Pay Any Price

by Ted Allbeury

The Kennedy killings meant trouble - trouble for the Mafia, trouble for the Cubans, and trouble for the CIA.

When Grabowski hides the CIA's hypnosis experts away in a remote Northumbrian safe house, there is only one catch: the British.

SIS have a problem just across the Irish Sea that needs to be dealt with, and they are determined to use their American guest's 'expertise' developed during Project MKULtra for their own purposes.

Genres: Espionage, Thriller, Fiction

267 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

1917 - 2005. Also wrote under the pseudonyms Richard Butler and Patrick Kelly.

Ted Allbeury was a lieutenant-colonel in the Intelligence Corps during World War II, and later a successful executive in the fields of marketing, advertising and radio. He began his writing career in the early 1970s and became well known for his espionage novels, but also published one highly-praised general novel, THE CHOICE, and a short story collection, OTHER KINDS OF TREASON. His novels have been published in twenty-three languages, including Russian. He died on 4th December 2005.


See also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/j...
and
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/a/t...

Reviews

[Colin]

It wasn’t until over half way through that I found myself drawn into the action. I did not enjoy the first half, it seemed disjointed as if it was too hastily written without proper planning. I usually enjoy Ted Allbeury’s tupenny bloods, but this was a penny dreadful! Just about three stars because I enjoyed the last part.

[Nigel Pinkus]

Short, sharp and swift! There was never a dull moment with this Allbeury thriller and he left this reader plenty to ponder after the final page. An under-rated author who wrote some pretty amazing novels that would rivalled the best the in the business ~ le Carre, Graham Greene, Seymour and Deighton. Yes, they're pretty good writers, but he fell short of their mark because not all his work was of the highest level. Indeed, his best work was very good, but he also had some pretty awful stuff as well. On this occasion, he pulled off a thriller that was about secret experiments involving hypnotising rather innocent people that could be traced all the way back to the days of John F. Kennedy.

At the start of the story, we found ourselves back in 1963 where the President was assassinated and questionable alliances seemed to have been formed between the CIA and some of the mafia to 'clean up' messes that the public didn't need to see. (There were also some questionable differences of 'opinion' between then the President and the CIA over the Bay of Pigs fiasco where it was argued that President Kennedy did not adequately provide enough air support and to the ground troops in Cuba who were quickly over-run and surrendered after three days. The CIA were privately furious with Kennedy because they thought he had 'hung them out to dry'. So, one argument was that they wanted the arrogant, stubborn Kennedy out of the way (assassinated)). This later argument was not addressed by Allbeury, but the CIA mobster hit squad certainly gets a good mention.

As usual, you'll find a cast of characters in this thriller that made this reader write them down. We find ourselves, back in 1963, with Jimmy Hoffa, Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK and Jack Ruby. Allbeury, then adds some of his own such as Grabowski (CIA), the CIA psychiatrist Symons and well as some mob hitmen. We soon find that the president gets assassinated, but Allbeury argued that it was through the CIA and its' links with mafia that bought down the President, but no one knows that for sure because both Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald were both gunned down, after the event, before the police got to formally interview them properly. What was also important during that time was that Grabowski and Symons would reappear in the story at a later stage (much later). Other characters of interest would include: Boyd, Cartwright, Maclaren and Sturgiss (SIS) (NOT MacClean and Burgess!), Debbie Shaw, Randall, George Walker and the (CIA) psychiatrist Petersen. It is amongst the backdrop of confusion, mob links, dirty CIA dealings and controversial CIA experiments that the reader finds himself or herself drawn into a web of deceit. Indeed, Boyd (SIS) stumbles onto the CIA's dealings and lets Cartwright (his senior) know what he has found. The consequences as you would expect are diabolical! Yes, a very good read.

Ted Allbeury wrote a staggering 42 novels and wrote under two other pen names ~ Richard Butler and Patrick Kelly as well. Here are 28 read’s from Allbeury, all rated accordingly:
THE GOOD (Four to Five Stars): ‘The Lantern Network’, ’Shadow of a Doubt’, ’A Wilderness of Mirrors', 'A Time Without Shadows' aka 'The Rules of the Game', 'The Only Good German' aka ‘Mission Berlin’, 'The Dangerous Edge', ‘Palomino Blonde’ aka 'Omega- minus', 'The Lonely Margins', ’The Crossing' aka ‘The Berlin Exchange’, 'Seeds of Treason', 'Other Kinds of Treason', 'Special Forces' aka 'Moscow Quadrille', the feel good, 'The Girl From Addis', 'Pay Any Price' and the rather exceptional, and this person's favourite, 'The Line-Crosser' (published in 1993).

THE AVERAGE (Two or Three Stars): 'Show Me a Hero', 'No Place to Hide' aka ‘Hostage’, ‘The Reckoning’, ’The Twentieth Day of January’ a.k.a. ‘Cold Tactics’, 'The Reaper' aka 'The Stalking Angel' and ‘Deep Purple’. He also wrote, ’The Choice' which is not espionage and this reader thought (even though it was critically acclaimed) not a good one.

THE UGLY (One or two stars): It’s, however, probably best to stay away from: ‘Aid and Comfort’, ‘The Assets' aka “Due Process’, 'The Secret Whispers’, 'The Alpha List', ’Consequences of Fear' aka ‘Smokescreen’ and ’The Spirit of Liberty'.

