Sen. Cohen enters world of mirrors in new spy thriller `One-Eyed Kings’ > Readers will wonder how much is real

ONE-EYED KINGS, by Sen. William S. Cohen, Doubleday, 466 pages, $20.

Like the smoke-and-mirrors world of espionage, William S. Cohen will leave the reader of his latest book wondering how much is imaginary, and how much actually came from within the sealed and heavily guarded state secrets about which he writes and used to oversee.

As with most spy novels, “One-Eyed Kings” is made of the stuff that could happen, but probably won’t: While the United States secretly pursues deployment of space-based weapons systems, the Soviet Union, which has returned to some of its hard-line mentality in its post-Gorbachev era, hopes to profit by using espionage to ignite war between the Arab states and Israel.

But Sen. Joshua Stock, who has been trapped into this web, is murdered, and his friend and colleague in the Senate sets out to discover why. Sen. Sean Falcone’s search leads him to an underworld of global intelligence and counterintelligence and the subversive policies of the White House, the Kremlin, and the Mossad that surprise even him, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“Kings,” which spans seven months, takes a while to build its intricate case. But things begin to pick up part way through, and the book reaches the goal of every spy thriller — to keep the reader going, quickly.

People familiar with Cohen and his work will recognize much in “Kings”: A Soviet leader ponders poetry, the Maine senator’s great love, and the late Sen. Stock was a member of both the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, as was Cohen. Stock complained that members of each committee sometimes attempted to pry information about weapons programs from his work on the other committee.

During one scene, a senator is dispirited about his work — always moving to this meeting or that, taking care of business in an increasingly shallow world of public service. And with the secrecy of the Intelligence Committee, there is little fruit to bring home to constituents hungry for a visible account for all the time served. These are problems sometimes raised by Cohen himself.

There are other familiarities in “Kings,” including one scene taken almost verbatim from Cohen’s autobiographical “Roll Call.” The description of Falcone’s workaholic Italian father is a near-perfect sketch of Ruby Cohen, the senator’s father, who once won a street fight against a man who would later become a gangster’s bodyguard. This, too, did not escape Cohen’s pen.

“He was not a big man, but he was wiry and surprisingly supple,” Cohen wrote of Falcone’s father. “He had large forearms and hands with fingers as thick as bananas. He was a fighter, too. He once knocked out a much larger man who later became a bodyguard for the gangster Mickey Cohen.”

And like Cohen, Falcone’s mother is Irish, with the child being reared in the middle of the two worlds.

Reading the obvious references to Cohen’s life also makes the reader wonder which references are better hidden — how much of “Kings” is autobiographical. And while movie studios might not wage war for the rights to “Kings,” the book continues Cohen’s literary tradition, which has established him not only as the Senate’s most prolific author, but one worth reading as well.

Flipping pages and discovering the senator and his life woven here and there into the copy, the reader will continue to wonder how much of it is true and how much is fiction, or perhaps near-fiction. This, of course, adds to the fascination of the book. For those thrilled by thrillers, “Kings” is surely a work to have under the belt.

John Ripley is a reporter on the NEWS city desk.