My Review of David McCloskey's "The Seventh Floor"

 Mole Hunters

Retired CIA officer David McCloskey has written another pager turner. In this novel he captures the bureaucratic back-stabbing culture of the CIA as only an insider can do. His protagonist is the gutsy curly headed five foot tall, Artemis Aphrodite Proctor.  She is a veteran of tours in Afghanistan and Syria and was the architect of a botched operation in Singapore where CIA officer John Joseph is kidnapped by the Russians and his Russian asset is killed. This failure forces her out of the CIA.

Simultaneously two other operations go awry with a key CIA asset in Russia assassinated.  She rightly believes that there is a mole in the house and when Joseph is released in a spy swap, they join forces to hunt down the mole. Joseph is also exiled from the CIA, so they are acting as private citizens, albeit highly skilled citizens in the dark arts of the CIA. I learned that the official mole hunters in the CIA are known as the dermatology department. 

On the other side we see an aging SVR officer, Rem Zomov, working as hard as he can to protect is asset operating at the highest levels of the CIA. The title refers to the executive floor at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Zomov orders a hit on Proctor and Joseph using an illegal couple on Dallas to do the dirty work. In shades of the hit TV series “The Americans” we find them to be a mild-mannered suburban couple blending into the north Dallas milieu.

McCloskey takes his adventure from northern Virginia, to Orlando, where Proctor is now improbably working at her cousin’s alligator park, to Las Vegas and ultimately on to France. There is much more to the story, but I ended up troubled by the bureaucratic infighting and petty jealousies that plague an organization dedicated to protecting us.

My Amazon Review of Jason Matthews' "The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel"

Spy Hunters

Former CIA operations officer Jason Matthews has offered up his third and likely final book in his “Red Sparrow” series of novels on Dominika Egorova, a CIA spy operating in the heart of the Kremlin. To get a sense of whom Egorova is I would note that Jennifer Lawrence is playing her in the newly released “Red Sparrow” movie.

Although not quite as good as the first two, “The Kremlin’s Candidate” packs quite a punch. In Moscow Egorova is well on her way to becoming the head of the SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) wining, dining and bedding Putin all the while the Kremlin is running an agent in the United States destined to become the CIA Director. It is Erogova’s and her CIA handler and lover, Nathaniel Nash, role to foil the Kremlin’s plot. Similarly the Russians are searching for a mole in their security services with Erogova in and out of the cross hairs.

Along the way we visit Khartoum, Hong Kong and yes, Staten Island, New York. We learn much of the tradecraft used by the CIA and the Russians and of how the Russians use “illegals” in the United States. (Shades of the TV series “The Americans”) We also get a very real sense that Matthews doesn’t like the wimpy politicians who ran America’s foreign policy under the Obama Administration. My guess is that he will like the current crop of politicians even less. As with his prior two books Matthews ends each chapter with a recipe for a menu item that was eaten in the chapter. Trust me; there are some real good ones here.

Although the reader doesn’t have to read the earlier novels first, it certainly helps. You won’t be wasting your time. Enjoy.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R8G9GXRKEST4E/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

Breaking out the Vodka at the SVR and the GRU

No matter what the outcome of the Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort meeting with Russian lawyer/intelligence operative? Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian security services have won bigtime. Break out the vodka in Moscow. Why? They have succeeded magnificently in creating total chaos in Washington by putting the Trump Administration in complete meltdown mode. And who knows what additional information the SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) and the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) has on the Trump Administration. Remember the Russian intelligence services have information on every single contact the Trump people had with them and/or their cutouts. So my guess is there are more shoes here to drop to than in Imelda Marcos’ legendary closet.

Nevertheless there is far more to this story. Why are all of the leaks occurring now just days after Trump’s meeting with Putin? Did “The Donald” give away the store to Putin causing our national security apparatus to start leaking like a sieve or was he surprisingly tough on him causing the Russians to do the leaking? My guess is the former, but either way Putin wins.

Did Sergey Kislyak Wear a Wire?

It seems that Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak met with quite a few officials in the Donald Trump campaign before and after the election. Who knows what was discussed but  the real question is whether or not Kislyak wore a wire. My guess is that he did and therefore the Russians have transcripts of exactly what was said. Given that Attorney General Sessions has already testified under oath and will soon do so again and the other Trumpista's will soon be facing subpoenas, there certainly is the potential  for blackmail.

Further although Kislyak is probably not an officer in the SVR (the Russian foreign security intelligence service) his "Rezidentura" (station chief) reports to him as well as Moscow Central and as is typical for most governments the ambassador and his/her security chief work hand in glove together. 

Thus President Trump has more to worry about than the alleged without evidence Obama wiretap; his friends in Russia could very well have a real hold on him and his administration.