INTELLIGENCE MATTERS

By John Skow

Resolute cynics may roll their eyes and conclude that David Ignatius' clever and unsettling thriller A Firing Offense (Random House; 333 pages; $23) is merely an elaborate dance of the oxymorons. Its plot, after all, places military intelligence, the archetype of self-contradictions, in opposition to another giggle inducer, journalistic ethics.

Giggles aside, however, important and quite nasty skullduggery still goes on in the world. If you are Eric Truell, the young Paris bureau chief of a grand old American newspaper, you might, fizzing with nerve and careerism, sneak past police barricades and into a hostage standoff to interview the terrorists and note down their predictable, forlorn demands for social justice.

Great stuff for the front page back home, but when the French become furious at Truell's caper, he is jailed briefly and then thrown out of the country. Why this overreaction? And why, he wonders, were all the terrorists killed, when what they wanted was negotiation? Most puzzling, what happened to the unarmed, unworldly microbiologist who had desperately tried to tell him something just before the shootout?

In the U.S., Truell backtracks the French story, relying for information on a disaffected CIA agent he knew in Paris. There seems to be a lot of disaffection at the CIA, a sclerotic bureaucracy, as the author tells it, lacking in clear purpose and shaken by its own incompetence. Truell's newspaper is tottering as well; its traditions, which date from a time when a newspaper could be the soul of a city, are far more solid than its finances. Good reporters are quitting. The publisher, a decent fellow in a shameful squeeze, is talking with secretive offshore moneymen.

The author, a Washington Post editor, gets a lot right about reporting, from Truell's woozy bravado to the knowledge that a new owner may stride into the newsroom any morning and start counting paper clips. The ethical dilemma he presents is real too, though a bit overstated. Truell learns that the missing French microbiologist is on loan to China, working unwillingly on a deadly project. He needs to be rescued, and so does the world. His CIA contacts ask if Truell, who's headed for China, will take on the derring-do?

Of course reporters have worked as intelligence agents. But to do so endangers other reporters and violates journalism's quaint, faint imperative to work for only one paycheck and report even awkward truths. The counterbalancing urgency--biological warfare, for Pete's sake--makes Truell's decision too easy, so that in the last chapters a paunch begins to show on what was a taut and enjoyable job of writing.

--By John Skow