JADE TIGER - Book review

Craig Thomas’s espionage thriller Jade Tiger was published in 1982 and subsequently reprinted at least thirteen times; my edition is dated 2000. (I’m gradually catching up on my backlog of ‘to-be-read’ books!) He was a very popular author in the 1980s and 1990s.

His debut novel Rat Trap was successful, but it pales by comparison with this outing. By this book, Thomas has improved in style and in conveying tension and suspense and characterisation.

The story begins with a Chinese officer from the Ministry of Public Tranquillity plotting operation Jade Tiger with an unnamed American.

Then a Chinese officer, Colonel Wei, ‘walks in’ to British Intelligence in Hong Kong. British SIS veteran Kenneth Aubrey is tasked with interrogating the man, for the Colonel apparently possesses potentially destabilising information about a high-placed German politician, Zimmerman. In 1940, when he was a wet-behind-the-ears spy Aubrey knew Zimmerman. He’d captured him but it was during the BEF retreat to Dunkirk. There developed a grudging companionship as they evaded strafing Messerschmitts and bombs. The war-time flashbacks are very effective.

Apparently, during a cultural visit to China Zimmerman was drugged while visiting Wuhan and then interrogated by the Chinese, who learned of his allegiance to the KGB and the USSR. (Wuhan is not sinister in this tale, however!)

Aubrey is ageing now; he has featured in 10 or 11 books; he appeared in three or four before this one. He is accompanied by Australian Patrick Hyde as his bodyguard. In Hong Kong they meet up with the CIA representative Buckholtz who is keen to take Wei off their hands.

Aubrey is the old school. He owes his life to Zimmerman so he needs to confirm that Wei is telling the truth about Zimmerman being a mole for the Soviets. At risk is the Berlin Treaty, the reunification of Germany, the pulling down of the Berlin Wall (in 1982).

The investigation also involves a Chinese-American CIA agent, Liu, who is inserted into Shanghai to verify Wei’s revelations. These are the days before China had embraced the ubiquitous facial recognition cameras. Liu’s attempts to obtain proof and avoid detection are well told and suitably tense and realistic.

Aubrey and Hyde follow a trail to Australia where an old associate of Zimmerman still lives. Again, the details and descriptions are first rate.

Throughout, Aubrey, Hyde and Buckholtz are shadowed and even on occasion attacked by Hyde’s nemesis, the Soviet Petrunin. Hyde and Petrunin have had previous encounters; the fact that I haven’t read these did not spoil my enjoyment of the book.

Like The Day of the Jackal, we’re aware that there’s a failure at the heart of the story; for we know that the Treaty must fail since the fall of the Wall did not occur until 1989. But that doesn’t matter; we want to know what happens to the individuals concerned, which is a measure of a good writer.

Sadly, in 2011 Craig Thomas died of pneumonia, aged 68, having also suffered from leukaemia.

Deep Purple - book review

 Ted Allbeury’s 1989 espionage thriller Deep Purple has all the hallmarks of his earlier books: authentic background, knowledge of the inner workings of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

 

It all begins with Yakunin, a KGB walk-in at the British embassy in Washington. He is swiftly flown to a safe house in England where he will be questioned by Eddie Hoggart, a man who worked his way up from a deprived childhood to become a seasoned interrogator.  Hoggart is married to Jacqui, a sex worker with a past that includes a Soho hard-man, Harry Gardner. In effect, Eddie and Jacqui are two sides of the same coin, surviving the hard knocks of society. Eddie was helped up by an adoptive parent and he wants to help Jacqui. Only Gardner has other ideas…

Confusing the mix is yet another defection: KGB man Belinsky, who appears to contradict the revelations of Yakunin.  Which one is the genuine defector, and which is the plant? Or are they both not what they seem?

The big question is: do they know about a mole in the higher echelons of MI6?

Here we can understand the lonely existence of spies. Yes, orphans definitely make the best recruits.

There are some poignant and tragic moments in this story, which rings true, thanks to Allbeury’s attention to the details that matter.

The title of the book is relevant: it relates to the old tune of the same name.

Guest interview

Author Jane Risdon has very generously asked me to be her guest on her blog - all this week.

Here

Thank you, Jane! 

'particularly superb...' and 'simply chilling...'

Here’s a review of the paperback Mission: Prague, the first in the Tana Standish series:

There’s a particularly nifty twist to this espionage adventure, set behind the Iron Curtain in the mid-1970s. The smart, sexy female protagonist isn’t just a rare survivor from Warsaw’s WW2 ghetto. Nor is she merely a highly skilled covert operative, brought up by the British military establishment to be extremely effective against the KGB and its cohort agencies when she’s behind enemy lines.

Nope, Tana Standish has one more thing going for her: psychic talents.

These attributes don’t make her an invulnerable or less-than-credible superwoman. They’re neatly underplayed, a talent which isn’t understood or entirely controllable but which frequently tips the odds in her favour.

This mild shift into the land of ‘maybe’ is carefully contrasted with the grim, grey reality of life in Czechoslovakia in the Seventies, brought to heel seven years earlier by Soviet tanks, its citizens stifled by the relentless brutal mechanisms of an efficient totalitarian regime. An underground resistance cell has been compromised; a British agent fled and the Czechs are scared. Tana is assigned to put the network back together and use her special talents to ascertain if comms have been compromised, or worse.

The result is a running chase through the back streets and sewers of Prague, where the protagonists barely taste their black bread and spicy sausage between violent and amorous encounters….

The best scenes are the one-on-one confrontations, claustrophobic closed room battles of expert second-guessing. One particular superb scene is beautifully choreographed and delivered, dragging the reader into the sweat-soaked reality of being stalked by a stronger killer… a simply chilling chapter, the best in the book, where Tana must marshal all of her mental strength to resist the worst (and it is very bad) that her opponents employ against her…

Mission: Prague is a rollicking read, an intriguing mix of action-adventure, actual events and augmented espionage.

Thank you, reviewer Rowena Hoseason!

Available from Amazon as an e-book or paperback: http://authl.it/B06XFY7LLV

Writing – research – espionage, defectors

The defecting spy is a staple for many espionage novels and films.  Obviously, at the height of the Cold War, it seemed quite commonplace, and judging by the newspaper reports it appeared that the Soviets were better than the NATO countries at suborning dupes in the West.

But the Soviets didn’t get all their own way, by any means. Briefly, here are two defectors of note.

Penkovsky

GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky first approached the Americans in 1960, but they dallied too long, so he approached the British the following year.

The Penkovsky Papers are reputed to have been written by the CIA, and some disinformation has been bandied about that Penkovsky wasn’t actually shot as a traitor or committed suicide in his cell (1963); the message was that he actually lived in retirement, having fooled the West into believing that the Cuban missiles were important to Kruschev, rather than in effect protecting Castro from US invasion – part of the deal struck at the height of the 1962 crisis. Yet the perceived repercussions in Moscow and within the echelons of the GRU and the KGB suggest that Penkovsky’s information, passed on at risk of his life did indeed damage the Soviet spy machine.

 

 

[Also of interest, see http://www.paperlessarchives.com/penkovsky.html]

Lyalin

In September 1971, the mass expulsion of 105 Russian diplomats and trade officials by Britain caused a storm. While MI6 and the CIA were aware of most of the individuals’ true purpose, the defection of Oleg Adolfovitch Lyalin revealed that their espionage activities were much worse than thought. Lyalin was an officer in the KGB’s Department V, responsible for sabotage and assassination. PM Heath and Foreign Secretary Douglas Home warned Moscow that if any reprisals against Western envoys followed the expulsions, even more Soviets would be sent back to the USSR.

Lyalin had arrived in London in 1969 and enjoyed the life there as a Soviet trade delegate. He was conducting an affair with his secretary, though he was a married man with a family in Russia. He was stopped for a drink driving offence and was persuaded that any subsequent disgrace would ruin him, so he agreed to cooperate with the authorities. He revealed that teams of saboteurs had been prepared to exact maximum damage on British radar stations, communications centres and other important complexes 24 hours before any surprise attack by the Soviet Union. Lyalin’s specific target was to blow up the Fylingdales early warning system in Yorkshire; he had plans and maps to link up with Russian commandos on the coast. Other plans entailed blocking the Clyde estuary, thus trapping the nuclear submarine fleet at Holy Loch, the London Underground system to be flooded, and indeed to employ British traitors to attack air bases using weapons from arms caches. This was some of the background to the expulsion of those 105 Soviets, and shows how serious and sinister the Cold War had become.

Britain lodged a formal protest to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and advised friendly countries about the details of the expulsions. By doing this, they effectively pulled the teeth from the mouths of the Soviet planners. Foreknowledge is power, after all.

 

 

The Prague Papers will be released as an e-book on 26 November by Crooked Cat Publishing. It's set in 1975, and yes, defectors are involved in the story... The first of the chronicles about Tana Standish, psychic spy (in action 1965-1988). 

 

Secret file-03 – Major Vassily Kasayiev, KGB

Date of birth – unknown; believed to be in 1918. Unmarried. At the time of The Prague Papers, in 1975, he appeared to be in his mid- to late-fifties.

Major, KGB. Overweight. Has a predilection for hashish cigarettes, which accounted for his discoloured teeth. Small, cold dark eyes pierce subordinates. Approaching retirement.

***

Thick pillows flounced on either side of him, Kasayiev sat up in bed and jabbed at the dozen or so pickles surrounding the Russian crabmeat and mayonnaise. ‘Damned pickles with everything!’ He swore, eyes heavy with lack of sleep.

            Though he was still verging on irritability, the breakfast went down well, washed all the way with jet-black Turkish coffee. His teeth crunched the tiny cool pickles. He ate them only because the doctor said they helped break down body fats. He preferred Spanish onions, though. He belched and realised that he’d come a long way since those far-off days in Spain.

            He remembered the day well, 16th September, 1936. As a recruit of six months’ experience, he had arrived in Spain at the age of sixteen together with fifty other pilots. To fight for the Republicans.

