The Cardinal of the Kremlin

I’ve got a fondness for airport reading, and when he’s on, Clancy is as good as any. Cardinal of the Kremlin centers around the CIA’s top source in Moscow, three time Hero of the Soviet Union Colonel Misha Filitov, who’s been passing secrets for 30 years. But bad luck blows his courier chain, and Jack Ryan and friends have to break every unwritten rule in the CIA-KGB game to get him out. There’s lots of tradecraft and spy versus spy. Meanwhile on the tech side of the technothriller, American and Russian missile defense programs are working themselves up—the Russians have the laser, the Americans the mirror. As usual, Clancy writes a great yarn, and this is actually a decent layman’s primer on nuclear war strategy and why missile defense could be destabilizing, although Clancy is strongly pro-Star Wars, against the professional consensus.

Some parts have not aged well. Our heroic allies the Afghan Mujaheddin are sadly ironic in a Rambo 3 kind of way. But this book is way more homophobic than I remember. Not that I expect 80s era Clancy to be progressive or anything, but the most evil character is a traitorous lesbian mole out to seduce her best friend by any means necessary, including having the KGB kidnap her husband. A thinly veiled version of Representative Barney Frank shows up just so Ryan can call him a queer. Super awkward, but still better than anything Clancy wrote after the fall of the Berlin Wall.