John Sager – författare

To tell this most-unusual love story about two seventy-five year-olds, author John Sager retrieves more than 200 e-mails which he and Jo-an shared in the six months leading up to their wedding, shown in this photo. He had been in love with her since the first grade; she had never imagined such a thing. Not long after she gets it, she falls in love with him. Soon enough, they slip away in his motor home to a quiet Pacific Ocean beach to talk about the M word.

Their electronic exchanges, taken verbatim from the original texts, tell of a growing love story of intriguing proportions: infrequent face-to-face get-togethers, owing to his peculiar work assignment for the CIA, the power of prayer in their daily lives, a bit of office intrigue and, eventually, a wedding under a palm tree beneath Diamond Head in Honolulu. Then five years of incomparable wedded bliss.

It is a beautiful story, told as the two lovers wrote it, and sure to warm the hearts of seniors everywhere, and of the not-so-old as well: Keep the fires of love burning and never give in to the notion that it is too late!

Uncovered is the life story of eighty-three-year-old cold war veteran John Sager. An operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, his postings to pre-revolutionary Iran, Gamal Abdel Nassers Egypt, and Nikita Khrushchevs Soviet Russia thrust him into the midst of Americas most tumultuous half-century since World War II.

The authors memoir reveals an up-close vision of the nitty-gritty of cold-war intelligence work: recruiting and handling agents, devising ways to insert them into the hermetically sealed Soviet Union, managing the CIAs Moscow station, and running intelligence-gathering operations in the United States. Over his fifty-plus years of service, he experienced much of the CIAs silent struggle with Americas principal adversary. Now he shares those reflections, through the eyes of a born-again Christian.

But the story is more than that. Sager combines his spy craft with a passion for fly fishing, an avocation that took him to Russias remote Kamchatka Peninsula, where he found the long arm of the Russian intelligence service waiting. And when he returned to the United States to stay put, he reconnected with the love of his life in a marriage that lasted barely five years, cut short by tragedy.