Traitor

November 27, 2017
De Shalit, “a former high-ranking member of the Israeli Intelligence Community,” has the credentials to pen a solid spy novel centered on a mole hunt, but veteran genre readers will find nothing that they haven’t seen before in his plodding debut. In 1983, Alon, a young Israeli parliamentary aide, walks into the American embassy in Rome and tells an official, John Roberts, that he wishes to work as an intelligence asset for the U.S. The ambitious Alon boasts that within two decades he will be in a position to provide top-level strategic information. Roberts, himself a traitor, will pass on Alon’s offer to the East Germans, for whom Alon unwittingly becomes a spy. In 2013, the betrayal of the man code-named Cobra by the East Germans comes to the attention of Aharon Levin, the retired head of Mossad, who is authorized by the Israeli president to put together an off-the-books squad to identify and apprehend him. It soon becomes clear that Cobra is Alon. Readers will struggle to sympathize with the colorless Alon, whose motives never cohere.