Paul Brodeur has been one of the nation's leading and most outspoken environmental journalists for thirty years. Now, with a novelist's flair for storytelling and the keen eye of a veteran journalist, he turns his attention to the experiences of his own life, weaving family secrets that were kept from him, secrets that he kept as a counterintelligence agent, and secrets he uncovered as an investigative reporter into the tapestry of the Cold War.

He focuses on the climate of secrecy and suspicion that fostered the deception and wrongdoing he has spent a career investigating and exposing. Brodeur crosses swords with the military, the CIA, the FBI, and the State Department; tangles with greedy corporate officials, callous industry physicians, dishonest bureaucrats, corrupt consultants, and hypocritical politicians; and is befriended and helped by some of the nation's leading scientists and medical researchers.

The result is a compelling narrative that takes issue with much of the Cold War's self-congratulatory mythology and its disturbing legacy that too often allows individual freedom to be curtailed in the name of national security.