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, by his own account, worked as a close advisor to Muhammad Ali and Adnan Khashoggi and as a spy with CIA co-founder Miles Copeland, Jr., with whom he was involved in intrigues in Pakistan, Nicaragua, India, Lebanon, and elsewhere, until 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 various places around the world, following his father's assignments. Kolb resisted various efforts at recruitment by official intelligence agencies until he was recruited by Copeland.
Upon the publication of Overworld, Kolb was again recruited, this time by the Department of Homeland Security, to help investigate two white collar criminals with connections to the CIA. Kolb's investigation of Robert Sensi and Richard Hirschfeld led him to discover and foil a conspiracy to smear the John Kerry 2004 presidential campaign with false links to Al Qaeda. This became the subject of his 2007 book America at Night, which was reviewed by The New York Times on January 25, 2007.
In The Unending Game: A Former R&AW Chief's Insights into Espionage, Vikram Sood, retired chief of India's foreign intelligence service Research and Analysis Wing, devotes a chapter to Kolb's operations in India, and calls Kolb "multi-talented, a kind of real-life James Bond with Bond's legendary luck with women and the subtlety of a John le Carré character."
Kolb, who was born in Virginia, currently lives in Florida.