Review of ‘Offenbunker’

Posted on August 4, 2017 Updated on July 29, 2017

The time is the 1960s, and America is still recovering from WWII, the Korean War, and waking up in 1946 to discover that its WWII ally, the Soviet Union, is actually its enemy. The CIA, formed partly out of the wartime OSS, is locked in a deadly struggle with the KGB in now-divided Berlin, and is losing the battle as its agents keep getting burned. A group of intrepid spies, some of them veterans of recent wars, are brought together to find out why the CIA is always on the losing side, and learn that there is a high-level mole within the CIA itself.

Against this backdrop of cold war intelligence skullduggery, a military hero is asked to oversee security of a super-secret facility designed to ensure government continuity in the event of nuclear war, a facility nicknamed Offenbunker. The Soviets, of course, want all the details of this facility, and they order their CIA mole, not just to get the details, but to sabotage it.

Offenbunker by A. G. Russo is a novel of Cold War intrigue and betrayal, as agents of both sides lock horns in battles, personal and professional. The narrative is a bit choppy in places, almost like stage directions, and some of the characters are a bit cliché, a lot like the depictions in movies filmed during the 1960s, given to a bit of hyperbole when they speak. Historical information is also dumped in large quantities, often at the beginning of a chapter, and I found this disrupted the flow of reading. It would’ve been preferable to have this data given out more naturally as the chapter progressed.

While this is not a bad book; it’s certainly an interesting subject; it’s not the author’s best work.

I give it three and a half stars. I received a free copy of this book.