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THE PICKLE FACTORY DEVOURS ITS OWN
KRAY is a nonofficial cover CIA case officer—an overseas NOC operator who works without embassy backup, relying on nerve and ingenuity to recruit and run foreign agents. That is until Headquarters summons him home and drops his naive keister into a dizzying bureaucratic maze, where initiative is taboo and solid officers get torpedoed.
KRAY’s bosses seize on a congressional bonanza—a multibillion-dollar money stream earmarked to field more NOCs. Enter Project GOOWIKI, the “Transformational Human Resources Worldwide Outreach Program.” The covert plan: Spend every penny on consultants and donuts, stack managers on top of managers, and advance nincompoops. KRAY begins to glimpse that the one thing missing is actual spies.
When seven CIA officers die in an overseas suicide bombing, top Headquarters apparatchiks spring into action—not to hit back, but to cover their own broad backsides. Meanwhile, KRAY’s career corkscrews downward. And his return to the field gives Headquarters the perfect opportunity to solve the KRAY problem. Permanently.
Fast, sharp, and bone-dry funny, Sam R. OYKEN’s vast comic debut is Catch-22 with a security clearance, A Confederacy of Dunces with a nation on the line. Bureaucrats obsess over mandatory trainings, cafeteria upgrades, and birthday cakes, while competence quietly bleeds out in a corner. Underneath the laughs and the irony runs a hard moral line: contempt for cowardice, anger at waste, and respect for those who actually risk their lives for the country. None of which plays well—or at all—at the Pickle Factory.
“An absurdist masterpiece . . . a provocative commentary on America’s out-of-control intelligence services and a laugh riot.“—Mark Hemingway, senior writer, RealClearInvestigations
“If you get it, you get it. If you don’t, you don’t. And you should ask yourself why. Absurd. Poignant. Filled with hard truths about the critical state of a vital government agency. There aren’t a lot of people with the guts to tell the truth. Every person in Washington needs to read this book now and then ask themselves what they plan to do to fix CIA.”—Charles “Sam” Faddis, retired CIA officer, author of Beyond Repair: The Decline And Fall Of The CIA
“In KRAY, the hero of this hilarious and harrowing merger of a spy caper and a kafkaesque nightmare, readers will discover an unexpected blend of Holden Caulfield, Jack Ryan, Austin Powers, and—most crucially—George Smiley, determined to get to the bottom of a seemingly bottomless pit of duplicity and misdirection.”—Andrew Ferguson, author of Crazy U, Land of Lincoln, and contributing writer to The Atlantic
“Sam R. OYKEN, or whatever his real name is, does to the CIA what Joseph Heller did to the Army Air Forces in Catch-22. Outsiders won’t believe it. Anyone who’s worked for the Agency, and in the operations side of the business in particular, will probably say: ‘damn right.’ It’s hard not to conclude CIA needs a flamethrower directed its way and rebuilt from scratch. The next time the CIA screws up, as it surely will, you can’t say Sam R. OYKEN didn’t warn you.“—Col. Grant Newsham, retired U.S. Marine reserve head of intelligence for Marine Forces Pacific, and author of When China Attacks
“The real deal. This is a laugh-out-loud antidote to the cartoonish fantasy world of James Bond. It’s filled with overt grains of ridiculous truth embedded on every page, all too bizarrely accurate to be complete fiction. With merciless wit, Sam R. OYKEN, or whatever his real name is, exposes and pillories the stultifying banality of the mind-numbing, self-serving bureaucracy at CIA headquarters. The only obvious disinformation is the author’s disclaimer that he made it all up.“—J. Michael Waller, former CIA operative and author of Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains
“The Pickle Factory is the CIA novel the Agency has always deserved and never wanted—a riotously inventive, Rabelaisian romp through the rabbit hole of American intelligence that skewers bureaucratic vanity, institutional self-delusion, and the gap between the Agency's mythology and its reality with the precision of a well-placed stiletto. Sam R. OYKEN writes with the irreverence of Mark Twain, the structural audacity of Joseph Heller, and the insider authority of someone who has clearly seen the sausage being made up on the Seventh Floor. The Pickle Factory is a tall tale that tells more truth than most straight ones—a genuinely searching critique of what happens when an institution devoted to deception loses the ability to be honest with itself.”—James C. Lawler, legendary, multiple award-winning CIA officer and creator of the best-selling Guild espionage series