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Roland Haas couldn't have picked a better time to release his memoir of life as a CIA assassin. News headlines have been dominated by recently released CIA documents, detailing covert activities from the Vietnam era, exactly the time Haas became an active CIA assassin. If these so-called CIA "family jewels" documents are the bureaucratic, sanitized version of intelligence operations of that period, Haas reveals the individual, down-and-dirty side of clandestine operations -- both the cloak-and-dagger blood-drenched drama and the personal cost to agents. In Haas's case, stress from his career led to alcoholism and cocaine abuse that came closer to killing him than any foreign operative.

Along with being a lethal assassin, Haas is an unexpectedly articulate narrator of his stranger-than-fiction story. Fluent in German and conversant in Russian, Haas was recruited in 1971 by the CIA while on an ROTC scholarship at Purdue University. Expelled from school as a cover story, Haas relocates to Germany, where he begins covert operations directed by a handler code-named "Phil." In short order, Haas kills drug dealers in Afghanistan and Turkey, gets imprisoned and nearly killed in Iran, and conducts espionage in East Germany.

Haas returns to the States to study comparative literature at UC-Berkeley, co-owns an Oakland gym and nearly gets himself killed by the Hells Angels. Haas continues working for the CIA, eliminating targets in the 1980s and 1990s (after 1990, he refuses to provide details). He also abuses alcohol, and much of the end of the book gets somewhat bogged down in the all-too-familiar addiction-and-recovery narrative.

Haas's tale is definitely entertaining, but it's hard not to think his re-creation of events strays into fictionalization at times. He elaborately details a meal he ate the day before executing a drug dealer and three bodyguards early in his career -- an impressive feat of memory, especially for a man who spent years heavily abusing alcohol. Haas occasionally resorts to a kind of dime-store spy novel-ese. The Raymond Chandler-esque repartee between Haas and his handler Phil is often stilted, and cryptic spy exchanges can be almost comical, like when he tells one espionage contact, "A bicyclist's liter would taste good right now" (referring to a beer-and-soda drink), and gets the expected reply, "Yes, but it would be better without the soda."

On the plus side, Haas's insights into the cultures he encounters are often engrossing, and he also goes into fascinating detail about aspects of his "profession," from explaining how a silencer works to describing his education at picking locks. Depending on your politics, his rationalizations about his career choice and body count (Haas details 11 assassinations of the 18 he says he carried out) might hold water. In the end, Haas comes away from Enter the Past Tense as a fairly sympathetic character -- and that just makes him all the more scary.