Red London: My Washington Times On Crime Column About A Spy Thiller That Captures The Mystique And Mystery Of Espionage

The Washington Times ran my On Crime column on Alma Katsu’s spy novel Red London. 

You can read the column via the below link or the below text:

BOOK REVIEW: 'Red London' - Washington Times

Alma Katsu’s “Red London,” the second spy thriller in a series that began with “Red Widow,” is a well-written and fascinating look at a CIA officer and a Russian oligarch in post-Putin London. 

Having served many years as a CIA and NSA analyst, Ms. Katsu (seen in the above photo) captures the mystique and mystery of the shadowy world of espionage. The novel also offers a look at the Russian oligarchs and how they live in London. 

I contacted Ms. Katsu and asked her how she would describe the spy novel. 

“’Red London’ is the second book in my Lyndsey Duncan series, but it can be read as a stand-alone. It’s set in London and is told partly by the British wife of a Russian oligarch. There’s been a regime change in Russia and, after a home invasion, and the wife worries that her husband is not on good terms with the new Russian president,” Ms. Katsu said.

“He was close to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and no one would’ve dared come after him in Putin’s day. At the same time, Lyndsey — who’s just arrived in London to start a new assignment — is asked to infiltrate the oligarch’s household in order to try to flip the wife. CIA and MI6 believe the new Russian president is up to no good and they want to take the oligarch’s billions off the table. But since it’s all stored in offshore accounts, they need someone on the inside with access to the data. They think the wife is an excellent candidate and Lyndsey is sent to make it happen.”  

Is your character Lyndsey Duncan autobiographical or based on a real person?

“Lyndsey is not autobiographical, but I drew on my experiences working with many great, smart women in the Intelligence Community to create her. I’ve been particularly impressed by the younger generation: I was a recruiter for the Agency for a while and got to meet all these amazing young women who were super accomplished and could’ve found great success wherever they went, and they wanted passionately to work for [the] CIA. Those are the type of people you get to work with at Langley.”

How would you describe Lyndsey Duncan? 

“She’s smart and extremely hard-working. She’s virtuous: she always does the right thing. She’s grateful to the Agency for giving her a life she never imagined, a way to leave the small town she came from,” Ms. Katsu explained. “Like many in the Intelligence Community, she puts her job first, which means she doesn’t have much of a personal life and is just starting to question that. She’s beginning to see that a life in intelligence asks a lot of you but doesn’t always reward in equal measure.” 

Mikhail Rotenberg is an interesting character. How would you describe him? 

“In many ways, Mikhail is a typical oligarch: he’s educated and from a family of elites, perhaps not rich but connected to the right people. He saw an opportunity to make money and took it, despite the fact that it often was not on the up-and-up,” Ms. Katsu said. “He’s trying to buy respectability by sponsoring charities and living a glamorous life, but at heart he’s an unpleasant man who is used to exercising power over everything and everyone he comes in contact with. I spent some time in my career studying autocrats and so I gave him a bit of that incredible hubris — except he is not at the top of the totem pole and even someone that powerful has to defer to the man at the top, which was Putin but, in the Red world, is the new Russian president, Viktor Kosygin.”

Please tell us about your long career in the CIA, NSA and the intel community.

“I spent 25 years with [the National Security Agency] and 10 with [the] CIA, and a couple years at RAND. Most of that time was spent as an analyst but the last decade or so I’ve primarily worked in emerging technologies, both as a forecaster and in the weeds in the field of quantitative analytics,” Ms. Katsu said.

“It was a broad career with a lot of interaction with policymakers and the military and gave me a good sense of how it all works together, how some small development in an overlooked corner of the world might end up having huge implications. But it also gave me plenty of time to see what a career in intelligence does to you as a person, to your family. How it changes you, not always for the better. My first novel wasn’t published until I was 50, and I didn’t start writing spy novels until I retired from government.”

Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction and thrillers.

RED LONDON
Alma Katsu
Putnam, 352 pages, $28.00

My Washington Times Review Of John le Carre's 'Agent Running In The Field'

The Washington Times ran my review of John le Carre’s new spy novel, Agent Running in the Field.

On the eve of John le Carre publishing his latest spy novel, “Agent Running in the Field,” Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), more popularly known as MI6, said that British intelligence officers are displeased with the otherwise well-regarded and popular espionage novelist.

Speaking at the Cliveden Literary Festival, the former spymaster said that John le Carre portrayed the SIS in a negative light. He said that the novels are exclusively about betrayal and they portray the dedicated SIS officers as untrustworthy. Trust between officers is at the heart of the SIS, he explained.

