Wesley Britton's Blog - Posts Tagged "british-intelligence"

The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life
John le Carré (Author, Narrator)
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Audible.com Release Date: September 8, 2016
ASIN: B016E8U2FO
https://www.amazon.com/Pigeon-Tunnel-...

I can’t think of any spy novelist who’s spent more time under critical microscopes than John Le Carre. To date, the best full-length excavation of his life an works has been Adam Sisman’s 2015 John Le Carre: The Biography which relied much on interviews with the writer and some insiders in the Le Carre circle.

For readers who want a straight-forward, linear biography of Le Carre, Sisman still remains the source to go to first. As implied by the subtitle of The Pigeon Tunnel, “Stories from My Life” is a pretty apt description of what readers will find from Le Carre himself. The book isn’t an autobiography in the traditional sense of following a subject’s life from childhood to sagehood told from a writer looking back over his years both in the public eye and in his personal life. Considering the amount of material available on the often elusive and confusing story of David Cornwell a.k.a. John Le Carre, readers should never expect a full, all secrets revealed account anyway.

Instead, Le Carre offers a literary slide show of events and people who he has known that have left an impression on him throughout his career. In a sense, we get a series of character sketches of actual personalities who don’t appear in the book in any chronological order. For example, Le Carre doesn’t delve into the importance of his unusual parents until very late in the book. We meet spies in the British intelligence services, German diplomats, Russian would-be defectors and gangsters, innocent Arab terrorist suspects, and powerful figures like Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdock. But this isn’t a book full of name dropping. Some figures get fleeting descriptions, as in “Muttsky and Jeffsky,” Le Carre’s humorous monikers for two Russian minders during one of his two visits to Moscow. Others get much more discussion, as in Yasser Arafat and Le Carre’s three brief encounters with the Palestine leader.

Along the way, we do get insights into the models Le Carre fictionalized in his work. As his own spy work was so low-level, essentially being an informant on potential Communists in British academia, the more action-oriented scenes are seen when Le Carre travels the world looking for depth and details for his novels. After he blunders with a scene in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy when he wasn’t aware of a tunnel in Hong Kong linking an island to the mainland, Le Carre didn’t want to get caught flat-footed again. So he endures battle conditions in Cambodia and Vietnam and we witness him being secretly smuggled from car to car in Beirut to meet Arafat. We get many observations on espionage, with often pithy notes like “Spies spy because they can.” Humorous moments occur when world leaders, like the president of Italy, think he has some special knowledge that might help them in ongoing operations.

I’ll admit, reading the audio version as narrated by the author has to be the way to go for Le Carre fans. This is a book that’s as readable as any Le Carre thriller because it’s colorful, insightful, revealing, descriptive, and full of a lifetime of accumulated understanding of human nature. While those who know something about the life and context of Le Carre’s output will gain most from a reading of this slideshow, I think It can be enjoyed even by those without any awareness of the backstories of the Le Carre canon.


This review first appeared at BookPleasures.com on Feb. 8, 2017
goo.gl/XU0o5s

Merlin at War (A DCI Frank Merlin Novel)
Mark Ellis
Paperback: 496 pages
Publisher: London Wall Publishing (October 12, 2017)
ISBN-10:0995566712
ISBN-13:978-0995566712
https://www.amazon.com/Merlin-War-DCI...

Reviewed by Dr. Wesley britton

Merlin at War is the third novel to feature Anglo-Spanish DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) Frank Merlin of Scotland Yard. As with the previous two books (Princes Gate, Stalin’s Gold), Mark Ellis’s new whodoneit is set in England during World War II. To date, the series has been successful overseas, especially in England and Australia; Merlin at War is Ellis’s first attempt to crack into the American market.

But mystery fans, don’t expect Merlin at War to be a detective procedural with Merlin following a series of clues to uncover a murderer. The novel is more layered and complex than any one plotline. In fact, there are long sections where Merlin isn’t onstage at all and a number of events seem unrelated to the death of a botched abortion victim Merlin is investigating. World War II is more than an atmospheric backdrop. In fact, the book opens with a deadly mission by British soldiers in Crete during 1941. One survivor of a six man unit gunned down by Nazi planes is asked by his superior officer to deliver a letter for him, but the officer dies before he can do more than scrawl a single “S” on the envelope. That’s the book’s first mystery—who is the letter’s intended recipient and what is in it? Does it have anything to do with the dead man’s very remunerative business holdings? Does it reverse previous wills giving his son command of the business?

