Disavowed

ST Section 31: Disavowed
© 2014 David Mack
304 pages

"Murder is murder, regardless of whether it is committed by an individual, a group of persons, or the state." - Disavowed, David Mack

Disavowed is the brilliant result of multiple spy plots intersecting one another, bringing together the standard and 'mirror' universes. Following Rise like Lions, a political entity much like the Federation has established itself in the Mirror Universe, and is strengthened by a hidden  organization called Memory Omega.  Established by Emperor Spock to conceal itself and to become a galactic puppetmaster, Memory Omega functioned rather like Hari Seldon intended the Second Foundation to function in his attempt to shorten the galactic dark age and create a second Republic.   Because of Omega,   the nascent Commonwealth has tremendous weapons at its disposal -- weapons the Breen of the standard universe have caught wind of, and are planning a covert invasion of the mirror universe in order to steal.  Section 31, the amoral organization which pledges itself to protect the Federation without sanction  or oversight, which previously nearly effected genocide by turning Constable Odo into a Typhoid Marry,  is intent on preventing the Breen from gaining this kind of advantage -- and to help scotch the Breen's plan, they are putting Julian Bashir -- who is helping them only because of the threat the Breen might pose with these weapons -- into play.  But there's always another level of conspiracy,  and before this one runs its course we'll see a Dominion invasion of the mirror Alpha Quadrant, a beloved character on trial, and a faction who are even better at pulling strings than Section 31. This is, in short, a very cool book.

Many years ago one of Trek lit's best miniseries hit the shelves: Section 31, telling stories of  that very interesting organization as it acted in TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY;  I was very glad to see their return,  especially under the able pen of David Mack. Mack here writes a sequel to both Rise like Lions and The Fall series, bringing two universes together, and allows us to spend time with a lot of beloved characters who are long gone in the standard universe, but still active in the mirror. People like Weyoun, that merry villain, and Eddington -- a rebel in one universe, an admired head of state here.  And not to mention Saavik, whether you're imagining her as Kirstie Alley or Robin Curtis.  We get glimpses of some of Section 31's toys,   there are the expected allusions ("Not good enough, damn it, not good enough! -- thank you, Captain Picard), and a fair bit of comedy to balance out what is one edge of the seat moment after another.  Bashir, for instance, is entering Section 31's service as a double agent; he intends to work for them only to bring them down, and so does his girlfriend. When she 'seduces' him into joining 31, however,  members of 31 are in fact observing them and mocking their poor acting skills...even the Vulcan.  Why 31 is still using Bashir and Sarina Douglas is one of the wheels-within-wheels ops that won't be unveiled until the end. We also receive regular insights into the Breen and into the mirror-Dominion, who are..very much the same, but different in an important way. 

This is a thoroughly gripping tale, and I'm looking forward to the sequel, Control.

Other Highlights:
“Because this isn’t about strength. Justice isn’t decided by power. It isn’t born through the force of arms. It comes from people of conscience taking responsibility for their own lives—and accepting the consequences of their actions.”

Church of Spies

Church of Spies: The Vatican's Secret War Against Hitler
© 2015 Mark Riebling
384 pages

The Catholic Church was one of Hitler's earliest enemies, barring its members from participating in the Nazi party and publicly condemning Hitler's early actions once he had been appointed -- not elected -- to  power.  But then, as the war between Hitler and the west began in earnest, the Church fell silent.   This silence was not cowardice, Mark Riebling argues here, but strategy.   With its people and churches already under attack by the Nazi government,  the pope elected during the early days of crisis (March 1939)  chose work more in silence, attempting to connect the German resistance to western governments, and aid them  with intelligence and shelter. A goal ever in mind was the overthrow of Hitler -- by assassination if necessary, as Catholic doctrine sanctioned the death of oppressive dictators provided plans were in place to  preserve order. 

Having previously learned about the role of the Catholic church in the German resistance, I wanted to read a more detailed history of it.  The book was certainly eye-opening in chronicling how early Pius XII wanted to move against Hitler,  working with members of the German army to attempt an early assassination.  The military contacts' interest never quickened into action, however, and after the war actually began, it was far harder both to find German officers willing to plunge their nation into a leadership crisis in wartime, and to find western audiences. After the fall of France and the beginning of the submarine and bombing siege of Britain, Churchill was especially cold toward representatives of a "decent Germany".

After this promising start the book quickly lost steam for me,  recounting various resistance groups ties to the church; we learn that the White Rose movement began by distributing Catholic sermons decrying Hitler, and that the people involved in the Heydrich assassination were given refuge in a church, hidden in the tombs by priests.  The mention of any Jews given shelter by the Church is barely mentioned here, but presumably is covered better by The Pope's Jews.  Of perhaps more interest is the  ideas Vatican authorities supported for a postwar Europe, one which would stymie destructive internal conflicts via a shared economic community, and politics based on subsidiarity, a key piece of the Catholic social doctrine.  Subsidiarity is still endorsed by the European Union in theory, but how well it is practiced is arguable.

Church of Spies is intriguing, but disappointing.

Related:
German Resistance to Hitler, Peter Hoffman
An Honourable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, Anton Gill
The Scarlet and the Black, a film in which Gregory Peck portrays the true story of a priest in Rome who  hid thousands of Jews and sheltered Allied prisoners.

From Russia with Love

From Russia with Love
© 1957 Ian Fleming
253 pages

I've tried three times to read any of Ian Fleming's Bond novels, because he was an actual intelligence officer writing spy novels. Bond in the abstract is an interesting character, a posh international superspy with cool tech and a drinking habit. However, in practice I've fallen asleep during the one Bond movie I've watched (Skyfall, apologies) and don't fare much better with the novels. This particular novel opens in Russia, however, with no Bond in sight, and the plot is introduced quickly. The Russians believe that killing Bond will gravely weaken British intelligence, and recruit a femme fatale to lure him into position so that 007 can be deep-sixed in a scandalous way. Said fatale's cover story is that she's a Russian intelligence officer who fell in love with Bond by looking at his photograph, and now she wants to defect so she can be with him in person.

