Top Highlights

• The whole of the newspaper seemed to have gathered.
• The traffic jam in this manicured park was a reminder that France, behind its neat hedgerows, remained a Mediterranean country—a place where people knew things without being told, where the official version of events was assumed to be a lie. It was like Beirut in that way; the Lebanese warlords always seemed to know which part of the city would be ...
• He was dressed like a German filmmaker, in a fuzzy black sweater, black pants and a black leather jacket. He was about my age, maybe thirty-five, medium height, hair short except for a tuft at the top. And he had a subversive gleam in his eye that I eventually came to understand was the mark of a man who—whatever other ideology he professed—was an ...
• You’re thinking about an organization with a flowchart. I’m talking about an affinity. There isn’t a single network, but dozens of them. The Secret Power includes businessmen, spies, politicians. It is a loose collection of the people who really run things in France, as opposed to the people who appear to run things. These people with the real, sec...
• Had I been used in a covert campaign by the U.S. government, deliberately plotted in Washington, to change French politics? Or had a source in Paris—a weirdo in a black leather jacket—slipped me the information on his own? Had I been the active player in this drama or simply the object of other people’s designs?