About Larry J. Kolb


Larry J. Kolb was born in Virginia and raised around the world as the son of a senior American intelligence official, a spy master. When he was twenty-two years old, Kolb was recruited by the CIA, but he declined. Instead he became a businessman, and the following year was featured on the cover of The Wall Street Journal. While still in his mid-twenties, he became an agent for professional athletes, including Muhammad Ali, with whom Kolb developed a close friendship. This brought him into contact with many of the world's most powerful and wealthiest people, especially in the Middle East, and made him almost irresistible to legendary CIA co-founder Miles Copeland. When Copeland recruited Kolb, Kolb said yes, and soon he was involved in covert intrigues in Beirut, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Nicaragua, Peru, Pakistan, and India, not to mention the halls of power in London, New York, and Washington. With Copeland, Kolb co-wrote white papers for the President of the United States and the National Security Council, during the administrations of President Reagan and the first President Bush. While running a covert propaganda campaign for Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Kolb anonymously wrote a widely-published series of investigative newspaper stories which electrified India. During most of the 1990's, while the then anti-Gandhi government of India sought to extradite him, Kolb found himself in a safe house in Florida with nothing to do but listen to the waves roll in and put down on paper the extraordinary story of his life so far.

Peopled by larger than life characters such as Ali, Gandhi, Copeland, Daniel Ortega, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Adnan Khashoggi, Imelda Marcos, and assorted coup plotters, assassins, gem smugglers, dictators, spies, swindlers, and tycoons, Kolb's first book, the memoir, Overworld: The Life and Times of a Reluctant Spy, is a real-life adventure story which offers compelling insights into the danger, glamour, and psychology of espionage and covert statecraft. Overworld was published in the United States and Canada by the Riverhead Books division of Penguin Group, and in the rest of the English-speaking world by the Bantam Press imprint of Random House. Overworld has also been translated into French, Portuguese, Polish, and Chinese.
Kolb's second book, America at Night, is his firsthand account of a counterterrorism investigation he ran in 2004 for a friend who was a high-level official of the Department of Homeland Security, and of the aftermath of that investigation. Deep within the recesses of power and politics, Kolb discovers two rogue CIA operatives' secret scheme to subvert the 2004 U.S. presidential election, then he risks his life to foil the plan. In America at Night, Kolb reveals how he uncovered the vicious political plot that eluded even our best intelligence and law enforcement officials, in a shocking true account that is both a troubling indictment of our national security and a thrilling page turner only one man can tell.

READ Pascal Riché's LIBÉRATION profile of Kolb in the original French
READ Pascal Riché's LIBÉRATION profile of Kolb in English