I really should have stopped reading there, but I persisted. (Seriously, who disguises an intel officer by pretending she's AN INTEL OFFICER?) I should note that I have an active dislike for novels with sex scenes in them -- I'll read science books about sexuality, no problems, but inflict fictional bedroom scenes on me and I'm sloooowly putting the book down -- and so I probably shouldn't have even TRIED a novel with this premise. There's just endless description of people's buttocks and breasts and yadayadayada. When Bond meets the fatale she's literally naked in his bed, and it's just....preposterous. I'd say "silly", a la Monty Python, but silly can be charming, whereas this is more like the 2016 US election. This is a rare DNF for me, as I stopped 75% through. There is a train at the end, though, and it's even the Orient Express. 

Anyway, I don't think Fleming is for me. Fortunately there's plenty of spy novels with more explosives and less anatomical exposition.

Rifleman Dodd and The Gun

The Gun, and Rifleman Dodd
© 1933 C.S. Forester
311 pages

"There was sorrow in Dodd's heart as he looked down on the pitiful scene, but it did not prevent him from turning away and setting himself to survey the next adventurous quarter of a mile of his route. There are many who give up, and many who procrastinate, but there are some who go on."

C.S. Forester is best known for his Horatio Hornblower stories,  naval adventures set in the Napoleonic Wars.   These two short works, The Gun and Rifleman Dodd, are less known but equally entertaining and detailed. Both are set in Napoleonic Iberia, as both a peasant resistance and the shattered remnants of the old Bourbon Army fight for Spain and Portugal's liberty from Napoleon,  with the generous support of English seapower and the Duke of Wellington.

The first story, The Gun,  follows an eighteen pound siege gun which abandoned on the field after a crushing Spanish defeat, but recovered by a priest and a few farmers, The gun passes from hand,  as many realize its incredible potential and attempt to shift it to the best place -- and those who particularly value it seize it by force. It does get put into action, however, fomenting rebellion on the plains and sending the French into retreat for the first time.

Rifleman Dodd pieces together the adventure of the eponymous rifleman after he is cut off from a retreat, and lost behind enemy lines. A hard-worn veteran of five campaigns, Dodd knows how to soldier and stay alive, and so when he encounters a group of Portuguese irregulars, he becomes their leader and becomes a phantom menace to the French, who are haunted by visions of a green Englishmen.  Even as they methodically begin sweeping and scouring the hills to destroy his hiding places, Dodd and a couple of survivors -- and finally, Dodd alone -- endeavor to put flames to Bonaparte's plans.

Although a sketch of their plots gives both of these novels an air of romantic air,  they're not fanciful in the least.  Forester does not shy from the brutal behavior of both parties, French and irregulars, as they fight tooth and claw with one another.  Forester also does not reduce the French to a distant enemy:  in Rifleman Dodd, he tells their story in alternate chapters, and every person Dodd kills is named as he falls.   There's no denying the adventurous drama of the last bit of Rifleman Dodd, however, as he beards the French lion in its den.  Good stuff!

As a bit of trivia, Bernard Cornwell mentions a missing rifleman named Dodd in one of his Sharpe novels, also set in Spain.   This is a deliberate reference to Rifleman Dodd, and one of Cornwell's stories about becoming a writer involves trying to find more stories like Dodd, and then realizing he'd have to write them himself.  Three cheers, then, for Rifleman Dodd, which was not only a great little story by itself, but one that gave us the force of nature that is Sharpe.

Rifleman Dodd was originally known as Death to the French. I speculated that the title was changed after the outbreak of World War 2, but Rifleman Dodd seems to have just been the American title.

Related:
Cornwell's Sharpe books
Forester's Horatio Hornblower sea stories

Confront and Conceal

Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of Power
496 pages
© 2012 David E. Sanger

Barack Obama may have been the only Nobel Peace Prize winner in history to order lethal force used on a regular basis, but things could have been worse. Confront and Conceal attempts to make a case for an "Obama Doctrine", one which avoids epic disasters like the destruction of Iraq, but still asserts American influence via surgical operations and international organizations.  Sanger reviews the actions of the Obama White House regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, China and Iran, with a special section on drones and cyberwarfare. He relies on extensive interviews with administration officials, including then-secretary of State, Clinton, as well as State Department cables which were made available via Wikileaks.  He creates a picture of an Obama who -- though mocked for his weakness or aggression, depending on the mocker --  attempted a cautious but efficacious approach  to foreign policy.  Considering Sanger's access -- interviewing heap-big chiefs  as high as as the secretary of state- -   it is perhaps no surprise that the representation rendered here is admiring, on the whole.

Obama encountered no shortage of foreign policy crises during his first time. He began it faced with the deathly tar pit of Afghanistan,  further complicated by the amount of trouble-makers hiding in the western fringes of Pakistan.  Excising the United States from Afghanistan wasn't as simple a matter as cutting losses and leaving, for neither the DC nor Pakistan desired a power vacuum between Pakistan and Iran.  The Arab spring, which forced DC to choose between its interests and its proclaimed values, further muddied the waters. The cascade of populist revolts took everyone by surprise, including the President who was determined to restore the American reputation in the middle east.  To avoid messes like Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama  preferred to use a light footprint approach: if American interests were at risk, then action must be taken --but the action should be swift and precise, using new tools like drones and cyberwarfare.   Diplomacy was preferable to brute force, however: Obama was also a genuine internationalist, who preferred using global organizations to apply pressure to ne'er do wells like Qaddafi, and to effect change.  This was not always possible;  the Iranians didn't trust his intentions and regarded him as timid; the international community remains divided over Syria, with some supporting Assad and others supporting the rebels and ISIS.   Ditto for North Korea: as vexsome as they are to all of their neighbors, China included, they won't just go away. Leaving the north in the hands of the Kim family cult isn't an attractive option for China, but it's more attractive than millions of malnourished and uneducated refugees streaming into China.

Anyone who has followed my reading for any length of time may have picked up on the fact that I am not a fan of DC, in any administration.  I did have a grudging respect for much of  Obama's foreign policy, however,  at least until he began getting the country more entangled with Syria and resurrecting Cold War tensions.   That respect was validated here, as Obama seems to have approached DC's expanse of empire with the desire to do as little damage as possible. I don't know how strong willed and idealistic someone would have to be to sit in the One Chair of the west wing, surrounded by the whispering host of the DC establishment,  faced with a neverending series of crises and commitments, and say "To hell with you, I'm not playing this game", and start manipulating the Titanic of state  away from its inevitable course of empire.  Obama seems to have resisted it for several years: agreeing to escalate in Afghanistan, but only with a pre-determined date to cut losses and run;  continuing Bush's development of the Olympic Games project, which would give him  more options in Iran;  and using drones instead of conventional bombing and strike team, because those were the only options DC produced. (The targets were 'terrorists', of course.  DC wouldn't casually assassinate just any reichsfeinde. That would never happen, no sir.)

