I've just made the whole trip discovering Grit TV, Barry Eisler, and everything that lead to everything else as a result of this posting... Many compliments to you Johanthan for never ceasing to amaze me. (Or almost never) This Eisler guy is truly amazing, someone I thought I would have heard of before now. So thanks again for being there and pointing things like Grit TV and him out.

Eisler is an okay writer, though even if his political stance is different from most of his contemporaries, he does write mostly sensationalistic potboilers.

The best writer of political thrillers right now to me is Lorraine Adams. Go read "Harbor" and "The Room and the Chair". Amazing stuff.

Eisler is a smart guy. I'll have to check out his sensationalistic potboilers after i finish browsing Hanke and Bartolomeo de las Casas and Sven Lindqvist, and then maybe i'll compare him to Lorraine Adams. Eisler is funny and smart to compare the CIA to the post office but with spies. That's what got them in such trouble when the Cold War ended--all of a sudden everybody started to see that the Emperor had no clothes. Because all that "intelligence" isn't really what they are for.

If you focus on Langley's crummy politicized intel and some of its ham-handed meddling abroad, you might think that incompetence and corruption are the only results of all the secrecy and unaccountability. But what they really excel at is marketing. Along with the Pentagon, Langley works the media (and the public) like no one else. It almost doesn't matter if they screw everything else up, which they often do, because man can they sell it.

N E,

One of his books, "Rain Fall" has been filmed in Japan, but didn't seem to see wide release in the West. It's a fancy espionage action adventure featuring his early hero, the Japanese-American agent/martial arts expert John Rain. Maybe he's changed since then, but I when I read "Rain Fall" many years ago it just felt like any other sensational potboiler, even if smarter.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1206086/