Larry J. Kolb

Larry J. Kolb is the author of two memoirs of his life as an intelligence officer and world-traveling businessman. Prior to his career as an author, Kolb worked as a close advisor to Muhammad Ali and Adnan Khashoggi, and as a spy recruited and run by CIA co-founder Miles Copeland, Jr. Under Copeland, Kolb was involved in intrigues in Pakistan, Lebanon, India, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and elsewhere -- until the late 1990s when Kolb was forced to retreat to a safe house in Florida to avoid extradition to India. As Kolb recounts in Overworld, his father was a highly placed U.S. intelligence official, and Kolb grew up in several places around the world, including Washington, Japan, London, Berlin, and Switzerland, following his father's postings. While in his twenties, Kolb resisted efforts at recruitment by the CIA, and became a businessman instead -- soon finding himself on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Years later, after Kolb, through his relationships with Ali and Khashoggi, among others, developed so much access in the Middle East that Kolb became an almost irresistible target for recruitment by Copeland (who was a Middle East expert and the CIA's first covert political operative), Copeland successfully recruited, trained, and ran Kolb -- primarily in covert political operations overseas. Upon the publication of Overworld, Kolb was again recruited, this time by the Department of Homeland Security, to investigate, locate, and catch two fugitive CIA-trained covert political operatives. Kolb's investigation of Robert Sensi and Richard Hirschfeld led Kolb to discover and foil a conspiracy to smear the John Kerry 2004 presidential campaign with false links to Al Qaeda, and to Hirschfeld's mysterious death while in federal custody in Miami. This became the subject of Kolb's 2007 book America at Night, which was reviewed by the New York Times on January 25, 2007. Kolb, who was born in Virginia, currently lives in a safe house on a beach somewhere in the United States.