At times I feel like I’m an intellectual and uncultured Neanderthal compared to David Foster and his excellent Permission to Kill website. David brings to the world interesting book covers and movie posters, well researched reviews of obscure spy films, his membership of COBRA and a witty writing style, where I come across as an angry totalitarian right wing loony whose contribution to mankind is a short review of the book of the movie Spies Like Us starring Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase, but enough with self pitying introspection, lets proceed with the review.

This book follows Austin Millbarge and Emmett Fitz-Hume as government employees, who being expendable, are used as decoys/sacrificial lambs whilst the US sends another more competent team to the real objective. This real objective is to gain a Russian ICBM, fire it at the US in order to test the missile defend shield. Some agents have already died in trying to carry out this high risk objective whose downside, apart from the loss of agents, is the possibility of nuclear war and its mutually assured destruction. This book follows Millbarge and Fitz-Hume through their Foreign Service Board exam and the repercussions for cheating. The repercussions include military training, getting dropped in a box into Pakistan, pretending to be doctors and their subsequent two man invasion of the USSR.

Sometimes, when I read books which have became films, for instance Funeral in Berlin, I can’t disassociate Oscar Homolka from Colonel Stok in the book and the screen, where with this I did not see Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd as the protagonists. Maybe it was a forgettable film or probably the actors lack of screen presence, which allowed me to sit down and read it and not have the influence of the film contaminating what I thought of the book.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: Maybe the USSR as the Americans seemed hell bent on destroying their country and had fools at the top of their military and intelligence services.
Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : Ninjas were involved at training (ninjas are underused in Cold War Fiction), things going boom through training and then escaping from the KGB twice, Yusufzais and the Tadzhik Highway Patrol before a quick fight struggle followed by loving between aliens and the ICBM crew.
I won’t bother writing about the believability of the goodies or baddies as they all had the personality of cardboard cutouts, and in fairness to the author, this book had to follow very closely to the movie, yet he still was able to write a book that stands alone as its own separate piece of Cold War fiction.

In summary, I have to be honest and say I did enjoy this book, it wasn’t laugh out loud funny, but rather there was a streak of good humour throughout it, and I think kudos to McGill to keeping the writing humorous as surely he would had to suffer so many viewing of the movie that the jokes would have became stale to him.