The former director said they have all enjoyed enormously John le Carre’s George Smiley novels, and he admitted that the author did in fact capture some of the essence of what it was like in the Cold War. But he added that John le Carre was so corrosive in his view of SIS that the author angered most professional SIS officers. Sir Richard Dearlove stated that the author, who worked for MI5 and SIS in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was “obsessed” with his relatively brief time as a “spy.”

The late John Bingham, John le Carre’s boss and mentor at MI5, and the man some say inspired the character of George Smiley, also disliked how his protege portrayed the secret services.

In my years performing security work for the U.S. Navy and the Defense Department, and later as a writer, I’ve spoken to many intelligence officers who also dislike John le Carre’s portrayal of intelligence officers, especially his dim view of American intelligence officers. Yet, like me, nearly all of the intelligence officers I know read John le Carre’s novels.

Although I disagree with his leftist worldview, I find Carre’s novels to be interesting and compelling, especially my two favorites: “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” and “The Honorable Schoolboy.” His novels are worth wading through his bouts of anti-Americanism and his dark view of the world of intelligence.  

In “Agent Running in the Field” the 88-year-old author’s narrator is a 47-year-old named Nat.

“I was christened Anatoly, later anglicized to Nathaniel, Nat for short. I am five feet ten inches tall, clean-shaven, tufty hair running to gray, married to Prudence, partner for general legal matters of a compassionate nature at an old-established firm of City of London solicitors, but primarily pro bono cases,” Nat says. 

“In build I am slim, Prue prefers wiry. I love all sport. In addition to badminton, I jog, run and work out once a week in a gymnasium not open to the general public. I possess a rugged charm and the accessible personality of a man of the world. 

“I am in appearance and manner a British archetype, capable of fluent and persuasive argument in the short term. I adapt to circumstance and have no insuperable moral scruples. I am not by any means immune to female charms. I am not naturally suited to deskwork or the sedentary life, which is the understatement of all time. I can be headstrong and do not respond naturally to discipline. This can be both a defect and a virtue.

“I am quoting from my late employers’ confidential reports on my performance and general allure over the last twenty-five years.”

Nat, a veteran British SIS officer and agent-runner, has returned to the United Kingdom after serving overseas and he expects to be forced into retirement. Instead, he is offered the job as head of a run-down London sub-station called the Haven. Supervising a misfit group of officers, Nat discovers a young woman in the Haven named Florence. Nat’s bosses have described her as talented but immature.

Florence is obsessed with a Ukrainian oligarch and London-based criminal code-named “Orson.” Nat likes the operation she has authored and he takes it to his bosses, who take their time in deciding to approve or disapprove.

In the meantime, Nat, a dedicated badminton (racquet ball) player and champion of his club, enters into a series of matches with a young man named Ed. After the matches, the two players have a drink at the athletic club’s bar, where Ed passionately decries President Trump, the Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Brexit, the British move to leave the European Union. Nat, who agrees generally with his younger friend’s view of Brexit, the American president and Putin, hardly gets in a word in as Ed pontificates over his lager.

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

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/nov/1/book-review-agent-running-in-the-field/

My Washington Times Review Of 'The Quantum Spy'

The Washington Times ran my review of David Ignatius’ The Quantum Spy.

Although my knowledge of computers is somewhat limited, I was able to follow the computer science backdrop to “The Quantum Spy,” as author David Ignatius did a fine job of explaining the basic technology involved in quantum computing and why it is vital that the United States builds a quantum computer before China, America’s adversary, builds one.

Quantum computing, Mr. Ignatius‘ fictional CIA director explains, is a paradigm shift. It’s like Galileo and Newton. It will change everything. “A Quantum computer would simultaneously explore every answer to a problem, creating a tool of immense, almost infinite computational power,” Mr. Ignatius writes.

The novel opens with John Vandal, the CIA Deputy Director for Operations, paying a visit to Jason Schmidt, an electronics engineer who operated QED, a small, privately-owned computer company in Seattle, Washington. The CIA official was responding to a letter the engineer wrote to his cousin, a CIA officer, that stated he had made a breakthrough in building a quantum computer.

 “I’ve solved the puzzle,” the engineer wrote.

“You understand what a big deal this is, Mr. Schmidt? We’re spending billions on quantum research. This is a race. The White House pounds on me every week wanting to know where the Chinese are, and we say relax: It’ll be ten years before anyone builds a machine, probably twenty, and we’re way ahead,” John Vandal said. “And now you say bang, you’ve done it.”

The CIA official explained that the issue was no much that the breakthrough, but rather that someone wanted to steal it. He was referring to what he called a “bell-ringer” in the letter, which was the engineer informing his cousin that he received an offer by a company to buy control of QED. The company, John Vandal told the engineer, was Chinese.

