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    The Director
    The Director
    The Director
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Director

    Written by David Ignatius

    Narrated by George Guidall

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In David Ignatius' s gripping new novel, spies don' t bother to steal information . . . they change it, permanently and invisibly. Graham Weber has been director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents' names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads. Weber isn' t sure where to turn until he meets a charismatic (and unstable) young man named James Morris who runs the Internet Operations Center. He' s the CIA' s in-house geek. Weber launches Morris on a mole hunt unlike anything in spy fiction-- one that takes the reader into the hacker underground of Europe and America and ends up in a landscape of paranoia and betrayal. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it' s drawn, The Director is a maze of deception and double-dealing-- about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones and nothing can be trusted.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 2, 2014
    ISBN9781490618708
    The Director

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    Reviews for The Director

    3.5/5

    95 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is an outstanding novel with a riveting plot and believable characters. If you read or listen to this, you will be glad you did.
    • 5/5
      The twist in the plot made it an interesting read
    • 4/5
      Graham Weber, is the recently appointed head of the CIA when he receives news that the organization has been hacked. He enlists James Morris, a super hacker himself, who is one of his department heads to track down the hackers. Weber is a billionaire businessman with no experience in the intelligence community. Given his lack of relevant background, I often found it hard to believe his actions. I thought that the parts of the book dealing with the hacking community were both plausible and interesting. You could never be sure of their motivations. They may have been driven by the combined folly and arrogance that equates anarchy with freedom, or they might have had more cynical and pragmatic political motives. The descriptions of the hacking plot were taut, complex and suspenseful as the chief hacker put his plan together, even though I thought he was naive and deluded. However, I found it to be less plausible and interesting when the focus shifted to the spying and maneuvering between the various U.S. security agencies. Do the agencies really spend quite so much time spying on each other? They seemed to just run around in circles one-upping each other. It also was not explained to my satisfaction why I should care that there is an historical linkage between the CIA and British intelligence. So what if we cribbed the structure of our intelligence gathering operations from the British? Overall, I found this book very entertaining, but not perfect. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
    • 3/5
      This is a good story with current cyber-security details, BUT the ending (last 8%?) just sputtered out. Almost as if the author / editors worked diligently on the first 90% and then rushed the ending to get it out the door. Obviously not the same quality of writing or story at the end. (THAT story might be interesting in an essay of "how I write"!)
    • 1/5
      You have to realize that this book is a primer on: hacking, dysfunctional clandestine orgs, German hacker culture, international banking, street directions to secret organizations, badass domination, and Russians. Along with a theory about how the CIA was originally a Brit scheme. A plot stitches these elements together with your normal thriller type characters, and as a bonus you get to visit DEF CON. But I still only onestar it. (Remember flamboyant clothing is always a clue in this type of book)
    • 3/5
      A little historical tidbit I picked up from this novel (which I verified independently): the British Secret Service was instrumental in getting the American intelligence establishment in place, beginning with the OSS in World War II. In fact, in one secret British memo an outline was made of what the structure of the the future CIA should look like. The memo was written by a British agent by the name of Ian Fleming.

      That British-American connection actually plays a key role in this novel, though it takes place today and involves all sorts of cyber-actions. There are conspiracies aplenty, not all the details of which felt convincing. But what do I know? Maybe in the "wilderness of mirrors" the comprises the modern spy business, these things happen all the time and the rest of us are just blissfully oblivious of them.

