The Listening War: A Vietnam War Espionage Novel

Saigon, 1968. Three days into the Tet Offensive, a CIA analyst finds a pattern no one wants him to see - and the pattern has his name in it. Miles Doyle reads signals for a living: enemy radio traffic, pulled from noise and turned into meaning. At 0217 on the first of February, the same seven-character prefix surfaces in an intercept for the third time in two months. Each earlier appearance was followed, within two days, by the death of American commanders. The targeting is too precise to come from the enemy alone. Someone inside the American command is selling the war - from the room above the American house. Doyle files his finding through the proper channels. Three days later he is reassigned: attached to a Special Forces reconnaissance team crossing into Laos, where American soldiers do not officially exist, carrying the only copy of his analysis in the one place no one can subpoena - his own memory. He believes he is being sent to confirm the pattern. > The Listening War is a literary espionage novel about intelligence and grief - about the difference between collecting a truth and surviving it, and about a man whose gift for finding hidden patterns makes him the most useful and most expendable piece on someone else's board. Moving from the signals rooms of Saigon to the triple canopy of the Laotian panhandle to a fluorescent-lit debriefing room half a world away, it is a slow-burning, precise, and quietly devastating novel in the tradition of John le Carré, Alan Furst, and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. For readers who believe the most dangerous war is the one fought over what is known - and who like their spy fiction cerebral, atmospheric, and morally unresolved.