The Miernik Dossier is American author Charles McCarry

Charles McCarry

Charles McCarry is an American writer primarily of spy fiction.-Life:McCarry served in the United States Army, where he was a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, has been a small-town newspaperman, and was a speechwriter in the Eisenhower administration. From 1958 to 1967 he worked for the CIA,...

's first novel. It introduces the character of American spy Paul Christopher, who would become a recurring character in many of McCarry's novels.

Style

The novel is presented as a dossier compiled by an intelligence organization as an example of a "typical operation". Each chapter consists of a different form of recorded communication, such as agents' reports, personal testimony given to intelligence officers, transcripts of telephone conversations, written letters, personal diary entries, etc, creating a Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, directed by and starring Orson Welles. Many critics consider it the greatest American film of all time, especially for its innovative cinematography, music and narrative structure. Citizen Kane was Welles' first feature film...

type narrative where each character reveals different events and different perspectives of the same events.

Plot

The novel chiefly concerns several expatriates living in Geneva in 1959: American agent Paul Christopher, British agent Nigel Collins, Sudanese prince Kalash el Khatar, Hungarian concentration camp survivor Ilona Bentley, Polish UN official Tadeusz Miernik, as well as Miernik's sister Zofia, a Warsaw University student. When Miernik is reluctant to return to his native Poland despite orders to do so, Christopher suspects that Miernik may actually be a Communist spy working for the Soviets. Christopher is instructed to determine whether this is the case while he, Miernik, Collins, el Khatar, Bentley, and Zofia journey to Sudan to deliver a gift to el Khatar's powerful father, trying to avoid crossing paths with a rising Sudanese terrorist organization known as the Anointed Liberation Front (ALF) along the way.