John Carre’s latest is brilliant

A review of A Delicate Truth, by John LeCarre

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

On the cover of A Delicate Truth, Gibraltar looms like the vast bulk of reality weighing down on the idealism and sense of duty that preoccupy the novel’s protagonist, as they do in so many of the works of John Le Carre. Gibraltar itself does play a key role here as the site of an incident that brings together a motley cast of hapless souls: the upstanding senior officer and the bent but bumbling junior Minister he answers to; the Minister’s fast-track Private Secretary and his jaded mentor; the upper-crust opportunist, his right-wing American bedfellows, and the British Special Forces soldiers made pawns in their machinations. This unlikely assortment of 21st century humanity is thrown together in what can most fairly be described as one glorious clusterf***.

The incident in question is a joint UK-US anti-terrorism operation in Gibraltar engineered under the tightest secrecy by the Minister and his shady partner-in-crime, financed by Texas-based evangelical Christian activists, and executed under cover of darkness by a combined force of handpicked British Special Forces and mercenaries in the employ of a mysterious American defense contractor. Our hero, Toby Bell, Private Secretary to the Minister but kept in the dark by him, learns that the whole thing went south. As the story slowly emerges when Toby is compelled to follow the breadcrumbs to the truth, he is thrown together with the now-retired diplomat who was attached to the mission and the diplomat’s daughter, a comely physician ministering to the poor in London’s East End. Toby’s rush to the truth through the minefields of institutionalized compromise is fraught with mystery, terror, pain, suspense, and the inklings of romance. Yes, A Delicate Truth is, in fact, one glorious tale, proof that John Le Carre at 81 still writes with the extraordinary skill he treated us to in the 1960s.

A thriller that delivers both excitement and insight about the war in Afghanistan

A review of The Shadow Patrol, by Alex Berenson

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 The cottage industry in spy thrillers encompasses a wide range of quality, from those that offer up cheap thrills with one-dimensional characters facing off in unreal circumstances to those, many fewer, that rise into the realm of literature, illuminating the human condition. The finest of the lot, such as Graham Greene and John Le Carre at their best, stand with other exemplars of modern fiction. Alex Berenson’s writing doesn’t quite measure up to them, but it comes close. His most recent novel about the adventures of soldier-spy John Wells, The Shadow Patrol, explores the tragic dimensions of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, from which no one leaves ennobled.

John Wells has left the CIA and his long-time love, his agency handler, Jennifer Exley, and is living in rural New Hampshire with Anne, a local cop. When his old CIA boss, Ellis Shafer, asks him to return to action in Afghanistan, where he spent so many years undercover inside Al Qaeda, Wells leaps at the chance. The agency’s Kabul station is in crisis. A Jordanian physician, having established a credible cover as an ally, has murdered the CIA’s top brass in the country by setting off a suicide vest. Now, in addition to the chaos that results when replacements for the top officials prove unequal to the task, reports have surfaced that the station has been penetrated by a Taliban mole. Wells’ assignment, to learn the identity of the mole, brings him and the CIA into conflict with the hierarchy of the Special Forces and eventually into a one-on-one test of wills with a Delta sniper who holds the key to the mole’s identity.

Returning years after his last visit to Afghanistan, Wells finds the country, the war, and the agency, all profoundly changed by the billions of U.S. dollars spread about the countryside and the years of unrelenting killing. Cynicism and greed have spread throughout the country like a virus.

When Wells checks into the CIA station in the capital, a senior officer tells him, “First off, understand the strategic situation’s a mess. We’re playing Whac-a-Mole here. First we had our guys in the east, and the south went to hell. Now we’ve moved everybody south, and the east is going to hell. And by the way, the south isn’t great either. This quote-unquote-government we’re working with, it’s beyond corrupt. Everything’s for sale. You want to be a cop? That’s a bribe. Five to ten grand, depending on the district. . . to become a patrolman. You want to be a district-level police chief? Twenty, thirty thousand. At the national level, the cabinet jobs are a quarter million and up.”

While there’s nothing in this monologue that we haven’t learned from news reports and the numerous nonfiction books about the war, this matter-of-fact informality drives home the point more clearly than any “objective” report could do. In fact, Alex Berenson was a New York Times reporter before he turned to full-time writing. As a reporter, he covered the occupation of Iraq, among other big stories, and he brings a reporter’s instinct for news and the value of obscure details to make a story come to light. In The Shadow Patrol, the intimate conversation and inner dialogue of American troops highlights the mind-numbing reality of war much more clearly than any nonfiction account could possibly do.

One of the most revealing passages in the book comes in the course of Wells’ conversation with the same CIA official who spoke of the corruption caused by the influx of U.S. dollars. Wells has asked “So how many officers do you have?”

“We’re close to full strength now. Six hundred in country.”

“Six hundred?”

“But you have to remember, only a few are case officers. More than two hundred handle security. Then we have the coms and IT guys, logistics and administrative . . . and the guys at the airfields, handling the drones. Fewer than forty ever get outside the wire to talk to the locals. Of those, most are working with Afghan security and intelligence forces. If you’re looking at guys recruiting sources on the ground, it’s maybe a dozen. . . . The security situation is impossible. Only the very best officers can work outside the wire without getting popped, and even then only for short stretches.”

This is today’s CIA.

Berenson has devoted significant effort to researching the agency, the reality of the war in Afghanistan, the heroin trade, the art of the sniper, and other elements in this clever and compelling story. The Shadow Patrol — the sixth in Berenson’s John Wells series — is a superb contemporary thriller that delivers both an exciting tale and down-to-earth reporting on the Afghanistan war.

Spies in conflict in contemporary Europe

A review of A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming

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Although its pace picks up sharply about two-thirds of the way through the book and builds to a crescendo at the end, A Foreign Country is the slowest-paced and most contemplative of Charles Cumming’s spy stories.

MI6 agent Thomas Kell has been sacked because of what he believes to be political expediency by the Old Guard now running the shop. Assigned to collaborate with American operatives in Iraq interrogating prisoners, he was forced to take the rap when they turned to torture to extricate information from a British citizen. He has been out of work for months and feeling sorry for himself, “his loyalty to the newly minted high priests of SIS . . . close to nonexistent. ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,’ he thought, remembering the words of E. M. Forster, ‘I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ For the first time in his life, that notion made sense to him.”

When Kell is called up “out of the cold” by one of the Old Guard to investigate the shocking disappearance of an old friend, SIS Chief-designate Amelia Levene, he is confronted with Forster’s dilemma. He chooses friendship, pursuing Amelia’s trail and keeping his bosses in ignorance. As Kell digs more deeply into the mystery, he comes face to face with a crew of renegade agents of the French secret service (the folks who sank the Rainbow Warrior), with the future of the United Kingdom at stake.

A Foreign Country is a complex tale that interweaves threads of deadly inter-service rivalry and the secrets hidden in Kell’s and Levene’s past. Both characters are fully realized, warts and all, and their stories unfold against a thoroughly credible backdrop of intrigue in contemporary Europe and North Africa.

A Foreign Country is the sixth spy novel Charles Cumming has written since 2001. In this blog I have previously reviewed A Spy by Nature (the first of the six),  The Spanish Game, The Trinity Six, and Typhoon. (Links will take you to those reviews.)

A truly superior novel of espionage at the dawn of World War II

A review of Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst

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Alan Furst writes deeply engrossing novels of suspense about espionage in Europe in the years leading up to and during World War II. Mission to Paris, the latest of these books, is good enough to satisfy the most exacting fans of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. It’s difficult to accept the fact that Furst grew up on the Upper West Side of New York City and now lives nearby in Sag Harbor. He lived in Europe (Paris, actually) for only a limited period, seemingly far too short a time to explain the convincingly European sensibility about his work.

An Austrian-born Hollywood film star named Fredric Stahl is the protagonist of Mission to Paris. The title is ironic, as Stahl has come to Paris at the behest of Jack Warner to star on loan to Paramount Pictures in a war movie. As production on the film slowly commences, Stahl becomes increasingly attracted to the German emigre seamstress who creates the costumes for the movie, and soon finds himself starring in his own private love story. Meanwhile, the resolutely anti-Nazi Stahl finds himself targeted by Nazi operatives intent on enmeshing him in their propaganda machine. As the action unfolds, the two story lines intersect, endangering both Stahl and his lover.

When the story opens, it is late in 1938, with Europe on the brink of war. Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich and the tragedy of Kristallnacht unfold in the background, occasional subjects of conversation and concern. Meanwhile, heated debate is underway in France about proposals from the Left to rearm the country in the face of inevitable German aggression, with sometimes violent opposition from the Right and the Nazi underground. Mission to Paris draws to a satisfying close shortly before Germany’s invasion of France in June 1939.

Mission to Paris is the twelfth of Furst’s “Night Soldiers” stories, which have appeared at an average of about one every two years since 1988. Far in the background of these novels is a lengthy cast of characters who may crop up from time to time in any given novel — occasionally with major roles, but usually more akin to spear carriers.

More power to Alan Furst! I can’t wait for the next book.

The Pentagon and the CIA take a lot of punishment in this novel of rendition and torture

A review of The Midnight House, by Alex Berenson

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The Midnight House of the title is a secret site in Poland where high-value prisoners in the “war on terror” are clandestinely flown to be interrogated outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law and even the U.S. Military Code of Justice. The term of art for this process is, of course, rendition, and the tactics employed by the secret team assembled by the CIA and the Pentagon can only be called torture. There’s nothing subtle about this novel.

The events that take place in the Midnight House over a two-month period in 2008 are so explosive, and so shocking, that they lead to an upheaval in relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, end the career of a senior U.S. intelligence official, and spark a series of brutal murders. As I say, there’s nothing subtle about this novel.

Berenson writes from an omniscient perspective, revealing the thoughts of a long series of minor characters as the story moves forward, but his soldier-spy-hero, John Wells, dominates the tale. Called back into action from an escapist vacation in the mountains of northern New Hampshire, Wells is maneuvered into investigating what appears to be the sequential murder of the members of the top-secret team that operated the Midnight House. Together with his nominal boss, Ellis Shafer, Wells soon finds himself enmeshed in a bewilderingly political set of tense, interlocking relationships among the principal figures in the story. As it turns out, nothing is what it seems.

The Midnight House is the fourth of Berenson’s six John Wells novels to date. There’s no sign he’s slowing down.

An able spy story about terrorism, nuclear weapons, and Russia on the rise

A review of The Silent Man, by Alex Berenson

@@@ (3 out of 5)

When I read a spy story, I tend to look for credible characters and plausible plots as well as the usual fare offered up by the genre, such as suspense, exciting action, and (sometimes) exotic locales. In virtually all these ways, The Silent Man passes my litmus test as an excellent example of the craft — but one decision by the President of the United States, not even critical to the plot, struck me as so implausible and so dumb that it soured the final chapters.

However, there’s no denying that The Silent Man builds tension from its opening scenes inside Russia’s super-secret nuclear production complex to its conclusion in an utterly commonplace setting within the United States. The protagonist is soldier-spy John Wells, a former Ranger who spent a decade infiltrating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and went on to work for the CIA, where he now hangs his proverbial hat. The Silent Man — Wells himself, deeply troubled by his crumbling relationship with his partner and lover, Jennifer Exley — is the focus of much of the book, but through Alex Berenson’s pose as an omniscient narrator we roam through the minds of the Al Qaeda terrorists Wells is pursuing as well as his colleagues and rivals within the CIA and the hard-line officials at the top of Russia’s nuclear establishment. Every character in this book is portrayed with fine brush strokes, emerging as a fully rendered person who acts in understandable ways (with the sole exception of the aforementioned President).

The Silent Man is the third in Alex Berenson’s series about soldier-spy John Wells and his continuing efforts to keep the world safe for humanity.

North Korea, Afghanistan, China, Iran: they all come together in a superb spy novel

A review of The Ghost War, by Alex Berenson

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Contemporary novels about espionage tend to focus on the rise of China, North Korea, Iran, or Middle Eastern terrorism. The Ghost War, the second of Alex Berenson’s six spy thrillers, brings all four of those themes to the fore in a heart-pounding story that thrusts the CIA ‘s preeminent soldier-spy, John Wells, into circumstances that threaten not just his life but also the beginning of war between China and the U.S.

The Ghost War opens on the coast of North Korea, where the CIA fumbles the extraction of their most valuable informer within the country. Soon afterwards, Wells is dispatched on a seemingly unrelated mission to Afghanistan, while his lover, Jennifer Exley, pursues the search for a mole within the CIA. As the story unfolds, these three threads — and more — become intricately intertwined, and the suspense builds toward a powerful climax in the vicinity of where the novel opened.

The Ghost War can be read alone but is likely to be more enjoyable if taken up after reading The Faithful Spy, the first of his novels about John Wells. The Ghost War picks up Wells’ career after the heroic role he played in the earlier novel, for which he has gained considerable fame.

With The Faithful Spy, published in 2006, Alex Berenson won the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list as well as an Edgar Award for best first novel. However, he left his job as an investigative reporter for the Times only in 2010, after more than a decade there. Berenson’s reporting skills, honed in reporting from Baghdad and probing the Bernie Madoff scandal, serve him well in his new profession. They’re reflected in the depth and technical detail of the story and the realistic scenarios he paints. He also writes well, and he has mastered the twin skills of plotting and characterization. The Ghost War is, simply, outstanding,

A great story of international intrigue that could have been better told

A review of Tribe, by James Bruno

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Harry Brennan is a veteran CIA field agent, equally skilled in recruiting informants and in front-line combat, but he has little respect for his superiors in the agency and poor insight into the finer points of the high-stakes office politics that threatens to sideline him. Following a botched mission to Afghanistan, he comes to believe that someone in the agency tried to have him killed in the field to conceal a plot to shift U.S. foreign policy to the benefit of Big Oil. The stakes in this latter-day version of the Great Game couldn’t be higher: $25 trillion in oil reserves, a brokered peace between the Taliban and the Afghan government, and the election of a President — not to mention Harry’s life and the life of his college-age daughter.

Tribe might have been an outstanding book. The backdrop shifts from Afghanistan, where espionage, major power rivalries, and the outsized ambitions of commerce so often converge, to the Georgetown cocktail circuit, the White House, and the CIA. Harry Brennan is a satisfyingly complex figure. Descriptions of life and work in the CIA, the White House, and on the front line in Afghanistan ring with credibility. The story itself is powerful and almost plausible. And James Bruno’s writing style is evocative.

Unfortunately, Bruno hasn’t produced the book that could have been crafted by a more experienced writer steeped in the principles of narrative technique. Time contracts and expands with no apparent logic: a span of minutes may occupy pages, while the passage of weeks or months is dispensed with in a phrase. Scenes shift without warning, in the absence of even the most rudimentary transitions.

James Bruno is a former diplomat, military intelligence analyst, and journalist who clearly possesses a wide range of knowledge about the themes touched on in Tribe. However, this is his third novel. Here’s hoping he’ll study narrative techniques before he writes the fourth.

A taut thriller about Special Forces running amok in El Salvador in 1983

A review of High Crimes, by Joseph Finder

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Most of the popular thrillers published in the U.S. tend to revolve around the CIA, the KGB, Nazis, or, these days, Al Qaeda. High Crimes is a notable exception, centering as it does on the neglected topic of U.S. military intervention in Central America under the Reagan Administration.

It’s 1996. Tom Chapman is a loving, family man who runs his own investment firm in Boston and lives with his adoring wife, Claire, better known as Claire Heller, a Harvard Law School professor with a reputation for merciless performances in the courtroom. Then, all too soon, we discover that Tom Chapman doesn’t appear to be the man he says he is. The U.S. Army claims his true name is Ronald Kubik, a former Master Sergeant in the Special Forces, and proceeds to put him on trial for the 1983 massacre of 87 innocent civilians in a village in El Salvador in reprisal for guerrillas’ murder of four Americans in the capital. Claire (of course!) moves to defend him in his court-martial.

The suspense in this cleverly plotted and tautly written novel circles around whether Tom is really Ron and whether he really was responsible for the massacre. Finder skillfully keeps the reader guessing nearly until the end. Along the way he works in an unflattering picture of U.S. foreign and military policy in Vietnam as well as Central America and of the stifling bureaucracy in the Pentagon. His characters, every one believable, include former and current Army attorney from the JAG Corps, the Chief of Staff of the Army, a shadowy CIA agent, and a whiny six-year-old girl.

High Crimes was the fifth of the nine thrillers Joseph Finder has written since 1991. He was previously (1983) the author of a sensational expose of multimillionaire oilman Armand Hammer’s longstanding ties to the KGB.

Al Qaeda from the inside out: a thriller filled with suspense

A review of The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson

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John Wells is the only CIA operative ever to succeed in infiltrating Al Qaeda. Now, after a decade undercover in Afghanistan and Chechnya, he finally appears to have gained the confidence of the group’s top leaders. Summoned to an audience with Ayman al-Zawahiri, Wells is dispatched to the USA to play a key role in a terrorist plot to rival 9/11.

As the story unfolds, we learn that Wells is no longer trusted by the CIA — with the exception of his handler, Jennifer Exley, with whom he is in love. Nor is he trusted by the brilliant Al Qaeda agent to whom he has been assigned, known to him only as Omar Khadri. Wells must maneuver between these two poles of suspicion, all the while fighting to survive, preserving his relationship with Exley, and exploring the depths of the Islamic faith he adopted in Afghanistan.

The Faithful Spy has all the elements of a best-selling thriller, and so it was. An Edgar Award winner when it was published in 2006, the book rose to #1 on the Times’ paperback bestseller list. It was followed by four more novels, all of them featuring John Wells, several of them bestsellers in their own right.

Alex Berenson was an investigative reporter for more than a decade for The New York Times, serving for nearly a year in Iraq but focusing largely on business issues. Since last year, he has been working full-time as a novelist. Berenson is not yet 40, so we can look forward to many more adventures with John Wells.