BOOKSHELF: The hinges of historyThe Honest Spy

By William Tobey

Review of Rolf Mowatt-Larssen’s A State of Mind: Faith and the CIA (BookBaby, May 2020)

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen’s A State of Mind: Faith and the CIA offers an engaging, if eccentric, memoir from a man who battled some of America’s greatest post-World War II enemies, from the Soviet Union to al-Qaida, and who also knew and worked with many of the important figures of our time.

Again and again, Mowatt-Larssen finds himself at the hinges of history. He was in Moscow in October 1993, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered the Russian Army to shell and storm the parliament (and he had to be rescued from the U.S. ambassador’s residence of Spaso House, where, as he recalls, he and colleagues came under fire and felt that they were outgunned, requiring an SOS call to Sergey Stepashin, then first deputy head of the KGB’s successor organization). At a state dinner in Oslo on Nov. 1, 1999, he witnessed U.S. President Bill Clinton pull Palestinian political leader Yasser Arafat aside and whisper to him, “Take it. Take the deal. This is your last best chance for peace.” In the fall of 1999, he had dinner in New York with John O’Neill, the FBI counterterrorism expert, who told him an al-Qaida attack was imminent; O’Neill was so convinced of the danger to the World Trade Center that he quit the FBI to become its chief of security in August 2001, and perished on Sept. 11 saving lives. In December 2001, Mowatt-Larssen flew halfway around the world with then-CIA director George Tenet for one meeting—to warn Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that al-Qaida and Taliban leaders had met with Pakistani nuclear scientists in a possible bid to gain nuclear weapons. (Musharraf’s assurance that he had “spoken with [his] top nuclear man, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan” and there was nothing to worry about, is harrowing.) Throw in the odd car crash or car bombing, and this is a recounting of an exciting life.