During the many pages of this unfolding storyline, and the three cases Merlin undertakes, we also meet many French characters on both sides of the battle lines, including spies and traitors. They represent those supporting a Free France and those willing to appease the Vichy government. These figures include the historical Charles de Gaulle and a French emigre shot in a seedy Notting Hill flat. Along the way, the deep cast of main characters are shown in Ireland, Buenos Aires, New York, occupied France, and especially London while the city was being bombed during the blitz.

Ellis is extremely good at providing the details and descriptions that give credible verisimilitude to his various overlapping stories. This is most evident in all the conversations that include reactions to the progress, or lack thereof, of the war, the political dynamics between the likes of de Gaulle and Churchill, the domestic relationships of a number of the protagonists, and the interviews Merlin’s team conducts as they investigate a number of seemingly unrelated murders in London. We are also taken to many night spots, hotels, offices, and restaurants, again mostly in London.

Without question, Merlin at War should please fans of espionage thrillers, mysteries, period dramas, and especially buffs of historical fiction set during the Second World War. Through it all, I often thought this novel would make for an excellent PBS mini-series. True, we already got the WW II set Foyle’s War which was primarily set on England’s south coast. Merlin at War has a wider canvas and is centered in the more cosmopolitan London.

Dear publisher: when you work on releasing Princes Gate and Stalin’s Gold in the U.S., please keep me in mind. I’d love to read and review the first adventures of Frank Merlin and his compatriots. Oh, and book four as well, whenever it comes out.


This review first appeared at BookPleasures.com on Aug. 3, 2017
http://dpli.ir/NM2L02

Pigs
John Henry Bennet
Paperback: 392 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (August 5, 2012)
ISBN-10: 1478360429
ISBN-13: 978-1478360421
https://www.amazon.com/Pigs-John-Henr...

Reviewed by Dr. Wesley Britton

I’m perhaps coining a somewhat inaccurate term, but while reading Pigs I felt like I was experiencing my first espionage procedural. That’s because, page after unfolding page, I really felt like I was witnessing a layered series of events in a very realistic “you are there” documentary style.

It all begins with the actual Buncefield Oil Terminal disaster of Sunday, December 11, 2005. It was the largest explosion on mainland Britain since WWII. In reality, it took years for any causes to be identified—it was finally determined that likely a failure with a switch or alarm attached to one tank resulted in an oil overflow that night.

But in Benet’s imagination, while investigators weren’t initially sure if the disaster was an accident or a terrorist act, readers are quickly notified it was a bomb planted by an Islamic agent in a “pig,” a device used to clean oil pipes. In the story, investigators were hampered by having no one taking credit for the strike. That was and is unusual behavior for Jihadists who usually want very public recognition for their blows against the West.

In the aftermath of the explosion, we are taken to the offices of important government ministers, the offices of intelligence officers who are British, French, and Israeli, observe camera clicking surveillance teams, and go into meetings of a multi-national terrorist cell. We meet a wide cast of well-drawn characters and follow them around, step by step, day by day, as they methodically determine just who was responsible for the explosion. And, as the story progresses, we watch the terrorists hatch their next scheme to blow up an oil platform in Qatar, a country they consider too cozy with the West. That’s just the next item on their vicious wish list before a serious attempt to plant a dirty bomb in London.

With his background, it shouldn’t be surprising that Bennet was able to fill his yarn with so much international verisimilitude. While serving in the British army, he spent time in the Middle East before he had a commercial career in the UK, France, the Middle East and Gulf. His travels included London, Paris, Doha Qatar, Dubai UAE, Jeddah Saudi Arabia, Eastern Europe, Hungary, Russia, Asia, North America, and Africa. His publicity doesn’t indicate any background in intelligence, so we don’t know if experience or research lead to all those operational details and personal interactions he provides.

