Nonfiction Book Reviews

Enter the Past Tense: My Secret Life as a CIA Assassin by Roland W Haas was a disappointment, to me at least. I spied the book while checking it out to a patron at the library, and had thought it looked like a very interesting book. After all, who wouldn’t enjoy a tell-all book from a CIA assassin?

Me, apparently.

My biggest problem with the book was the man himself, Roland Haas. He is NOT a good guy. Perhaps I’ve been steeped in too many Hollywood movies where the soldier is the good guy, or perhaps it was being raised by a dad who served in the Marine Corps for 20 years and talked endlessly about duty and country and “doing the right thing even when no one was looking” but to me, this guy was just a creep. At one point, upset with his up-to-that-point best friend, Roland took an ice pick and swung with all his might into the side of his best friend in an attempt to kill him. This was in either junior high or early high school – the book wasn’t quite clear on the timeline. His best friend lived, but they were not (shocking!) best friends after that. A murder attempt tends to put a damper on things.

He also spent most of college higher than a kite, he listed every drug he ever used, and even described in detail the various delusions that he suffered through. All of that would have been fine, if he had gone on to somehow redeem himself by changing his life around, etc etc, but instead he agrees to be an assassin on a lark, and then spends his time either learning how to kill people, or getting drunk or high (sometimes both at the same time). He just isn’t likable.

And all while reading this, I kept thinking, “Is this guy for real? Could he have honestly done all of this, or is he just writing this fictitious life in order to sound a lot cooler than he really was?” Maybe he wanted a good excuse as to why he was kicked out of college, and thought being a CIA assassin was a good cover story. Who knows. So I hopped online to read reviews on Amazon.com, and there were more than a few reviews on there that said that they believed the book was fictitious. We’ll never know for sure unless the guy confesses, but I have to say, I truly doubt half the stuff in this book.

I only got a third of the way through before deciding that I didn’t want to read about this guy any longer. He was depressing, he wasn’t a very nice human being, and I didn’t see this getting any better any time soon. I didn’t expect him to be a Boy Scout (after all, it was about an assassin!) but some of the stuff he did as a kid was just outright horrid.

Perhaps an adventurous soul could read through to the end and find a kernel of goodness and worthiness in the guy, but I would say there’s better books out there to spend your time reading.

2.25 stars out of 5

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