Cantankerous sarcasm aside,  Confront and Conceal was a varied and endlessly fascinating history given the range of topics and their (unfortunately) continued relevance.  The Kims are even more problematic now than they were;  Syria continues to exact a morbid fascination for the establishment, and China...well, it's still there. So too are the opportunities for mischief the digital world has opened, as this weekend's crippling wave of digital attacks (chiefly in Britain) have shown all too well.   I would take its general admiration for the establishment with no small level of salt, however.  Foreign-policy wise, I think it's especially helpful for the material on the US-Pakistan relationship.

Related:
Playing to the Edge, Michael Hayden. Another keyhole light inside  the establishment.

Los Alamos

Los Alamos
© 1997 Joseph Kanon
416 pages

A man lies dead in Santa Fe, but the answer to 'whodunit' lies in the hills above the city -- or on The Hill, the site of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where something very mysterious is being cooked up.  The Hill's residents, many of them foreign scientists, are not even known by name; if a local sheriff asks them for their I.D., the card they present merely has a number. They are the creators of the most secret project in human history, and easily one of the most expensive: the Manhattan Project. To find out who killed the man, and why,  Army Intelligence PR man Mike Connolly must get inside the most secret place on the planet.  Los Alamos  is a murder mystery turned spy thriller, set in the last year of the Second World War,  when man took Death in his hands and released it on the desert.

The story unfolds over the course of several months, Connolly working in secret after the 'official' cause of death is a romantic pickup turned violent. Though Connolly has arrived on the Hill to penetrate its secrets and find a murderer, he soon creates secrets of his own, beginning an affair with a bored scientist-wife, an English rose who occupies her free time studying the Anasazi.  Working with local cops and sometimes against the government, which is rightfully obsessively secretive about the Project,  Connolly struggles to connect the dots of a very mysterious murder. The man's death carries with it enormous scandal, not just because he was a security agent on the Hill, but because his body was arranged to make it look like a sexual liason gone very wrong.  Ultimately the resolution of the murder isn't love, but power -- the power the United States is working to perfect, power other nations want to share.

I have read Kanon before, starting with his The Good German, and found it dark indeed. Los Alamos isn't nearly  as dreary, though an isolated mesa in wartime doesn't lend itself to much merriment. I did enjoy the way Kanon slow-cooks the plot, minor details acquired over months creating a larger picture when they're assembled together. In a way it reminded me of NCIS, in that a character who seems rather minor turns out to be the missing piece: in NCIS, there's a rule of thumb that an adult who appears and is then forgotten about is usually the murderer.   I think Kanon captures the wartime feel well enough, a mix of optimism, wariness, and horror as the Nazis are drive back, but their retreat exposes the full horror of their ideology to the world.  It succeeds as a mystery-thriller, though as usual I could have gone without the bedroom play-by-play.

Related:
Engima, Robert Harris. Also WW2 spy thriller.

Playing to the Edge

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror
© Michael Hayden 2016
464 pages

As someone who became a civil libertarian in response to the increasingly sweeping powers of the surveillance state during the Bush administration, I began reading this as a hostile audience, more or less. I was chiefly interested in the chapter on cybersecurity, although he says very little about it. The book is part memoir-biography, part defense of the privileged powers given to the United States' intelligence-security programs. While I am still not nor never will be comfortable with the amount of information being collected by these agencies, even if they are staffed by the heroic characters who populate this book under Hayden's pen, recent books on cyber war have made me realize that that agencies like these have actual national-security priorities, with a focus on malevolent organizations outside the U.S.

Hayden is very good at making the enormous amount of data-collecting sound completely mundane, even benign, and is very cagey with details when a plant is bombed or infrastructure sabotaged via computer viruses. Sometimes interesting and sometimes plodding are his comments on CIA-NSA organization, and the organization of the intelligence community (sixteen agencies, including the intelligence depts of other organizations). There's the usual attraction in a political memoir in that formidable media personalities are suddenly reduced to ordinary people: Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice becomes "Condie", the attorney general is "Al", Hayden himself is "Mikey"...it's a little touch of intimacy that a vast bureaucracy, far-removed from the concerns of the people as a whole, is usually without. All that said, I still like having Greewalds and Snowdens to keep the government on its toes.

The Director

The Director
© 2014 David Ignatius
384 pages

The first week at a new job is rough for anyone, but what if you're the new director of the CIA and a German kid off the street just informed you that every agent in Europe is exposed?  Such is the promising hook of The Director, a novel  involving  conspiracies within conspiracies, told through meeting after meeting. The news that the CIA's internal networks are compromised grows more ominous after the German is found with a Russian bullet in his head, but for most of the work the 'action' consists of the Director's agent flitting from town to town,  reading up on his Globalist British Banking Conspiracy literature and  recruiting a cyber League of Shadows to take down said conspiracy. Everyone else sips mineral water and talks. And talks....and talks...and....talks.  The director also occasionally receives ominous quotations from Cicero.

I found The Director to be utterly tedious, as most of the book consists of people who enjoy hearing themselves talk spinning riddles around the increasingly frustrated director. (He's not so much an actor as a coordinator, bringing the plot together in his office.)  There are some positive points, however.  Some bits of description leap out; "the cowl of a foreign accent shrouded his voice". The author, a D.C. journalist, offers an interesting flavor to the hacking conspiracy; early on,  people are recruited into it using references to the Illuminitas trilogy. The author claims this is a cult classic among hackers, and while I can't vouch for that, this playing-with geek culture is definitely different from the ordinary international thriller. The problem is that all the conversation of this book isn't all that thrilling. Some of it borders on pompous, as though the characters were straining to be dramatic. I just imagined and pictured them as Hollywood personalities to make it tolerable (and amusing).  There were very few people in this novel I enjoyed reading about -- and I certainly had no interest in following them to the supermarket to consider competing brands of Greek yogurt, or to Berlin's sex-clubbing scene.

