Catch-22 meets Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in this biting comic novel of one spy’s quest for justice—and a ray of truth—when he’s cast into a pit of bureaucratic vipers bent on never-ending expansion of the nest, even if they have to kill to do so.

The Pickle Factory Eats Its Own

KRAY (not his true name) is a nonofficial-cover (NOC) CIA operator—a field case officer who works without embassy backup, relying on nerve and ingenuity to recruit and run foreign agents for his country. Then Headquarters calls him home and drops him into its own maze, where initiative is a liability and successful operators are resented. At first, KRAY plays along, hoping to outlast his bureaucratic tour and get back to real operations.

But the NOC program’s potential brings in a new congressional windfall—a multibillion-dollar money stream earmarked to hire and field more NOCs.

Enter Project GOOWIKI (the “Transformational Human Resources World-Wide Outreach Program”). The plan: spend every penny on consultants, stack headquarters with new hires, and promote layers of supervisors to manage them. Field work? No way. Effective foreign operators only cause headaches HQ doesn’t need.

Then a forward operating base abroad explodes in a suicide bombing. CIA officers die. Headquarters springs into action—not to hit back, but to cover its own backside. Meanwhile, KRAY’s reputation sinks exactly as intended. And when he returns to the field to find out if any of GOOWIKI’s “1,000 new NOCs” actually exist, Headquarters figures this may be the perfect time to solve the KRAY problem. Permanently.

Fast, sharp, and bone-dry funny, Sam R. Oyken’s vast comic debut is Catch-22 with a security clearance, A Confederacy of Dunces with a nation on the line. Bureaucrats obsess over “Funny Names,” mandatory trainings (“Talking on the Telephone,” “Talking with Foreigners”), and cafeteria upgrades, while competence quietly bleeds out in the corner. Underneath the irony runs a hard moral line: contempt for cowardice, anger at waste, and respect for those who actually risk their lives for their country. None of which plays well—or at all—at the Pickle Factory.