George Mueller

Washington D.C., 1953. The Cold War is heating up: McCarthyism, with all its fear and demagoguery, is raging in the nation's capital, and Joseph Stalin's death has left a dangerous power vacuum in the Soviet Union. The CIA, meanwhile, is reeling from a double agent within their midst. Someone is selling secrets to the Soviets, compromising missions around the globe. Undercover agents have been assassinated, and anti-Communist plots are being cut short in ruthlessly efficient fashion. The CIA director knows any news of the traitor, whose code name is Protocol, would be a national embarrassment and compromise the entire agency. George Mueller seems to be the perfect man to help find the mole: Yale-educated; extensive experience running missions in Eastern Europe; an operative so dedicated to his job that it left his marriage in tatters. The Director trusts him. Mueller, though, has secrets of his own, and as he digs deeper into the case, making contact with a Soviet agent, suspicion begins to fall on him as well. Until Protocol is found, no one can be trusted, and everyone is at risk.

Former CIA Agent George Mueller arrives in Havana in August 1958, during the last months of dictator Fulgencio Batista's reign, to look into the activities of Toby Graham-an in-country CIA officer suspected of harboring sympathies for the rebels fighting the unpopular Batista regime. Specifically, Mueller's old friend Graham may be putting weapons into the hands of Castro's forces, in bold defiance of the United States arms embargo on the island. But when Mueller uncovers a world of deceit as the FBI, CIA, and State Department compete to influence the outcome of the revolution in the face of the brutal dictatorship's imminent collapse, he realizes that nothing and no one is what they seem. This is a powerful story of ideals, passions, betrayals, and corrupting political rivalries in the months before Castro's march into Havana on New Year's Day, 1959.