Interesting in spots, obscene in others, but on the whole rather dull.

Related:
Trojan Horse, Mark Russinovich.  Also a cyberthriller, but buckets more fun.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day
© 2004 Vince Flynn
407 pages

"And if they manage to get this thing into Washington and end up killing the leaders of America, Great Britain, and Russia?"
Rapp shrugged. "At least there won't be any more ambivalence about the war on terror."

Suspicious activity from some shady financial institutions hints that something big is about to hit the United States, and an investigation -- followed by a black ops abduction job in Pakistan -- reveals the scheme. On Memorial Day, as the entire US government gathers with the leaders of Great Britain and Russia to christen a new World War 2 monument,  militant jihadists intend to set off nuclear explosions along the eastern seaboard, beginning with D.C.  Only Mitch Rapp, an assassin in the employ of the CIA, stands in their way.

Memorial Day is an early War on Terror action thriller that has little patience for those who view the Patriot Act as a threat to civil liberties, and features a main character who abducts jihadists not only from Pakistan, but from the Justice Department's own holding cells.  He has no compunction against shooting terrorists to coerce confessions from their brain-besplattered comrades, or slipping a man a drug to make him terrified, then repeatedly holding him underwater.   At least no one can say he murders in cold blood, because Rapp spends the entire book enraged. He's at war not only with every AK47-wielding beard in the middle east, but his own government, riven with softies. If he's not yelling or shooting at jihadists and politicians, he is on his way to do one of the two.

Memorial Day is an action movie in book form. The main character stands out because of his sheer bloodlust (he almost doesn't care if D.C. is turned into a radioactive crater, because it means the entire Arabian peninsula will be glass shortly thereafter), but no one else is worth paying attention to.  If a character emerges who is sympathetic, they are immediately killed off -- like the poor Mexican truck driver who was hired to haul a trailer into Atlanta,  never knowing that the mysterious trailer held an unstable radioactive core that was slowly poisoning him.  All he wanted to do was make it home in time for his son's baseball game. Why do you hate baseball, terrorists?  The villains are, as you might aspect from a book written so early after the 9/11 attacks, complete caricatures of the "They hate us for our freedoms" variety.   They're seriously in the United States because its teenage girls wandering about in malls in skimpy outfits are dragging the world into a cesspit of moral decadence.  Seems like fighting moral decadence in Riyadh would be easier on the gas. (The suggestion that the terrorists object to D.C.'s foreign policy is dismissed as blaming rape victims.)  

In terms of sheer action, Memorial Day works very well:  it opens with Chinooks deploying company of rangers in Pakistan, and later there's action on the high seas as various agencies try to intercept container ships, and towards the end we have car chases and even a boat chase.  Flynn reveals several interesting technical details, like D.C.'s plan for continuity of government in the event of an attack, and the existence of a large Soviet nuclear testing range in Kazakhstan, where duds are literally just abandoned in the desert for any lunatic with a deathwish to dig up.  (A New Jersey-sized field in Kazakhstan actually exists, but from what I've read, various international agencies  were secretly cleaning the site all throughout the 2000s,  with all detritus secured by 2012.)   While the villains are wholly uninteresting, Flynn does admit for a little blowback: one of the attackers was formerly used by the CIA to fight the Russians invading Afghanistan,  He also doesn't regard Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as reliable allies in the war of terror because the Saudis are in fact financing some of the extremist groups.

Memorial Day is a fun action thriller, though not a seriously interesting geopolitical one.

Related:
The Last Patriot, Brad Thor.  A blend of this and The Da Vinco Code. Very silly.

All the Shah's Men

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
© 2003 Stephen Kinzler
272 pages

On one  dismal  night in 1953,  a conspiracy destroyed both Iranian democracy and American honor.  At the dawn of the 1950s, Iran was struggling to free itself from British domination, a  precursor to the bloody colonial revolutions that would mark the mid-20th century.   Despite being a product of colonial rebellion itself, the United States would betray its own history and one of amiable relations with Iran to  assert itself on the world stage.  All the Shah's Men is an admirably executed mix of espionage, history, and politics,  brimming with passion.

Iran arrived at the 20th century in a sorry state;  ruled by monarchs who were either corrupt or incompetent, it fell under the influence of both Russia and Britain, whose great game of tug-of-war used Iran as the rope, plundering its resources. While Russia would collapse into civil war in 1917, Britain proved a far more formidable opponent, securing a long-term monopoly over the harvesting of Iranian oil and natural gas, and virtually taking over the country in the 1940s during World War 2.  For fifty years, Iran's mineral wealth was literally siphoned out and shipped away:   Iranians were denied the opportunity to learn and master the industry,  granted only menial labor and a token share of the profits.

The forced abdication of the shah in 1943 meant that the Iranian parliament and its democratic offices were free to grow in legitimacy and authority. Increasingly, the parties running for office called for an end to British imperialism in Iran, and one Mohammad Mossadegh was particularly famous for his attack on the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.  He called for better working conditions for laborers, the inclusion of Iranians in the engineering and administrative aspects of the oil business, and a more equitable division of profits between the British company and Iran.  Britain would have none of it.

Mossadegh achieved office several times championing the cause of an independent Iran as the Truman administration gave way to Eisenhower's.  The change of American leadership was important, for while the British government wanted to take action in Iran, it wanted American support, in part because of D.C's previous help in securing Iran against German interests.  Truman had no interest whatsoever in going to bat for British petroleum, but Eisenhower had witnessed the fall of China to Communism and the unraveling of Korea, and -- with help from Winston Churchill, no stranger to mideast debacles --  he was sweettalked into seeing red in Iran.   There would be no Persian Mao, not on Ike's watch.    While Britain considered and dismissed the idea of simply invading Iran, this was decided to be more trouble than it was worth. Far better to take the country from within, by using the lingering authority of the shah's successor-prince to dismiss Mossadegh, and back him with the Iranian and Allied militaries as need be.

