How a Black Vietnam is being built in the heart of the United States

The life of Sam Greenlee (Chicago, 1930-2014), the author ofOur CIA infiltrator, brings to mind a James Bond film written and directed by Spike Lee. A descendant of the Deep South, with all the terrible and tragic heritage—slavery—that this entails, Greenlee was a diligent and meritorious student and made his way in the United States, structurally deformed by white segregationist racism. As a teenager and young adult, he participated in organizations promoting black civil rights, studied at several universities (political science), and finally joined the army, where he served for two years. From there, he moved to the U.S. Information Agency (diplomacy, propaganda, espionage) and became one of the first black agents deployed abroad. He served in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece. Having already left the service, in 1969 he gained considerable literary notoriety with Our CIA infiltrator, which makes one think of the novel Catch-22 by Josep Heller but as if it had been rewritten by Malcolm X and Richard Pryor.

One critic once described the novel as "a program for revolution." It may seem exaggerated, but it's a perfectly accurate comment. Suffice it to say that when the film version, written by Greenlee himself, was released in 1973, all copies that had been made disappeared within days, supposedly seized by the FBI. Even seen in retrospect, when so many revolutionary gestures of the 1960s and 1970s have become outdated and seem naive, it's understandable that Greenlee's work disturbed white American hegemony. Because it works, at the same time, as a devastating satire against American racism (especially against the paternalistic, cynical and arrogant racism of progressives who pretend to be anti-racist and against the connivance of middle-class Black people who play into the hands of white people because they are already fine as they are), as a fantasy of revenge and resentment of the oppressed and as a combative and unabashed call to recover Black self-knowledge and self-esteem.

Here's a brief summary of the plot. Dan Freeman is an intelligent, athletic, handsome, and capable Black man who, in the 1960s, joins the CIA as part of a government program aimed at desegregating it. This is all a cover-up operation driven by a liberal politician who wants to win back the Black vote, but Freeman, a lower-class man and therefore an outsider in the realms of power, seizes the opportunity. He acquires political and military knowledge, techniques of dissimulation and combat, and finally manages to be admitted to the CIA. After a few years of work, during which he expands his operational capabilities, Freeman quits his job and returns to his native Chicago ghetto as a social worker. To help young Black men who are victims of poverty and systemic racism? No. To teach them everything he knows, organize them, and instigate an armed revolt.

If the plot is explosive—because Greenlee unfolds it in a direct, fast-paced, absolutely ideological manner, and without any euphemism—the style, outlook, and tone are even more so. The precise and frenetic prose (finely translated by Josep Grau), full of sarcastic asides and comments as hilarious as they are devastating, as well as the author's highly intelligent games and innuendos with all kinds of prejudices and stereotypes related to race, class struggle, and the Cold War, transform the novel and the Cold War. More than half a century after its publication, it continues to explode with ease.