At the moment he was reading alone in White's sea cabin, which had become his permanent home aboard.  Ritter had thoughtfully tucked a CIA staff study into his duffle bag.  Entitled "Lost Children:  A Psychological Profile of East Bloc Defectors," the three-hundred-page document had been drafted by a committee of psychologists and psychiatrists who worked with the CIA and other intelligence agencies helping defectors settle into American life—and, he was sure, helping spot security risks in the CIA.  Not that there were many of those, but there were two sides to everything the Company did.

Ryan admitted to himself that this was pretty interesting stuff.  He had never really thought about what makes a defector, figuring that there were enough things happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain to make any rational person want to take whatever chance he got to run west.  But it was not that simple, he read, not that simple at all.  Everyone who came over was a fairly unique individual.  While one might recognize the inequities of life under Communism and yearn for justice, religious freedom, a chance to develop as an individual, another might simply want to get rich, having read about how greedy capitalists exploit the masses and decided that being an exploiter has its good points.  Ryan found this interesting if cynical.

Another defector type was the fake, the imposter, someone planted on the CIA as a living piece of disinformation.  But this kind of character could cut both ways.  He might ultimately turn out to be a genuine defector.  America, Ryan smiled, could be pretty seductive to someone used to the gray life in the Soviet Union.  Most of the plants, however, were dangerous enemies.  For this reason a defector was never trusted.  Never.  A man who had changed countries once could do it again.  Even the idealists had doubts, great pangs of conscience at having deserted their motherland.  In a footnote a doctor commented that the most wounding punishment for Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was exile.  As a patriot, being alive far from his home was more of a torment than living in a gulag.  Ryan found that curious, but enough so to be true.