Although the coup initially seemed to be failing disastrously -- arrests of conspirators were made, followed by the fleeing of the shah  to Iraq -- the American man on the ground was able to turn things around. Kermit Roosevelt was the son of Teddy Roosevelt,  one of the first American executives to dream of the United States having a 'place in the sun', stretching its wings across the globe.  Using the economic depression that followed Britain's economic war against Iran, Roosevelt  stirred up dissent and paid people to form an anti-Mossadegh mob that would march on the man's house.  He was arrested, his  government fell, the shah returned, and-- well, things just went downhill from there. Emboldened by outside support, the shah grew ever more tyrannical against his own people, until he was ousted by a religiously authoritative regime that was hostile to Mossadegh for its own reasons.

  
All the Shah's Men succeeds brilliantly in part because of the connections Kinzler draws to broader Iranian history. The Iranians had thrown off another resource monopoly sixty years before,  and in the process they established a constitutional government. While weak against the traditional authority of the shah, and his control of the military,  it steadily acquired its own moral authority -- increasingly seen as more legitimate than the shah, who was a creature of the outside world, forcing its designs on Iran, from control of Iranian resources to the forced adoption of Western suits and hats.   Mossadegh's championing of Iranian independence was not merely freedom from outside manipulation, but freedom from the unjust and arbitrary rule of the shah.  The coup didn't simply topple Mossadegh's government: it and Anglo-American support  of the shah thereafter sabotaged and reversed the trend toward Iranian self-government.

The coup not only derailed Iran' development as a democratic and humane society, but has caused no end of trouble for both Britain and the United States, mostly the Americans who did the dirty work.  When the shah was ousted in 1979 and sought refuge in the United States, Iranians who remembered 1953 thought they were about to re-witness history. Hadn't the shah fled  before, only to be returned under the aegis of the Americans?   Such was the spark of the hostage crisis, leading to decades of hostility and cold fury between the powers in which Iran and the west continue to wage war against one another's interests;  in Iran's case, this has taken the form of funding terrorist organizations.

All the Shah's Men is one of the more outstanding books I've ever read; though  principally about the conspiracy,  Kinzler does a terrific job in explaining the historical context.  But the book doesn't read like a lecture; at times it has the feel of investigative journalism or a spy thriller. Kinzler isn't just summarizing news articles, but relies on interviews with those who remember Mossadegh, for whom the man is a memory of a time when Iran's destiny seemed its own to make, when the law was being strengthened as a redoubt against arbitrary authority instead of being used to execute it.


Related:

• Nehru: the Invention of India, Shashi Tharoor.
• Tehran and the United States, Seyed Mousavian

When the Eagle Hunts

When the Eagle Hunts
© 2002 Simon Scarrow
274 pages

The Emperor Claudius is determined to make good the conquest of Britain, but his supply fleet sleeps with the fishes. The only Romans to survive a wintry crossing of the (English) channel are one officer, one woman, and two small children. Drowning might have been a better fate for them, however, as on shore they fall into the hands of an incredibly gruesome and violent sect of Druids. Used as objects of ransom, the royal family is threatened with death-by-bonfire if Rome doesn’t meet the druidic demands...demands which might compromise the whole expand-the-Empire dream.  Enter the grizzled Centurion Macro and his peach-fuzz faced second, Cato,  who have in the past proven quick enough on their feet to infiltrate barbarians and walk out alive.

When the Eagle Hunts is third in Scarrow’s Roman historical fiction, and features cloak-and-gladus operations more than larger battles.  Not that Hunts is without legion-wide brawls, for the first half of the book features the Second Legion patrolling the border and being brutally harried by the Durotriges.  Scarrow uses this to create a sense of dread about the Black Moon Druids, who expect some deity to arrive and consume the world, beginning with their enemies. The druids wage savage war against anyone who draws close to Rome, and if they spare women and children from being killed in battle, it is only so the captives can be tortuously executed at leisure. Scarrow still provides comic moments, here principally in the Romans' interaction with their Iceni guide, but Hunts is darker than the previous novels in the series. Of great interest is the role played by a red-haired Iceni named Boudica, who both Macro and Cato have a certain fascination for. She moves like a tiger, a fount of hidden and fierce strength, and she most definitely will feature in this series again, I'm sure.  The druidic horror show also has some interest given that Scarrow penned his afterword on fanaticism and violence  on September 12th, 2001.  Hunts is also a series milestone, a coming-of-age for  young Cato, who must attempt a rescue on his own after Macro is incapacitated.

All Other Nights

All Other Nights
© 2009 Dara Horn
400 pages

Why is this night different than all other nights?  Well, for starters, Joseph Rappaport is going to poison his uncle, on suspicion that he is plotting to kill Abraham Lincoln.   That move is the beginning of Rappaport’s career as an intelligence agent, using his family connections to infiltrate a Southern spy ring.  All Other Nights  is the enthralling story that emerges as he descends deeper into the shadows, finding – even as his body collects injuries from narrow escapes – a purpose worth living for.   Although running away from an arranged marriage at his father’s hands puts Rappaport into the ranks of the Union army,   it is when he tasked with seducing and marrying a young woman undermining the Federal campaign that the story fully begins.

Romance and work are a poor mix, as Rappaport soon finds. He wins the affections of his dazzling spy-rival,  a star of the theater who excels in sleight of hand. Her theft of his heart, however, is no parlor trick. The war makes a tragedy of their love, however,  doomed as their work was toward mutual self-destruction.  Joseph is soon broken in heart and body, marooned in the Tennessee wilderness.   A chance connection leads him to realize that not all hope is lost, however, and soon he is back in Virginia,  at the side of the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. His masquerade is two-fold, however;  while posing as a Confederate agent and gathering information for the Union, his true purpose in returning to Richmond is to find the family he helped destroy and save them and what little he feels of his soul from further ruin.

What a fascinating novel this is!  There's a touch of small-world coincidence, but it's handled deftly enough.  Joseph’s Jewish heritage isn’t just character flavoring;  the book opens at a Passover seder, the remembrance of Hebrews escape from Egyptian bondage the call for retribution.  Most of what Rappaport does throughout the novel is escape – flee the obligations his father seeks to impose on him,  out-run the consequences of his own actions – but  once he loses an eye he begins to see his way more clearly,  embracing a new life for himself even as Richmond burns.  The story thus combines historic espionage (ciphers, messages hidden in riding crops) and agonizing soul searching. There's romance here, but unlike other authors Ms. Horn doesn't force a play-by-play on the readers. She teases, as characters gaze at one another longingly, and then discretely moves on.  It has substance, too too, for Jacob's is a love discovered accidentally and kindled slowly.  The final scene is a true finish, one that complete's Jacob's growth as a man capable of decision, not merely running or obeying masters above.

