This novel continues the Cold War espionage series featuring the operator Blackford Oakes. In this installment, Oakes has just been cashiered from the Agency, when his boss decides he is the only man for an exceptionally dirty piece of work. Oakes agrees to return, but in short order finds himself standing before a secret Soviet military tribunal which has as its subject his execution for spying.
William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing style was famed for its erudition, wit, and use of uncommon words.
George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American conservative movement, believed that Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century". "For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure." Buckley's primary change to politics was the fusion of traditional American political conservatism with laissez-faire economic theory and anti-communism, laying the groundwork for the modern American conservatism of U.S. presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan.
Buckley wrote first *God and Man at Yale* (1951); among over fifty further books on writing, speaking, history, politics and sailing, were a series of novels featuring CIA agent Blackford Oakes. Buckley referred to himself as either a libertarian or conservative. He resided in New York City and Stamford, Connecticut. He was a practicing Roman Catholic, regularly attending the traditional Latin Mass in Connecticut.
([Source][1])
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley,_Jr.