            A lump still rose in his throat as he recalled first seeing his own I-15 Ilyushin standing on the airfield: the Spanish dubbed the I-15s Chato, snub-nose – yet he had thought it the most beautiful creation on earth – and all his!

            His fellow-pilots had difficulty curbing his youthful exuberance. He dearly wanted to slaughter the Nationalists, to blast their Fiats, Heinkels and Junkers.

            But training-classes demanded his time and attention. Recognition classes; strategy; and, laughably, he was expected to teach Spaniards to fly as well. Him, with only a hundred hours under his belt.

            Then came his first kill. His heartbeat quickened at the memory. He had been dawdling negligently when he spotted a squadron of nine Fiats above him, appearing from behind a bank of cloud. The dryness of mouth and rapid pulse-rate came back to him as if the events had only happened yesterday. He had slammed the throttle wide open and climbed to meet the enemy, the exhilaration of surprise attack quashing any fears he harboured. He didn’t have time to be afraid.

            Yanking the stick hard over, he kicked on the rudder-bar and was abruptly swinging in behind the formation as it slid past. A Fiat drifted into his sights and he fired, wide eyes peering with a mesmerised glaze through his goggles as the bullets flashed and sparkled on the enemy’s wings. Then tracer lanced past his cockpit and he knew fear; pure survival-instinct hauled back on the stick, and the craft frantically bounced higher. He glanced back. The Fiat was nosing earthwards, blazing furiously, and his heart soared. He never did recall landing.

            That kill had been his introduction to the slaughter of battle. It seemed so clinical, far removed from the hand-to-hand fighting on the ground.

            By the time the Italians attacked Madrid in March 1937 he was a hardened veteran of the skies. Together with his compatriots, he systematically cut the Italians to ribbons, strafing endlessly as the poorly led rabble became bogged down in the mud left by recent rain. It was sickening to begin with, but after the ninth or tenth run in, it became automatic, merely capricious target practice. The Barcelona highway was littered with burning transport and hundreds of corpses, creating their own bottleneck, enabling the Chatos to deliver their death-blows at will. Carnage was too mild a description of their efforts.

            Blood-lust figured in Kasayiev’s life from that moment. He reveled in inflicting pain on his women in Madrid and particularly relished the death of an enemy especially if he could see the poor pilot futilely beating off the flames as his plane plummeted.

            Much of the credit for the Italians’ rout was attributed to Commander Berzin, head of the Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff and codenamed ‘Goriev’ whilst in Spain. Berzin became Kasayiev’s hero.

            So late in 1937 he was shattered when he learned that Berzin had been recalled to Moscow under a cloud. Berzin faced charges of being a Trotskyite; the tribunal found him guilty and he was shot, as were so many high-ranking officers in Stalin’s senseless purges.

            With the memory of Berzin’s execution constantly in his mind, Kasayiev determined to keep his nose clean and actually distinguished himself. Throughout the years of 1937-38 the great purges kept most officers in thrall; many were grossly unhappy at the prospect when the Soviet hierarchy decided to recall them on realizing that the Republicans’ cause was lost.

            But Kasayiev was not among those singled-out for purging. Instead, he found himself halfway around the world at Langchow, embroiled in the Soviet-Japanese conflict, flying his I-15 amidst the twisting mêlée of a hundred aircraft. He acquitted himself in countless sporadic duels with the Mitsubishi ASMs. But he soon discovered that his beloved I-15 was quite inferior to the Japs’ Nakajima Ki27s: he was shot down but survived with only minor wounds.

            It was while recuperating that he allied himself with a sallow character in the Intelligence Section, Lieutenant-Colonel Lobanov.

            He then remembered his hero, Berzin, and guessed correctly where the real power lay. Not in a soldier’s hands, nor an airman’s, nor a sailor’s. But in the Secret Service.

            On his return to active duty he repeatedly requested a transfer to Intelligence and finally, in 1942, he was successful and joined the NKVD in time to fight the Nazi menace.

            He had committed some vile things in his time, mainly to satisfy his gross appetite for blood. But nothing he had perpetrated could match the vileness of those Nazi pigs.

            Kasayiev’s fingers trembled at the memory of the concentration camps he had personally seen. And he lit a hashish cigarette to calm himself.

            As the hemp coursed through him and did its work, he cursed his susceptibility.

            Every time he reminisced on his career, he came round to his numerous encounters with the Gestapo. He should know better by now.

            Whenever he came across an ex-SS man – usually working in another Security Department, such as the First Chief Directorate or Department V – he couldn’t refrain from revealing his naked hatred.

 

***

On November 26, The Prague Papers are released, published by Crooked Cat. It is based on a manuscript handed to me by an MI6 agent, Alan Swann. It needed some knocking into shape, as it had been a collaborative effort by a select group of agents, all intent on telling the story of Tana Standish, psychic spy, whose career spanned 1965 to 1988. They asked that her story be told as fiction.

 

As a result, the novel The Prague Papers is the first adventure to feature Tana Standish and is mainly set in Czechoslovakia in 1975.

Certain information was divulged in order for me to write the book; yet some has been concealed to date. This is the third secret file to be released ahead of the book. Others will follow.