This is one of the best Civil War novels I've read in a long, long time.
 

Hitler's Undercover War

Hitler's Undercover War: The Nazi Espionage Invasion of the U.S.A.
© 1989 William  Breuer
358 pages

Wars are not confined to battlefields, even when the fields of conflict are as wide-open as the open oceans and the very sky itself, as they were in World War 2.  Victories and defeats can be effected in the quiet of the night, by men and women ostensibly noncombatants, whose intelligence and skillful deceit is applied in just the right areas to supply vital information, or sabotage endeavors. Hitler's Undercover War is a rare history of German intelligence operations  before and during the Second World War, ending only in the total defeat of the Nazi state.   It is doubly a history of the growth of the FBI, from suited cops chasing bootleggers to sophisticated intelligence men vying to out-maneuver devils most devious.  Written by a soldier of the war, heart fully on his sleeve,  it has the immediate excitement of a spy thriller with a most satisfying conclusion.

The story begins long before the rise of the National Socialists, just after the peace of Versailles which concluded the Great War by dismembering Germany's army and forcing its new civilian leaders to accept the   Allied costs of fighting the war, and responsibility for starting it in the first place.  In an age of constant militarism,  surrounded by powers which hated her, Germany's disarmament wouldn't last long. Soon into the 1920s, in fact,  programs were being developed to keep the German army up to speed -- through whatever means necessary. If Germans could not refine military aviation at home, they would watch other nations' progress with great interest....and appropriate it when necessary. This was made easy, Breuer writes, by the fact that the United States was utterly naive in the area of espionage and counter espionage;  at one point Customs agents literally discover a briefcase full of military blueprints, give the nervous man carrying them a stern reminder to come in for questioning next week, and let him go.  The German 'Abwehr', its military intelligence group, created separate and later coordinating spy circles to collect and funnel war-related R&;D Germany's way.

Things grow darker once the Nazis assume power and begin plotting nothing less than world domination. The United States' status as a nation of immigrants is no less impactful here than it was in the leadup to the Great War, when immigrants of competing parts of Europe protested the thought of their new nation waging war on their homeland.   The Abwehr capitalized on the fact that many Americans were German who still wanted the best for their native land, even if they had left it behind.  The German-American Bund, for instance, led the way in protesting the thought of the United States getting into another of "England's wars", labeling Roosevelt a warmonger. They were aided by Nazi agents with press connections, who flooded areas with isolationist propaganda.  Hitler's intelligence handlers were far quicker to resort to violence; once a man or woman had been vouched as a Good German, worthy of serving the Reich and presented with an offer to spy, they and their family on both continents were threatened with harm if they did not answer the call.  (Such arm-twisting would eventually backfire, when one German-American immediately became a double agent, allowing the FBI to penetrate and take down one especially prominent intelligence cell.)

As the "New Germany"  realized war with the United States was inevitable,  its spy networks widened and readied for direct action. They remained at work tracking military developments, attempting to steal plans and parts for items like the Norden bombsight, and continually forwarding to Germany details on  American troop strength and deployment. Once the war began, however, they began actively attempting to sabotage factories and misdirect shipping. (Shipping information was especially vital given the American lend-lease programs, which sent arms and other equipment to both Britain and the Soviet Union.  With U-boats prowling right off the coast of the Atlantic seaboard, loose lips truly did sink ships.)  On one especially dramatic occasion,  a boatload of Nazi agents disembarked on a beach with trunks of explosives,  with plans to disperse throughout the United States and cause pandemonium by blowing things to pieces. They were partially undone by the fact that a Coast Guard seaman just happened to chance upon them burying their explosive booty and chattering in German.

Hitler's Undercover War will definitely interest  readers with a taste of intelligence operations;  here we have men creating and applying vintage spy paraphernalia, like matchbooks with secret codes, microfilm captures of confidential documents rolled into pens, and buxom blonde fatales flirting with guards so co-conspirators can do some snooping.  The period charm extends to the unfiltered adoration of the FBI:  J. Edgar Hoover is described as a "lantern-jawed supersleuth" who abstains from dating on the grounds that it will distract him from his work.  His determined avoidance of taking the Mafia seriously, and his antagonist role during the Civil Rights movement make his star shine far dimmer these days, so the Captain American-esque descriptions are little much. To give Breuer's treatment of him and his team credit, however, they were fighting the Nazis, some of whom were authentic Judases in selling out American troops for money, with no genuine love for the country of their youth  to excuse them.


Related:

• The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, James Corum.  Far more information on how Germany was able to 'invent' a modern air force so soon after Hitler's rise to power, which included sending agents to tour air shows,  reviewing western aviation journals,  experimenting with civilian aeronautics, and even partnering with the Soviets. 

Armada

Armada
© 2012 John Stack
400 pages

It is the 16th century, and a crisis looms for England.  Spain, who thanks to the plunder of the New World and its Hapsburg connections, is Europe's heavyweight and the declared enemy of England, threatens war. Spanish armies stand just across the Channel, occupying Holland, and a massive fleet has sailed from Iberia to help cover and transport that invading army to a land which has not known a conqueror's boots in five hundred years.  The force from without may have assistance from within, as persecuted Catholics look to Madrid for salvation. In the center of this drama is Robert Varian, a secret Catholic whose father was said to have died in exile following defeat in a rebellion decades ago.  Robert's father Nathaniel is quite alive, however, and from Spain he has helped organize the forthcoming invasion.  If Robert could be convinced to aide his father and provide intelligence on the gathering English fleet,  he could very well pave the way to Spanish victory and the restoration of the Faith in England.  But matters are far from simple.  A recusant Robert may be, but he is an Englishman who loves his Queen -- but does he love her more than his father?  As the hours draw the two massive forces closer to conflict, desperate attempts in England to root out a potential spy dot the landscape with death, and two missions converge in the same running battle as the English fleet and a fickle wind fight fiercely against the armed might and brazen ambition of the Dons.

