When a shadowy Russian mole threatens to undermine the Free World's defenses by infiltrating President Eisenhower's National Security Council, CIA super-secret agent Blackford Oakes is called in to unmask the imposter. Then Oakes turns the tables on the communists by piloting a U-2 spy plane on a Gary Powers-style one-way mission behind the Iron Curtain. Sentenced to death and trapped in the depths of Lubyanka prison, Oakes may have played his last trick. Or has he? One of the foremost political thinkers and word spinners of our time, William F. Buckley Jr. delivers an intriguing reexamination of the early days of the cold war in this best-selling spy thriller. It's fiction, but Buckley convinces us that it really could have happened this way.