Beer and Gasoline — John Knoerle

The top-secret facility perched in a remote part of the Mojave Desert is known as Camp X. It's a high-walled compound bristling with antennas and satellite dishes, and is the brainchild of James Jesus Angleton, the long-serving CIA Chief of Counterintelligence. Angleton dispatches his most trusted aide, posing as US Army Lt. Dick Nolan, to Needles, California, to investigate the strange death of the man who disposed of Camp X's highly-classified refuse. Lt. Nolan's initial inquiry indicates that the trash hauler's 'accidental' death was actually an elaborate KGB assassination. However, further investigation suggests to Nolan that the man's death was staged to make it look like a Soviet hit. And then, as the bizarre story of Camp X unfolds, Lt. Nolan begins to suspect that his boss may have succumbed to the demons that often plague the CIA Chief of Counterintelligence - more commonly known as The Paranoid in Chief. The story takes an even darker turn when Nolan's wife and daughter disappear from the family home in Falls Church, VA. This novel is set in the context of that terrible year of assassinations and riots and geopolitical turmoil: 1968.