Word: brookner
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last December the CIA agreed to pay a $410,000 settlement to former Jamaica station chief Janine Brookner, who had charged, in a highly publicized case, that the agency had falsely accused her of sexual promiscuity and alcoholism after she turned in her male deputy for beating his wife. As it turned out, Brookner had been one of the few Directorate officers who had tried to get Aldrich Ames fired for security breaches, 10 years before the FBI unmasked him for selling secrets to the KGB. As part of Brookner's settlement, the agency promised her a letter of recommendation...
...case officers are privately demanding a housecleaning of top officials in the clandestine Directorate for Operations, whose lax management and protective culture allowed Aldrich Ames to get away with selling secrets to Moscow for nine years. Last December the CIA settled a lawsuit with former Jamaican station chief Janine Brookner for $410,000 plus lawyers' fees. Brookner claimed she was denied promotions after she disciplined subordinates for drinking, carousing and, in one case, wife beating. ``They're almost a whole generation behind in their thinking about how to handle a modern work force,'' a recently retired senior CIA official says...
British novelist Anita Brookner's 12th book comes as a welcome surprise--just when it looked as if she had settled into Barbara Pym's world of lonely females without Pym's wit and trenchant insight into character. Written from the point of view of a just retired bachelor businessman, George Bland, who becomes enthralled with a heedless, scheming young woman, A Private View (Random House; 242 pages) is not only wise but funny...
These are the antagonists in the love match that Brookner sets up. George watches unblinkingly as his standards go down the drain. He also looks without flinching at the object of his fixation. She has ``an unusual gift: she brought everyone to the brink of bad behaviour.'' An honest man and proud of it, he is appalled to hear himself telling her petty lies, mostly in an effort to keep her greed at bay. Meanwhile, she is a determined missionary as she rattles on about getting in touch with ``the essential self.'' Confronted with one of his respectable female friends...
George slides very far. Too solid in the end to set Katy up as a guru--she has in mind usurping his pleasant apartment--he offers her a Christmas trip to Rome instead. In the end, of course, he loses the girl, but Brookner's triumph lies in the story's resolution. Torturing his sensibilities, wasting his money, disparaging his friends, Katy nonetheless succeeds in bringing animation back to her prey. As she re-enters the void from which she came, George starts a new life...