The Social Agent is being kept from most bookshops because philanderers and old spies, or their widows, want to keep their secrets. The strange thing is that you can still buy this book on the internet, and many are. It is available in the US, in Europe and even in India, via Amazon and other sites. And there is irony, too: the technology that keeps The Social Agent on sale is the same that led to its being 'withdrawn' by the publisher. As the controversy develops, we've added media articles which have the details.

It has been a threat of legal action from the widow of the 'social agent' of the title which is the problem. Lawyers believe she may have a case under increasingly restrictive European 'privacy laws' which, because of that very same internet, means an American book is also a European book, challenging our American rights to self expression. We are on the case. Why should spies who worked for the communist machinery of terror and repression be entitled to keep their secrets? One of those is that the 'social agent' led a senior American journalist into a trap that put him in the gulag, a betrayal revealed for the first time in this book. Those who oppose this outrage, and the willingness of publishers to kowtow to foreign gagging laws, should protest to the publisher at Idee@ivanrdee.com

The Daily Beast:   My Banned Book   by Charles Laurence (pdf)

Born in London and educated in England, Charles Laurence is a former foreign correspondent for The Daily Telegraph of London who covered conflicts ranging from the Falklands War to the Middle East, India, and Afghanistan before heading the paper's New York bureau. Now an American citizen, he continues to write for British media and lives in Woodstock, New York and the remote Caribbean island of Salt Cay.

"A mesmerising story. The narrative thread alone compels one to follow the author into the dark labyrinths of Kafka's spooky city of Prague during the cold war. There's immediate page-turning excitement in unraveling the real motives of a man named Jiri Mucha. He seduced the author's mother, the wife of a diplomat in the British embassy in the fifties, and numerous others including the mistress of British Premier Anthony Eden. He may also have destroyed the author's sister. It was Jiri's job. He was what the secret police called a "social agent", code name ANTY, Agent No. 5902, paid to steal blueprints to the hearts of women who had access to men of power. None of this could have been obvious to the author, a child at the time, but one of the charms of the book is the manner in the way we see the lives through fragments of family remembrance. And when the story ends, the exceptional quality of the writing lingers in one's mind like sight of the city's medieval towers through a Prague fog."
– Sir Harold Evans, Editor of The Sunday Times, of London, from 1967 to 1981; President and Publisher of Random House; author of The American Century, and the memoir My Paper Chase.

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