Breaking Cover

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Breaking Cover
Michele Rigby Assad
Tyndale

The CIA is looking for walking contradictions. Recruiters seek people who can keep a secret, yet pull classified information out of others; who love their country, but are willing to leave it behind to head into dangerous places; who live double lives, but can be trusted with some of the nation's most highly sensitive tasks.

Michele Rigby Assad was one of those people.

As a CIA agent, Michele soon found that working undercover was an all-encompassing job. The threats were real. The mission was a perilous one. Trained as a counterterrorism expert, Michele spent over a decade in the agency--a woman leading some of the most highly skilled operatives on the planet, secretly serving in some the most treacherous areas of the Middle East. But deep inside, Michele wondered: Could she really do this job? Was she in the right place at the right time, or had she misunderstood what she thought was God's calling on her life? Did she have what it would take to survive?

The answer came when Michele faced a life-or-death choice--one that had secretly been the plan for her all along.

In Breaking Cover, Michele has at last been cleared to drop cover and tell her story: one of incredible struggle; of thwarted plans and expectations; and most of all, of discovering a faith greater than all her fears

      I'm not normally a big reader of non-fiction outside of history texts, especially when it comes to memoirs. But I've always been a little curious about the CIA (I mean, who isn't?) and so this book intrigued me.

     Parts of it were fascinating, yet also incredibly foreign. And I don't mean just the secret spy stuff. The Middle East is just so different from Western culture, and even though I've taken a class on Middle Eastern history and am not entirely ignorant on the subject, some of the situations that Mrs. Assad described in certain countries were even worse (in regards to how women are viewed and treated) than I  thought.

     It was interesting how the very personality traits the author thought would be a hindrance in her line of work actually turned out being an asset, and I appreciated the glimpse into a world that I doubt I'll ever get to see into in real life. (Plus, she and her husband were spies together, which I find doubly awesome.) While the author's juggle between her work in the CIA and being a Christian is an interesting dichotomy (and God's hand has definitely moved in her life) some of the things she did or had to do still made me uncomfortable, which brought forth questions about ends justifying means. I don't agree with her perspective on everything, but it was an interesting point of view.

     That being said, I found it difficult to connect to the writing in this book. That's actually why I don't usually read memoirs; the writing style almost always tends to rub me the wrong way, making it difficult for me to empathize with the author, even when I think I'd like the person in real life. Breaking Cover suffered from this problem, which makes reviewing it a little tricky. But objectively, I'm sure readers who love memoirs and/or are curious about the CIA will want to try picking this one up.


I received this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

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