My Review of I.S. Berry's "The Peacock and the Sparrow"

 Betrayal in the Desert

Former CIA Officer I.S. Berry has written a terrific first novel set in Bahrein at the time of the Arab Spring. It is a classic espionage novel. Her protagonist is Shawn Collins, an aging CIA officer with an alcohol problem. He finds Rashid, a questionable source within the Iran-backed Shia underground that is attempting to overthrow the ruling Sunni monarchy.

Collins’ new station chief is a young and arrogant Ivy leaguer who thinks he knows it all. The two don’t get along from the start. Collins is attracted to a stunning local artist named Almaisa of European/Arab parentage. She has studied in the west and his interest in her is more personal than professional.

With Almaisa and Rashid we get a sense of the real Bahrein. We get a real smell of the streets and get an understanding of violence associated with uprising. I visited Bahrein on business many years ago and only saw its office towers and a large collection of Mercedes automobiles. I didn’t see the back streets or the outskirts of Manama, the capital.  

Along the way we get a sense of the politics of the CIA and the habits of the elite westerners who reside there. They live in a different world. If I had one criticism it would be the lack of maps, for the country as a whole and Manama. It would have made it much easier to follow the plot.

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 Ben Macintyre's "The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War"

Mrs. Thatcher’s Spy

It is not for nothing that John Le Carre noted in a front cover blurb “the best true spy story I have ever read.” Ben Macintyre’s biography of KGB Colonel and MI6 spy Oleg Gordievsky reads like a novel. His description of Gordievsky’s exfiltration from Moscow by MI6 under the watchful eyes of the KGB has all the hallmarks of a tension-packed Hollywood spy drama and that alone is worth the price of the book.

The story begins with Gordievsky growing up as the son of a KGB general who becomes disillusioned with life under Soviet communism. He follows in his father’s footsteps and is recruited by the KGB. He is initially stationed in Denmark and there he is willingly recruited by MI6.  As he rises in the KGB bureaucracy he become ever more important to the British. Along the way he marries, divorces remarries and has two daughters.

Where Gordievsky enters history is when he becomes a senior political officer in the KGB’s London rezindentura in the early 1980s. While there he reports to his MI6 handlers that the Soviets actually believed that the United States was going to launch a first strike on the Soviet Union. So paranoid is KGB head and future general secretary Yuri Andropov that he sets up Operation RYaN to find evidence of plans for a first strike. As in most bureaucracies the KGB spies produce such evidence thereby exacerbating his paranoia. The same thing happened with the CIA when it was ordered to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq twenty years later.

Compounding the problem was that at about the same time in 1983 NATO ordered up its massive Able Archer exercise which was a practice drill to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. To the Russians it looked like a precursor to war. It was Gordievsky who tells the British of the Russian fears who then relay that information to the CIA. Several authors have noted that had not both sides deescalated, nuclear war was on the table. Gordievsky’s information to both Thatcher and Reagan was influential in bringing about from the de-escalation.

As the Soviet heir apparent, Gorbachev met with Margaret Thatcher in London in 1984. Here Gordievsky’s role is crucial because be briefed both Thatcher and Gorbachev as MI6 spy and KGB political officer on negotiating strategy. The meeting was a big success and Thatcher noted that Gorbachev was a man she could do business with. The end of the Cold War was now more than a pipe dream. Later, after his exfiltration, Gordievsky meets with Reagan to advise him on negotiating strategy for an upcoming meeting with Gorbachev.

But wait, what caused Gordievsky to be exfiltrated from Moscow, especially after he was made the Rezident of the KGB’s London office? In very short form the CIA is jealous of MI6 and wants to know who their source is. They soon find out and his name ends up on the desk of Aldrich Ames who was selling secrets to KGB officers in Washington. His betrayal leads to the death of scores of CIA operatives and sources in Russia and ultimately to the KGB investigation of Gordievsky. In Macintyre’s view Ames is a traitor who sold out his country for big bucks and Gordievsky is an honorable spy seeking to better his country.

This is a great book that I couldn’t put down and I highly recommend it. As an added plus you learn quite a bit of trade craft.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1DYCZTEAIL4ZH/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

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