Month: July 2012

It’s hard to write a credible historical spy thriller. You have to get the history right while fashioning a narrative that will keep the reader turning the page. Writing a literary historical spy thriller is even harder: you need to balance believable characters, well-crafted prose, and a consideration of larger themes while maintaining suspense.

Joseph Kanon achieves that balance in his latest novel, Istanbul Passage, which should be regarded as a tour de force for the genre. It’s no surprise that Kanon’s fiction is compared to that of John le Carré and Graham Greene—he tackles the same moral ambiguities that surface in the world of espionage.

Kanon sets his story in Istanbul just after the close of World War II. Turkey stayed on the sidelines for most of the war (entering on the side of the Allies only after it was clear that they would prevail) along with the other countries that remained neutral: Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.

A few novelists have explored the tensions and ambiguity involved in neutrality: C.J. Sansom looked at life in Franco’s wartime Spain in Winter in Madrid, and Robert Wilson wrote two well-received mysteries set in Portugal during the war, A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers .

Istanbul Passage begins in the early days of the Cold War. The novel’s protagonist, Leon Bauer, is a businessman working for the R.J. Reynolds Company who has been helping American intelligence on the side (“An errand boy when I happened to be going to the right place”) and discovers not only does he find clandestine work exciting, but also that he’s good at it. When Bauer takes delivery of a Romanian defector and things go terribly wrong, he finds himself drawn deeper into the struggle between Soviet and American intelligence.

Kanon excels in his portraits of the people in the novel—the portly, amoral document forger; the well-connected Turkish socialite who began life in a harem; the bored diplomatic wives; the competing Soviet and American agents; the Mossad operative who must deal with local corruption, Western indifference, and British hostility. The novel brilliantly evokes the Expat world of post-war Istanbul—the foreign diplomats and businessmen who have created their own closed society. Kanon also weaves into the plot the efforts of Mossad agents to help Eastern European Jews evade a Royal Navy blockade and make their way to Palestine. And then there is the Turkish elite, caught between the two emerging powers, and trying to decide which side to land on.

Kanon touches upon some of the themes of accountability and expediency that surfaced in his 2001 bestseller, The Good German. Where should American intelligence have drawn the line when working with those who were part of the Nazi war-machine? What was the morality of making use of those in the Cold War struggle who could be tried on war crimes charges? (We know the answer in Europe: the Allies made use of the Gehlen organization despite its Nazi past). Should the “enemy of my enemy” be enough to justify making alliances?

My only (minor) quibble with Kanon’s book is that I kept waiting for Kim Philby, the infamous mole, to appear, and he didn’t. In September 1945, Konstantin Volkov, the deputy head of the NKVD in Turkey, walked into the British Consulate in Istanbul intent on defecting. He offered to expose Soviet agents in Turkey and Britain. Cold War history might have been different if Philby, the head of MI6’s Russian Desk at the time and a Soviet agent, hadn’t been the official tasked with handling the defection. Philby delayed his arrival in Istanbul long enough for word of Volkov’s planned escape to reach Moscow Center; a heavily-bandaged Volkov was then seen being hustled board an airplane bound for Russia. Had Volkov made it to London he could have exposed the penetration of the British Foreign Office and MI-6 (the Maclean-Burgess-Philby ring).

Copyright © 2012 Jefferson Flanders
All rights reserved

Click to purchase The North Building, the new Cold War thriller by Jefferson Flanders. You can also find his critically-acclaimed Herald Square at Amazon.com and other online booksellers.

Veteran journalists Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman have authored a compelling new book, Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, that should become required reading for President Barack Obama and his National Security Council.

The White House has abandoned “nation-building” and opted for a “small footprint” strategy of special operations missions and drone attacks in the Middle East. If this is the direction for American foreign policy in the region (at least for the short-term), there’s a lot to be learned from the Israeli experience and Spies Against Armageddon offers a deeply researched account of how Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies operate when confronting threats to the Jewish state.

Take, for example, the sensitive topic of state-sponsored assassination (covered in detail in Chapter 22 of Spies Against Armageddon). It is a practice frowned upon by the international law community (which considers assassinations of suspected terrorists to be “extrajudicial killings”), but one that has been employed by the Mossad in its fight against terrorism.

Historically American political leaders have been queasy about endorsing assassinations and confronting the difficult legal and moral questions they raise, especially when the targets are far from armed conflict zones. After the revelation of CIA involvement in assassination plots in Cuba, Vietnam, the Congo and elsewhere, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning assassinations in 1976. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush Administration relaxed prohibitions against “targeted killings” arguing that they were a form of self-defense*. Predator drones began firing Hellfire missiles at Al Qaeda and Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Obama has dramatically expanded these drone strikes, making them the central tactic in American counterterrorism efforts.

In fact, Obama’s enthusiasm for, and acceleration of, “drone wars” has disturbed many of his liberal supporters. The revelation that Obama himself reviews the “kill list” of targeted terrorists, and decides their fate, has been an unsettling image for many. In his Esquire piece “The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama,” Tom Junod directly challenges the President’s current direction: “You are the first president to make the killing of targeted individuals the focus of our military operations, of our intelligence, of our national-security strategy, and, some argue, of our foreign policy.” Junod adds: “Since taking office, you have killed thousands of people identified as terrorists or militants outside the theater of Afghanistan. You have captured and detained one.”

In contrast, Spies of Armageddon argues that the Israelis take a more restrained approach to targeted killing. They prefer the scalpel to the hammer. Raviv and Melman note that:

• The Israelis are very selective in their use of assassination as a foreign policy tool, despite the public perception (aided by movies like Munich) that they rely on hit squads. Raviv and Melman claim that since the creation of Mossad in the early 1950s “it has been involved in only a few dozen killing operations—certainly fewer than 50.”
• Their targets tend to be key operational players in terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, or technical support people (bomb-makers, nuclear scientists). Spies Against Armageddon made headlines around the world in reporting that it was Mossad agents, not Iranian rebel groups, responsible for the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists.
• They don’t go after top political figures.
• They won’t, and don’t, kill Israeli citizens.

In contrast to this selectivity, the drone programs operated by the U.S. military and the CIA have been aimed at thousands of militants in an increasing number of countries. Drones have been employed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia. And most disturbingly, President Obama and his surrogates have claimed the authority to kill American citizens deemed to be terrorists without judicial review or due process. Attorney General Eric Holder has argued that administrative due process is enough—a bizarre position for the nation’s top legal official to take.

It’s not hard to see why the Obama Administration has turned to drones to counter Islamic jihadism. It avoids the costly, and unpopular, use of American combat troops in the Middle East. It does keep Al Qaeda and the Taliban off balance. And it does protect Obama politically from right-wing attacks that he is soft on terrorism.

Yet it doesn’t appear that policy makers have thought through the practical, legal, and moral issues surrounding their reliance on targeted killing. The Obama Administration’s position on targeting American nationals without judicial oversight is a terrible one, arrogating to the President the “power of kings” to unilaterally kill his subjects. There’s also the question of how long this approach can be sustained. Boston University’s Andrew Bacevich, for one, has questioned this continuing “whack-a-mole” approach: “How many Hellfire missiles do we launch from drones before the last violent Islamic radical is either dead or decides that the cause is futile and puts down his arms and goes home?”

These aren’t easy issues to address. Spies Against Armageddon makes it clear that within the Israeli government there is a continuing debate over the limits of action and the ethical boundaries for intelligence agencies in a democratic state. It’s heartening to know that such debates are taking place in Jerusalem. We can only hope that they are happening in Washington as well.

*Lethal force may be employed in self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Copyright © 2012 Jefferson Flanders
All rights reserved