The Soldier Spy

The larger-than-life exploits of Walter Patrick Lang—the green beret who shaped America’s covert conflicts from the Cold War to the War on Terror. “One brigadier general compared Lang to Odysseus, Siegfried, Roland, and Beowulf. Some anecdotes called to mind the Dos Equis ads about the Most Interesting Man in the World. The King of Jordan held the car door for him, jungle tribesmen in Panama offered Lang their wives, the Pope assigned him to protect the tomb of Jesus.” Army Colonel Walter Patrick Lang led the life that many men would love to live. He faced firefights on three continents and led a band of Pentagon ruffians who toppled or tamed four of the world’s worst villains. When America was losing the War on Terror, he leveraged the lessons of his life to correct the course of his country. Yet only after the action, as the tape ran back, did he question the stories that both he and his nation were living. A decorated combat officer, founder of West Point’s Arab Studies program, and senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lang spun the webs that trapped Che Guevera, defeated Ayatollah Khomeini, tamed Mohamar Qadaffi, and doomed Saddam Hussein. But his gifts were not always rewarded. He chose the Army over Harvard, then was spit on as he shipped out to Vietnam. The same maverick streak that drove his successes led to his downfall.  “Lang should have been a general,” said one three-star, “but he told the truth too much.” Culminating a trilogy of secret histories that has been called “prophetic” (The Washington Post) and “compellingly life-and-death” (The New York Times), Mark Riebling worked for a decade among counterterrorists taught by Lang, then spent another decade debriefing Lang and interviewing his colleagues—including seven DIA directors—to craft this definitive portrait of a master of war. The Soldier Spy is not only a riveting chronicle of clandestine operations and American wars; it is a moral reckoning with the vanity of spreading freedom by force, an elegy for ideals of manhood that formed an extraordinary warrior, and a warning flare for all who will inherit and defend the American dream.