The Spook Who Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee, is the fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first black CIA officer

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) DVDRip Dir. Ivan Dixon

The fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first black CIA officer, and of the CIA’s history of training persons and political groups who later used their specialized training in gathering intelligence, political subversion, and guerrilla warfare against the CIA. Soon after its release, with the facilitation of FBI suppression, the film was removed from theaters as a result of its politically controversial message.

In this still from the film, ex-CIA officer Dan Freeman (played by Lawrence Cook, right) goes underground to recruit a guerrilla army from the Cobras street gang, including their leader Do-Daddy Dean (played by Paul Butler, left). (Everett Collection).

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969), by Sam Greenlee, is the fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first black CIA officer, and of the CIA’s history of training persons and political groups who later used their specialized training in gathering intelligence, political subversion, and guerrilla warfare against the CIA. The novel has been characterized as “part thriller, part satire, and part social commentary”. As described by The New Yorker, the title “alludes to the conspicuous deployment of the agency’s one black officer to display its phony integration.”

Author Sam Greenlee, EX’57 (shown here in an undated photo), cowrote and coproduced the 1973 film adaptation of his signature novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Photo courtesy Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester).

The author, Sam Greenlee, was told by Aubrey Lewis (1935–2001), one of the first black FBI agents recruited to the Bureau in 1962, that The Spook Who Sat by the Door was required reading at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Having been much rejected by mainstream publishers, Greenlee’s spy novel first was published by Allison & Busby in the UK in March 1969, after the author met Ghanaian-born editor Margaret Busby in London the previous year, and in the US by the Richard W. Baron Publishing Company. It was subsequently translated into several languages, including French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Finnish, Swedish, and German. To read more go to the link below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spook_Who_Sat_by_the_Door_(novel)