The Spike? A newspaper term that means a story is killed because an editor doesn't like its politics. It means slanting the news, by omission. It means politics governs news. And it is politics that are at issue here.

Robert Hockney, young liberal journalist, scourge of the Nixon White House and the CIA, and lover of a radical sex symbol, is forced from his job when he insists on investigating an unfashionable theme: the way that media bias, fostered by the KGB's sinister Directorate A, has anesthetized public awareness to the thrust of Russia's bid for global supremacy.

Following a trail that leads him from the jungles of Vietnam to the terrorist lairs of Hamburg and Rome, from high society orgies in Paris to the discovery of the Soviet "mole" who burrowed his way to the heart of the National Security Council in Washington, Hockney's dangerous journey lays bare to the reader what could very well be the secret history of our times. Spies, agents, double agents, moles, bribes, seduced high officials, trained sex experts, and special investigators crowd the scene with blackmail, assassinations, suicides, and mysterious disappearances,

More convincing than and previous bestseller, this is a work of fiction that exposes what may be going on behind closed doors in the White House, Western newsrooms, and at 2 Dzherzhinsky Square, the headquarters of the KGB.