Drone warfare, collateral damage, extraordinary rendition, and illegal imprisonment: these and other exercises of US power are articulated by a CIA agent in an effort to justify his role as a mole in Western intelligence. By putting these dark acts in the mouth of the villain of "A Colder War", Charles Cumming effectively diminishes their meaning. How different from the barely veiled anger at the forms of state and corporate power in the post-Cold War novels of John Le Carré, with whom Cumming is sometimes associated, particularly when his first two novels were published. Judging by the occasional references to James Bond in this latest novel, Ian Fleming is a closer influence than Le Carré. This is hardly a colder war. Only intermittently is an external threat (Syria) referenced and this has the effect of isolating the warring secret services and their respective obsessions: protocols (dead-letter boxes [DLB's], cut-outs etc), their own history (Kim Philby for the British, James Angl