Robert Varian dominates the lead here in a way  John Stack's other hero, Atticus, never did. Although there is an ensemble of other viewpoint characters, one of whom is his principle Spanish rival, this is Robert's story.  Happily, then, he's a likable fellow; conflicted, but devoted to his faith, his country, and the memory of  his father. He thrives as a warrior in an age of changing seamanship; sailors might pack primitive muskets and fire cannons instead of cutlasses and arrows, but cannons have begun their conquest of the naval scene. While the Spanish still rely heavily on boarding and hacking away,  the English have begun to experiment with using cannon alone to wear down the enemy. It is a tactic that will serve them in good stead during the battle itself, and give the Spanish captain Morales no end of grief. He wants desperately to take down Varian, a man who took his ship but spared his life in a raid, but how can he if the English do not consent to letting their graceful gunships be bludgeoned down by massive galleons? So Varian wrestles with both his conscience and the Spanish, working out the question of how he can be true to his faith, his father, and his country.  His love for both England and the church contrasts with the fanaticism of those on either side working against him, both Puritans in England and holy warriors in Spain.

The story of the Armada's protracted fight against the English fleet, unfolding over the course of several days, is told largely through the repeated brawls between Varian and his Spanish counterpart's ships, climaxing with a frantic duel aboard a burning ship.  It's a strange story, both because of the in-flux state of naval war, transitioning from ancient to modern methods, and because of the way it ends. The Spanish Armada is not destroyed, and neither is the English fleet;  they fight and go home. Stack's historical note comments that it was fortunate for England that the Spanish regarded themselves as spent, for the English fleet was driven to exhaustion as well, and this attitude reflects itself in the story, in that the Spanish lead is driven to despair over his loss even as the English captains are worrying about what the morrow will bring.  Varian, at least, gets most of his ends tidied up, though parts of the ending seem to be begging for a sequel.  It's a slight blemish, however, and if Stacks does more work in this period, so much the better off are we readers!

A Map of Betrayal

A Map of Betrayal
© 2014 Ha Jin
304 pages

When  Lillian Shang touched down in mainland China, her official purpose was to teach. Unofficially, however, she was there to learn -- to uncover the truth of her father's life by tracking down the family he left behind. Daddy dearest was exposed as a top-level Chinese spy embedded in the CIA in 1980, and when he committed suicide he left behind two wives, families in two hemispheres, and a lot of questions. With the help of a journal and a few estranged relatives, Lillian discovers her father -- a deeply tortured man, torn by love for two nations. A Map of Betrayal uses the life of fictional Gary Shang to make personal the history of the Cold War, of relations between the Soviet Union, China, and the United States. In alternating chapters, Ha Jin tells the story of Shang's life and his grown-up daughter's attempt to come to terms with his legacy.  Only a young man when he accepted orders from the Chinese government to seek employment at an American cultural office and start forwarding relevant information to the Party,  Shang found the job inescapable. No matter how far it took him from home -- to Okinawa, and eventually even to the United States -- the Party insisted he stay embedded therein.  Not only was Shang forced to leave his young wife and child behind, but eventually, as the decades passed, he grew to love the American nation which adopted him as its own, even as he maintained a private allegiance to another. Shang's attempts to find a way to serve both countries, to love both families, make him an enormously sympathetic character, even for a spy of the Communist state.  Although Lillian is the narrator of the novel, Gary is truly its star, and his story -- gathered in full for the first time by his daughter -- allows his Chinese family to reconsider their own lives, especially a grandson who is also employed by Beijing's intelligence service.  A Map of Betrayal fascinates with its literary look into not only Cold War China, but the soul of a spy who loved that which he betrayed.

Related:
The Mao Case, Qui Xiaolong


[2015 Reading Challenge 5/52: Book Set in Another Country]

George Washington's Secret Six

George Washington's Secret Six
© 2013 Brian Kilmead
257 pages

Wars are not won by soldiers alone. In the shadows are those silently gathering information, sometimes at great risks to themselves,  to give the nation's leaders an edge over the foe -- or to prevent the foe's own shadowy talents from doing likewise. George Washington's Secret Six is a flashy history of a civilian intelligence ring operating throughout the revolutionary war, a ring that invented by necessity many of the tactics still faithfully and productively employed by intelligence agencies today -- and a ring that accomplished more in the dark than the young nation's struggling army did on the battlefield. It's an area of history which is getting increasing attention these days, but The Secret Six is as its title indicates intended for a popular audience; it's quite casual history, full of energy and fanciful storytelling -- including scenes with dialogue. Given that the book is centered on New York, and that George Washington spends its entirety brooding over reports from the spies that give him little hope for taking the city, the full title seems something of an overreach. Despite the fact that the ring was created to help Washington free New York City from the British, however, they keep turning up information of interest outside that limited theater, like a plot to undermine American currency through counterfeiting.  These episodes link  the spy ring to a war that otherwise seems to be taking place in a place far, far away.  Though limited in scope, and distressingly sparing in cites sources,  the heroism undertaken by the merchants and common men and women is well worth being introduced to, as is their cleverness.  It remains of interest despite being very light history.

The Last Patriot

The Last Terrorist

© 2008 Brad Thor

352 pages

The Last Patriot takes a modern covert-cops thriller and combines it with The DaVinci Code, though the sinister establishment being threatened by some archaeological find is not the Church of Rome, but global Islam.  The novel opens with a car bomb exploding in Paris, its target an American historian in the employ of the US president.  “President Rutledge” hopes to shake Islam at its base by revealing the Last Revelation of Muhammad, for which the prophet was supposedly assassinated.  The nature of that revelation is evidently seriously enough  that angry Muslim villains employ a US secret agent turned terrorist to kill anyone who might know about it. Unfortunately for him, Rutledge has a whole band of terrist-fightin’ secret agent men of his own, and they go ‘round and ‘round throughout the novel killing people until the final reveal.

