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How far would a U.S. government official go to protect secrets and maintain power in the belief that he or she was acting for the greater good? Would they risk their lives? Would they threaten the lives of others? In a divided country, seething with disinformation, who can we trust as the guarantors of American democracy? 

These are the questions raised by former CIA officer Jeff Grant in his thought-provoking debut spy thriller, The Swamp. Lest we harbor any doubts about which swamp we are referring to, the subtitle reads, “Deceit and Corruption in the CIA,” over a cover illustration of a White House sinking in the muck and flying an upside-down American flag, a symbol of distress. But this is a new twist on the Deep State nightmare. 

No subtleties here for Grant, an engineer who spent 21 years at the CIA and then two decades more at Northrop Grumman Aerospace. The two-pronged story line of The Swamp follows Elizabeth Petrov, a Russian-born engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in …