Before the increasingly exciting final 100 pages or so, there is little glamour in the investigations, very minimal violence, little high drama or pyrotechnics, many interagency turf wars, and the obligatory politicos working to make sure no blame falls on them. In addition, we see much simple low-tech legwork in various settings before it all comes together in a London showdown where another pig is employed in the heart of the city’s sewer system.

So Bennet’s Mi-6 operative Harry Baxter, head of a three person team looking into the possibility of terrorism in the Buncefield disaster, is a very believable globe trotter in the trilogy that began with Pigs and continued in Porkies (2015) and Lies, Damn Lies (May 2017). You can be sure—this reviewer plans to read the other two volumes this year. For those who like their spy adventures down-to-earth, topical, and down-and-dirty without the exaggerated elements of the likes of Fleming, Ludlum, or Higgins, give Pigs a try. It’s an engrossing ride even without the over-the-top aspects of other thriller writers.


This review first appeared at BookPleasures.com on Sept. 16, 2017 at:
http://dpli.ir/4zCg4C

Porkies
John Henry Bennett
Print Length: 343 pages
Publication Date: November 1, 2015
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
ASIN: B017H31IVW
https://www.amazon.com/Porkies-John-H...

Reviewed by Dr. Wesley Britton

Porkies is John Henry Bennett’s 2015 sequel to his 2012 Pigs, and this is one of those cases where you really need to read the first volume before diving into book two of the trilogy.

In part, that’s because Porkies begins at the moment when Pigs ended, with the clicking countdown of a dirty bomb timer working its way through a London sewer. After the bomb is defused, Bennett spends considerable time with three alternating storylines focused on his three principal characters. First are the circumstances involving his primary protagonist, Harry Baxter, a middle rank operative for the British intelligence service. In order to keep him away from possible political embarrassment for events that occurred in Pigs, Baxter is assigned to an apparently tedious mole hunt in Islamabad, Pakistan. Likewise, his on again, off again girlfriend Mossad agent Anna Harrison (a.k.a. Anne Hardy) is taken off the frontlines by her superiors for her not following procedures before she’s reassigned to Beirut, Lebanon just before a major terrorist operation is launched there. Along the way, we watch Alain Dubois, operative for France’s DGSE intelligence agency serving in Lebanon, hook up with Anna before the pair of them meet up with Baxter some 200 pages or so into the narrative. In short, it takes Bennett around 200 pages to set up his chessboard, demonstrating battling worldwide Jihad can only be done while operatives simultaneously walk on diplomatic high wires and not ruffle any political sensitivities.

The main trio spend some recuperative time together in Beirut and Damascus after Alain and Anna are wounded in an aborted Hezbollah kidnapping scheme before Harry, against orders, rescues them. Then, Alain and Anna are off to Paris and Harry returns to Islamabad. Throw in the CIA, some pesky Russians, and some relentless Jihadists and we get the brewings of a plot to place bombs in Paris and London for simultaneous devastation.

I’ve read reviews where fellow readers wonder if Bennett is in the tradition of either Fleming or Le Carre. Neither, it seems to me. There’s none of the Flemingesque escapism or fantasy and none of the atmospherics of Le Carre. There’s none of the pumped-up thrill rides of authors like Jack Higgins, Clive Cussler or Eric Van Lustbader. Rather, I think of spy writers like W. Somerset Maugham, especially his 1928 Ashenden: or The British Agent, and some of his literary contemporaries like Graham Greene or Eric Ambler. By this I mean Bennett is following in the footsteps of getting into the bureaucratic weeds of administrative processes and procedures and the day-by-day functions of espionage officers that are often neither dramatic nor exciting. As with Pigs, all the pyrotechnics and violence occur in the final 100 pages of Porkies.

In the end, Bennett’s trilogy, presuming the 2017 Lies, Damn Lies follows the same formula as Pigs and Porkies, is for readers who like their spy stories believable, realistic, down-to-earth, and appearing to be based on actual spycraft of our times. Events are more likely to take place in government offices more so than in enemy bases or fantastic headquarters, the technology is far more low-key than in many other thrillers, and much of the action is simply moving the players from square to square. As I said in my review of Pigs, I feel reading these books is like reading espionage procedurals where we see how everything is done and why.

This review was first posted at BookPleasures.com on Oct. 13, 2017:
http://dpli.ir/Tni6vN