's Daughter

Author: Sara Mansfield Taber

ISBN:  978-1-59797-698-5