THE CIRCUS MASTER'S MISSION

by Joel Brinkley ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 26, 1989

A roman clef about covert CIA operations in Nicaragua--from first-novelist Brinkley, son of veteran reporter David Brinkley, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning international newspaper correspondent. The circus master supposedly in control of the mission is Terrence Ascher, a minor diplomat asked to head the Restricted Interagency Group by a friend who's convinced he can break through the military stalemate between the Sandinistas and the contras. Convinced that he's supporting the President's wishes, Ascher approves a high-profile kidnapping of politicos and their families from the Cuban Foreign Ministry in Managua. But the real masterminds of the operation--US Colonel Eric Gustafson and Cuban CIA agent Rafael Mendoza--have bigger ideas: they order the hostages killed so that the contras will take the blame, then arrange a retaliatory strike--apparently by the Sandinistas against an American military unit--in order to get support for a full-scale American invasion of Nicaragua. In the wake of the predictable American outcry, the troops go in, but in the meantime Balita--a contra guerrilla prodigy--realizes that he has been killing Americans, not Communists, and gives his story to Christopher Eaton, as international newspaper correspondent who's been waiting in the wings for just a break like this. The usual heroics (in which both Balita and Eaton are shot at repeatedly by bloodthirsty Colonel Paz, but both survive) lead to a depressingly comic conclusion--in which Ascher accidentally kills himself after imagining his future as a heroic, whistle-blowing John Dean; Gustafson brazens out the scandal with anti-Communist rhetoric; the President's approval ratings go down for several weeks before rebounding; and the new pro-American regime in Nicaragua begins to adopt the same tactics that the contras had been revolting against. Overstuffed with insiders' detail and factual disclaimers and lumbering in its story's development, but still impressive in its suspicious view of American involvement in Latin America.

Pub Date: June 26, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION