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

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

 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.

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

A review of High Crimes, by Joseph Finder

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

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.