The Soldier Spy - by Mark Riebling (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The larger-than-life exploits of Walter Patrick Lang--the Green Beret at the center of America's covert conflicts from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

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 stalked some 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 Pentagon counterterrorist, he built target folders on famous names. Guevara, killed. Khomeini, contained. Gaddafi, chastened. Saddam, nudged toward the gallows by a hand he never saw. 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.

Informed by a decade of conversations with Lang and his colleagues, The Soldier Spy is not only an epic of wars and spies; 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.

Review Quotes

"Based on more than a decade of original research, Mark Riebling has written an absolutely captivating, vivid, and provocative biography of intelligence legend Walter Lang, a humanist and warrior who kept faith with his foreign partners even when his government did not. It is a sweeping and incisive portrait of a conflicted patriot trying to hold fast to his moral compass through a half-century of mercurial American foreign policy." --Stephen R. Platt, author of The Raider

"The Soldier Spy is written on a vast canvas and it is a vast achievement. The battles bring to mind Stephen Crane, the espionage Graham Greene, the politics Machiavelli, the strategy Clausewitz. Through the eyes of the one man who fought, taught, and thought with equal facility, Mark Riebling offers the definitive valediction to the American Century." --Aaron Haspel, author of Everything: A Book of Aphorisms

"Pat Lang was an important but ultimately divisive figure in defense intelligence. Mark Riebling has given us a beautifully written and richly detailed biography of the life, mind, and times of the man that will compel national security professionals and general readers alike to come to terms with it." --Michael Vickers, former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence

"With the care of an archaeologist and the panache of a master painter, Riebling restores the buried biography of an American Achilles. The result is a triumph like The Right Stuff, The Power Broker, and A Perfect Spy." --Warren Fahy, author of Fragment

"Mark Riebling is an amazing writer and he's written a military masterpiece. It's about fighting adversaries you don't understand, reconciling official duty and personal honor, loving your wife and family, and finding your purpose in life. This is the best book I've read since Myrer's Once an Eagle and should be required reading for all generals, soldiers, and cadets. The Soldier Spy is a book for our time and for all time." --LTC (R) Nate Sassaman, author of Warrior King

About the Author

MARK RIEBLING served as research director in the NYPD Intelligence Division's Center for Policing Terrorism for a decade after the 9/11 attacks. He is the author of Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA (1994) and Church of Spies (2015), and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in New York City.