The Increment Book

A very good spy novel which is also about real politics and the real world. An Iranian nuclear scientist has decided to risk everything to alert the West that Iran is still working to build nuclear bombs. He sends an email to the CIA to let them know, and the email eventually lands in the lap of Harry Pappas, a career spy, who brings it to the attention of Fox who is more of a political appointee. Fox alerts the White House, which decides that this information can be used as the starting off point for attacking Iran. Pappas suspects that this will lead to the death of the Iranian asset, and that Fox and the White House will get many Americans killed in an ill advised war that is unnecessary if the Iranians are really not far along in the research to find weapons.

Pappas asks the Director of Operations of the CIA for more time and gets 2 weeks. Pappas asks an old friend of his, a British spy for help. The Brit, arranges for a special forces team, composed of his very attractive girlfriend and two other British Arabs (the so-called Increment) to penetrate Iran and get the scientist out so he can be questioned by Pappas to find out how far along the Iranians are in their nuclear weapons program. At the same time, the Brit, takes Harry to meet a friend of his Kamel Atwin, an Arab billionaire arms trader who is involved in a secret plot to sell sensitive material to the Iranians, which eventually breaks down and causes calculations of the Iranians to be off. Pappas, plans with his Iranian asset a way to mess up the Iranians weapon program even more and sends the asset back to Iran.

Kamel has his own agenda, of course, and its up to Pappas to figure out what is going on when the plan works in part but is screwed up in other ways.

The novel is really a good view of how the players on the world stage work and how a principled CIA agent has to use whatever means he can to do his job --gather intelligence and support American interests in the face of those who want to use the intelligence for their own ends.