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

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/25/book-review-the-quantum-spy-by-david-ignatius/ 

You can also read my interview with David Ignatius (seen in the above photo) via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2018/03/the-quantum-spy-my-q-with-spy-novelist.html 

The Quantum Spy: My Q&A With Spy Novelist And Washington Post Columnist David Ignatius

Counterterrorism magazine published my Q&A with David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist and author of the thriller The Quantum Spy.

You can read the interview below:

  Note: My review of David Ignatius’s The Quantum Spy will soon appear in the Washington Times. 

On This Day In History Spy Novelist John le Carre Was Born

As History.com notes, John le Carre, author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, was born on this day in 1931.

You can read about John le Carre via the below link:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/john-le-carre-is-born?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2017-1019-10192017&om_rid=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa&om_mid=254700158&kx_EmailCampaignID=15174&kx_EmailCampaignName=email-hist-tdih-2017-1019-10192017&kx_EmailRecipientID=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa

You can also read my Washington Times review of John le Carre’s latest novel, A Legacy of Spies via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/09/my-washington-times-review-of-john-le.html

  

And you can also read my Washington Times review of John le Carre: The Biography via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/12/my-washington-times-review-of-john-le.html 

My Washington Times Review Of John Le Carre's 'A Legacy Of Spies'

The Washington Times ran my review of John le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies.

Although I don’t subscribe to John le Carre’s leftist worldview, I’ve been reading and enjoying his spy novels since I was a teenager in the 1960s.

I’m not fond of most of his post-Cold War novels, as his political and anti-American sentiments mar the stories for me, but I admire greatly his earlier novels, such as “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” based on the notorious British spy and traitor Kim Philby, as well as “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.”

In his latest novel, “A Legacy of Spies,” his 24th, the 85-year-old author returns to the scene of the crimes, so to speak, from “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” and his other Cold War novels. His great character, the brilliant, bespectacled, physically frog-like master spy, George Smiley, appears in the novel, albeit briefly.

But Smiley is the center of conversation throughout the novel between former spy Peter Guillam and officials of the current-day British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, and formally known as the “Circus” in Mr. Smiley’s day. (The old headquarters was located at Cambridge Circus in London).

… Peter Guillam, now elderly and in retirement, is the central character in “A Legacy of Spies.” He is recalled to London by SIS headquarters to answer questions regarding the operation that resulted in the death of British intelligence officer Alec Leamas and his companion, Elizabeth Gold, who were shot and killed at the Berlin Wall in “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” The grown children of the two are suing the SIS and intelligence officials have discovered that nearly all of the classified records of the operation were destroyed by Smiley, or by someone under his command. Guillam, perhaps?

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/31/book-review-a-legacy-of-spies/  

John Le Carre's Most Famous Character George Smiley To Return In New Novel, 'A Legacy Of Spies'

Although I don't subscribe to British spy novelist John le Carre's leftist worldview and rabid anti-Americanism, I am an admirer of his early novels featuring frog-like intelligence officer George Smiley, such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honorable Schoolboy. 

So I look forward to a new le Carre novel that brings back George Smiley, as well as Peter Guillam.

Danuta Kean at the British newspaper the Guardian reports on the news of the new novel.

George Smiley, John le Carré’s iconic cold war spymaster, is to return for the first time in 25 years in a new novel by the beloved spy-turned-author.

A Legacy of Spies, due to be published on 7 September, will also see the return of Smiley’s colleagues from the British secret service – or the Circus, as they were known in Le Carré’s original books. The bestselling noveles famously drew on the author’s own experience of working for British intelligence in the 1950s and 60s.

Though scant details have been released by publisher Viking, a division of Penguin Random House, the new novel will feature Smiley protege Peter Guillam, who in his old age has retired from the world of spooks to a farm in southern Brittany.

Summoned back to London, Guillam and his colleagues are subject to scrutiny for past misdemeanours, committed at a time when there were fewer scruples about the methods used to win the ideological war raging between the west and the Soviets.

According to Le Carré’s agent, Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown, the book was written in “a fever” over the past 12 months. Though Geller refused to reveal details of the plot, he said that it would “close George Smiley’s story”, which began in 1961 with Le Carré’s debut novel, Call for the Dead: “When I received the draft I had to keep starting it again and pinching myself that I was in the company of all these great characters from the Circus,” he said. “It really is going to be one of his finest, if not his finest, novel.” 

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

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/07/george-smiley-to-return-new-john-le-carre-novel-a-legacy-of-spies 

Note: You can also read my Washington Times review of the John le Carre biography via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/12/my-washington-times-review-of-john-le.html