      One lesson is that this is not a world for idealists. Idealism only blinds its adherents to become easily manipulated by those with more cynical schemes. There may be many possible outcomes to any particular crisis, but throughout all of them, the Man wins in the end.
    • 4/5
      Interesting story about Graham Weber the new Director of the CIA. His first week as The Director, he decides that there is a mole in the CIA who is leaking their secrets to other countries. He starts to conduct an investigation quietly and entrusting a handful of people to help him. Then there is James Morris the head of the Information Operations Center who used to be a hacker. He is pretty much too smart for his own good. He is conducting a secret mission outside of the CIA to hack into The Bank for International Settlements. Then there is Cyril Hoffman the Director of National Intelligence who I found to be a little smarmy. There is a lot going on in this book that makes you question if anything you put online is safe. This is a great thriller.
    • 3/5
      Ehh. Interesting idea but too twisted.
    • 3/5
      A nicely paced spy yarn that finds the new director of the CIA up to his ears in potential double-agents, geeky-hip underworld hackers, and an echo-chamber bureaucracy that eats what it kills. Good-looking billionaire Graham Weber accepts the job to clean up the mess, but finds that his private sector gut instincts may get him more into trouble than solve problems. Readers get to enjoy a snappy ride through international spy networks, high-tech cyber snooping, and old-school pressure politics as Weber sorts through allies, suspects, and a world of self-doubt. Author David Ignatius gives us top-notch plot and an array of complex characters that defy stereotype, except, unfortunately, Weber himself. And, in places, the writing becomes slightly cliched. But this one is a keeper.
    • 5/5
      As is with other David Ignatius novels, the author presents the impression - whether it's real or not, which really doesn't matter - that he really knows the subject matter. As with other his novels the characters are somewhat stereotypical. Overall, good plot, good writing, solid background and interesting facts.
    • 2/5
      What a bore. The author talks down to the audience a lot. The average episode of 24 assumes more domain knowledge. (The story might not have been bad without the poor execution. Also, lots of tedious description of people's clothing: Pride and Prejudice meets a supposed techno-thriller.)
    • 4/5
      Mixed feelings on this book and perhaps 4 stars is too generous. What I liked: This is about hacking, and in a sense it is the new frontier for intelligence agencies. Hacking has been around since only days after the Internet was born, but now the hackers are getting better and better. The new director of the CIA has to worry about in-house cyber intrusions as well as invasions of financial institutions which could catastrophically impact global economies. So we learn a lot about the new tools, the lingo, the attacks, the talent pool, defenses, etc. An awful lot. This book is similar in some ways to the recent novel "I Am Pilgrim" in that it staggers the reader with the nightmare, "Hey, this could really happen here." And that is what sticks most with me after reading this book. What I didn't like: Perhaps there was just a bit too much about all the hacking. Towards the end I didn't want to hear anymore about how systems, programs, etc. I also didn't care much for the character of the Director. He came across to me as a bit of a bumbler, someone who was learning learning learning all the way up to the final pages. Though a very successful businessman, he doesn't strike me as someone who could succeed in a different environment than the one he is most familiar with....Is there a message here that success in government leadership positions absolutely requires tons of government experience? Perhaps.... While the Director is ultimately hailed as a hero and someone who brought a new focus to the CIA, I came away with the feeling that the organization would be back to "normal" 24 hours after he leaves. And then there's the climax. It felt to me that the author got tired of the whole thing and just wanted to end it, So he did it in a few brief pages, and not all of those were credible to me.
    • 4/5
      A good story about two things: computers and D.C. duplicity. Ignatius has fashioned a story that relates the learning curve of new head of the CIA who is a complete novice in the spy game. He also seems to be friendless. This is where the novel break downs depicting the leader as a dog without a master or home. Frankly, I think Ignatius worked a story too big to tell and he would have been more successful had he chosen one or other of his subjects. Still, it is a very readable book.
    • 1/5
      I received this book through Goodreads First Reads.Since I received a free advance reading copy of this book I felt obligated to complete the book, however throughout the last half of this book I felt like just ditching it.The plot is incredibly rushed in getting from Point A to Point Z, so rushed that it missed half the alphabet. The primary characters are underdeveloped, especially when it comes to motivation, which went hand-in-hand with the rushed plot. This combination by itself doomed the book, however the fact that the titular character was forgotten for stretches of the book and then suddenly he reappears dealing with things that the reader is given no context too, just made it worse. And the final nail in the coffin was the numerous instances in which the reader's intelligence was insulted by things the CIA characters did throughout the book, it was maddening.This was the first time I read a book by Mr. Ignatius and it will be my last as well.