[Stained Glass,] an elegant and engaging tale of East-West skulduggery in postwar Germany, genially observes all the conventions of the first-rate spy story and at the same time conducts a disturbing lesson in the unsavory realities of international politics.

Given to outlandish fantasies …, the author here advances a startling proposition: What if the Western Powers, the United States in particular, had resisted Soviet tyranny in East Germany during the scramble for influence in Europe that followed the Second World War? Now, of course, we will never know, but as the author re-creates the international climate of the early 1950s, the notion that history once in a great while presents an opportunity for right to prevail seems tantalizingly plausible, and the bungling of such a chance, maddeningly and momentously wasteful.

Stained Glass proceeds with the ample wit and intelligence that one by now takes for granted in Buckley. With...