Sexpionage: A Review of 'Palace Of Treason'

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review of Jason Mattews' spy thriller Palace of Treason in the Washington Times.

Given the superb credentials of the author — a top CIA operative for 33 years — one is tempted (and with justification) to read this novel as a roman a clef, and especially in its depiction of the Russian criminal state assembled by President Vladimir Putin. One minor disappointment: Putin is on the verge of seducing a beautiful Russian counterintelligence officer who is also a CIA penetration agent, but must desist at the very last minute.

No matter. Enough insider information is contained about the corrupt court of Putin — is it heresy to term him Vlad the Terrible? — to make one suspect that much of the material is based on reports from the agency’s Moscow station. One little secret about Langley is that our spies love trafficking in salacious gossip about foreign leaders that would not be out of place in the New York Post’s Page Six column. Jason Matthews was CIA chief in Moscow during a career spent mainly in the so-called “denied areas” subservient to the old Soviet Union. And his book has an authenticity seldom encountered in spy fiction.

At the outset, cast aside uninformed Washington chatter about a “detente” among spies. Mr. Matthews depicts an intelligence battle in which the CIA and the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki (SVR), the Russian foreign intelligence service, successor to the late KGB, compete with Cold War fervor.

“Palace of Treason” features two central characters who Mr. Matthews introduced in his best-selling first novel, “Red Sparrow.” The luscious Capt. Dominika Egorova, is an SVR counterintelligence officer turned into a penetration agent by the CIA. (To start her career, she underwent “sparrow” training in the art of sexpionage, which is exactly what the name implies.) Her chief CIA handler — and lover — is Nate Nash. That they are lovers breaks the rules, of course, but such is Eros.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/29/book-review-palace-of-treason/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

A New Spy Novelist For Vladimir Putin's World

I enjoyed Red Sparrow, the first spy thriller written by former CIA officer Jason Matthews, so I look forward to reading his second novel, Palace of Treason.

Jeff Stein, the author of a fine nonfiction book about the Vietnam War called A Murder in Wartime, and a writer for Newsweek, offers a piece on Jason Matthews.

The spy was going to be late. In Jason Matthews’s line of work, that was cause for worry. But on this rainy afternoon in Washington, D.C., the former CIA officer was merely dodging traffic, not a Russian trap. And he was rushing to meet a reporter, not a secret agent.

 

But shedding the cloak and dagger, it turns out, isn’t as easy as trading wingtips for Top-Siders. Both Matthews and his wife, Suzanne, also a former CIA secret agent handler, still look over their shoulders for hostile intelligence agents. It comes from three decades of dodging Russian, Chinese and other adversaries’ counterspies.

 

“Yeah, the old habits die hard, proving that there is no such thing as a former ops officer,” jokes Matthews, in town to promote his second, much anticipated spy novel, Palace of Treason. ”Suzanne and I notice cars behind us, we come home from parties with the same assessments of people, we still pick up a phone and think, 'It's tapped.'”  

 

... Like his CIA hero in Red Sparrow, which The New York Times called a “startling debut,” Matthews has shed one identity for another with hardly a stutter step. One day shortly after his 2008 retirement, he picked up a pen and started writing. Out came a thriller that drew widespread, even ecstatic praise, with the inevitable comparisons to not just John le Carré and Ian Fleming but Cormac McCarthy and even T.S. Eliot.  

 

At its center is Dominika Egorova, a once promising ballerina forced into training as a professional seductress by cretinous Kremlin intelligence bureaucrats. Egorova is back, of course, in Palace of Treason, this time at the behest of her handsome, self-effacing, equally idealistic CIA handler and rules-breaking lover Nate Nash, for whom she takes nerve-shattering risks, including a stab at seducing Vladimir Putin, who turns out to be plagued by EDS. (Trust me: This is high dark humor.)

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://www.newsweek.com/spy-novelist-vladimir-putin-world-340400