Although I’d hoped for an exciting military or political thriller set in the mid-east, most of the action takes place in either Paris or D.C. The fantastic plot beggars belief, between the amount of clues tied up in Thomas Jefferson’s architectural work, and all of the characters seriously believing that a document changing their beliefs about the Koran would diminish global terrorism. The story climaxes at Jefferson’s privately-designed estate, where clues in its design lead to the location of the final revelation’s hiding place, National Treasure-like. The stuttering hostility toward Islam doesn’t help, with the general avowing that global Islam is the worst thing ever being occasionally disrupted by characters blandly mentioning that it’s radical Islam they hate, not Islam in general). Aside from the technology and some of the American characters, there’s not a lot of believably here: Left Behind had more credible Muslims.   I'm not entirely sure what the title even has to do with the plot; it seems a generic America vs Evil Muslims tale with some Founding Father resonance thrown in. 

An Officer and a Spy

An Officer and a Spy
© 2013 Robert Harris
496 pages 

  In the late 19th century, the Dreyfuss Affair shook France when one Captain Alfred Dreyfuss, accused of selling French military secrets to the Germany General Staff.  Declared guilty, publicly disgraced, and dramatically exiled, Dreyfuss’ name became a lightning rod of controversy. On trial, more than Dreyfuss himself, was the pride of the army and the Jewish question. Could a Jew  be a loyal citizen of the Republic?   An Officer and a Spy is a history of the affair in novel form, from the perspective of Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, who observed the trial in its entirety and who, upon becoming an intelligence master,  began to realize that something was amiss. Though Picquart begins as hostile to Dreyfuss, his investigation of ongoing security concerns reveals that not only is there a spy still operating within the General Staff, but the case against Dreyfuss was based on ‘evidence’ too flimsy to be respectable. When he attempts to call his superiors’ attention to this miscarriage of justice and take down the real spy, however, Pichquart becomes another target of an entrenched institution desperate to save face: the French army.

            Robert Harris has displayed his strengths as a writer of fiction, with books as diverse as political thrillers set in ancient Rome  to modern science-fiction thrillers set in financial markets. After books like The Fear Index and The Ghost, An Officer and a Spy is a return to the genre in which Harris proved his writing mettle: historical fiction.  Its integration of source material and narrative is impressive, drawing extensively on Dreyfusses' letters but never obtrusively. Trials are a mainstay here, as not only Dreyfuss but various suspects are dragged before courts-martial and forced to defend themselves. Picquart himself is never officially tried, but when his associates are he might as well be, for he is exiled to Africa and given a pointless and likely suicidal mission.  Being a few years removed from my French history courses, I don't know how the development of Picquart's case aligns with reality, but it's excellent fiction. I suspect Harris stays close to the facts, because certain characters, like the 'real' spy, aren't as overblown as they might be in a purely fictional novel:  the real spy isn't particularly sinister, but in pure fiction he could have been developed as a mastermind. Because in reality he managed to stay hidden accidentally, the true villain of the piece is the French army's distrust of Jews and their obsession with protecting themselves from additional controversy.  Considering how rich in detail this book is about life during the 'beautiful epoch', before the great war, and about the craft of intelligence in particular,  it's an attractive historical piece while doubling as a fascinating political and legal thriller.

Sharpe's Revenge

Sharpe's Revenge

© 1989 Bernard Cornwell

Englishmen in Toulouse, Prussians in Paris -- there are foreigners everywhere, and for Napoleon the war is over. Not for Sharpe, though, not by a long shot. His old enemy Pierre Ducos has seen fit to ensnare Sharpe one last time before the piece is signed, and it will cost Sharpe more than he ever imagined.  Sharpe’s Siege takes the reader  through what seem to be the last skirmishes of the war, and then into the peace, which is far more dangerous. Accused of murder and grand theft,  Sharpe is left to wander through France avoiding the armies of l’Empereur and the English Crown, for both have become his enemy.  Sharpe’s Siege is one of the more agonizing pieces in this series, but satisfies in a way few have.  The plot is vaguely familiar (I’m sure this isn't the first time Sharpe has been on the lam from his own army with no one but Patrick at his side),  but the late game is more than mere military adventurism.  Sharpe’s own soul is tortured here, and while it’s painful for him it’s great reading -- and it is moments like those crafted in here that will be remembered long after the series is finished and the epic battles scenes have evaporated from memory.  I rather doubt Sharpe’s Waterloo can top this, but we’ll see.

Hitler's Peace

Hitler's Peace
© 2006 Phillip Kerr
464 pages

Willard Mayer has the strangest luck. How many people get to dine with FDR, talk about the worries of life with Winston Churchill, annoy Joseph Stalin, and shake hands with Adolf Hitler? And this after they've  been arrested several times for espionage given a string of bodies trailing behind them. Mayer's no murderer or spy, even if once in his impressionable youth he was a member of the Communist party and passed information to the Soviet intelligence service, the NKVD.  The year is 1943, and Mayer is a philosopher-turned-OSS agent who is accompanying FDR to an ultra top-secret conference as a German translator/intelligence strategist. The confidential conference in Tehran -- the one so concealed that everyone and their twitchy uncle knows about - is the first coming together of the Big Three: FDR,Churchill, and Stalin. But more will happen there than will ever be publicly known, for while some Germans are planning the assassinations  of the allied trio, others intend to entice them into an early peace.

Hitler's Peace is exciting from beginning to end, a bit of historical fiction that occupies a grey area between historical and alternate fiction. Although history is fundamentally unchanged, Kerr's plot explores facts considered odd and provides a highly speculative explanation. Truth is stranger than fiction, however; I was astonished to learn that some events within the novel which strained credibility actually occurred, like the string of calamities that beset the Willie D. Porter, one of the ships escorting FDR to the conference. Within hours, the ship backed into and destroyed another ship, saw a man vanish into the sea, blew a boiler, dropped a depth charge, and just for good measure, fired a torpedo directly at FDR's ship. "She's not what you would call a lucky ship", the baffled president noted shortly before ordering the ship to detach itself from the convoy and deliver its crew for total arrest at the nearest port.  The cast of characters is largely German (Mayer is the son of German immigrants),which is a refreshing change.  They're all antagonists who are neither sympathetic nor overtly villainous; the Nazi regime's crimes against humanity are not ignored, but neither are those of the Russians, and the revelation of several Soviet slaughters features as a plot point. The novel plays fast and loose with history, but touches on aspects of the war largely ignored (Soviet war crimes, for instance, or "Operation Long Jump"). I found it entertaining, though Mayer is only marginally more sympathetic than the book's 'baddies'.