The Director

by David Ignatius

First published 2014

Graham Weber has held the CIA director's chair for less than seven days when disaster strikes. A young Swiss hacker in rumpled clothes appears at the American consulate in Hamburg with devastating news. The CIA has been compromised. The kid carries a list of agent names as proof. Weber stares at every director's nightmare made real. He needs help navigating this crisis but doesn't know who to trust. Then he encounters James Morris, a brilliant but erratic young operative who runs the Internet Operations Center. Morris becomes Weber's digital bloodhound in an unprecedented hunt for the mole. The investigation plunges them into the shadowy hacker networks spanning Europe and America. Weber discovers a world where loyalties shift like code and betrayal lurks behind every encrypted message. In this realm of cyber espionage, information flows in binary streams and deception rules everything.

Genres: mystery, contemporary, thriller, espionage

Vibes: fast-paced, suspenseful, thought-provoking

Tropes: deception, investigation

Setting: Hamburg, Europe, America

Period: 21st-century

384 pages · Hardcover · W. W. Norton & Company

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