[Jak60]

I came to discover Ted Allbeury quite late and I am trying to catch up...I've read so far a dozen of books of this extremely prolific author and I found in his body of work a few outstanding pieces, some honest and solid ones and also some really bad stuff.
Pay Any Price is so far my worst experience with Allbeury: DNF at 60%...bad sign when you drop the ball at such an advanced stage, it really means you lost any appetite to go the last mile even to see just how it ends.
The story has many problems in my view, the main ones being plausibility and fragmentation. The story is centred around the idea of hypnosis (first level hypnosis as well as second and third level, like in Inception) for espionage purposes; and all this is used to construct another conspiracy theory on the JFK assassination, of which the world could have easily done without.
Now, the hypnosis thing is rooted in reality, program MKUltra has been an actual CIA program for years, but using real facts is not sufficient to make a story plausible. Such facts must be credibly integrated into the main flow of the plot and used in a realistic fashion, and this in my view is not happening, or not happening enough, in Pay Any Price, hence my problem of plausibility.
Moreover, the plot is totally disjointed, especially in the first half, with a big number of rather disorganised narrative fragments, including even some gross chronological mistakes. The most striking is a dialogue in which Jimmy Hoffa, a couple of hours before being killed, is speaking - of course rudely - of J F Kennedy's assassination as an event occurred a few days before; except that Hoffa was killed 12 years after JFK's assassination...A detail, in the context of the whole story, but for me these are symptoms of carelessness which just put me off.
This won't prevent me from completing the exploration of this underrated author, as his work is anyway overall worth the effort.

PS In the end I felt bad and went back to finished the book.The end is very bitter, as in most of Allbeury’s stories, and in a way more tight and sober than what preceded it, but it was not enough for me to save the book. It’s just like a nice little tail attached to an ugly pet.

[Tom Lloyd]

Typical Allbeury - a fun, informed spy story - not too short this time which is good and like Le Carre very keen on brief, effective character descriptions that add to the interesting story. Ended a little flat for me, just lacking a certain something because it seemed all-too-plausible an outcome, one that might be more likely in real life but doesn't necessarily make as good a book. The main problem is, as usual on books he's not phoned in, the characters - the cold, efficient male spies and the women who are playthings for them. There's minimal variation and clearly Allbeury was something of a bastard personally, but as a spy novel of it's time from a man who knew what he was talking about, it delivers the goods.

[Michael Martz]

Ted Allbeury, who passed away over 20 years ago, certainly penned some prescient and politically charged novels. My experience with his work isn't deep, but Twentieth of January was quite a tale of Russian interference in US elections and Pay Any Price covers a topic that just won't ever go away: the conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassinations.

The short plot summary is that a group of American businessmen, gangsters, and politicians decided that they really didn't like JFK or his bulldog brother, Robert. A renegade CIA group had identified hypnosis as a tool for turning 'normal' people into killers, so their solution to dealing with the Kennedy problem for the collection of Kennedy haters was to turn Lee Harvey Oswald into a hypnotized killer and to train additional folks to take care of various other enemies. Once the Brits recognized the capabilities of the hypnosis program, they began to use the 2 CIA practitioners who controlled the human weapons to get rid of a few nasty IRA types. However, one of the English members of the Brit's equivalent of the CIA renegade team actually has a few morals and begins to put 2 and 2 together to identify the bad things the program has been involved in. He gets in deeply enough to put the program, as well as the future of the CIA, British intelligence, and his own life, at risk.

Solid writing, decent characters, and a story that we know is PROBABLY fiction.... the conclusion wasn't unexpected but I still didn't like it. A solid 4 for me.

[David C Ward]

Allebury is having a bit of a revival since he’s a pretty good writer and one of his books has a Trump like businessman elevated to the presidency thanks to soviet interference. This one is a brisk, competent thriller whose premise is borrowed from the Manchurian Candidate (book and film): that the CIA used hypnotism to create assassins, including those who killed the Kennedys. The action is split between the USA (with a fast paced summary of the events leading up to Dallas) and Britain as the English discover the program and come to an accommodation to use it for their own purposes. The story bogs down a bit as the unwitting English assassins unravel mentally and their cases come to the attention of a decent, but naive and sentimental, MI6 officer. Well plotted but without much in the way of style; conversations are especially stilted. And I don’t believe any CIA officers would have fried oysters for breakfast at the old Sherrill’s on Capitol Hill.

[Shadow]

Ted Allbeury was a prolific British spy novelist who, before becoming a writer, actually lived the life of a Shadow Operative as a secret agent behind enemy lines in World War II. I’d never read his work before, but when I saw the description of his 1983 novel Pay Any Price I was immediately intrigued. It deals with a fascinating front of the Shadow War that is arguably the most important of all: the war for the mind.

The novel’s premise is that Lee Harvey Oswald and other notorious assassins were actually under the hypnotic control of rogue psychiatrists working for the CIA. That might sound outlandish, but when one studies some of the historical assassins and mass shooters up to the present day, many of them do seem rather disconnected from their acts, as if they were committed by alter egos not under their control. Having read a few things about the history of CIA mind control (The Search for the Manchurian Candidate is a classic) and MKUltra, I find the premise of this novel chillingly plausible.

The book begins in the early 1960s, as we meet the psychiatrists, intelligence officers, criminals and dupes who will carry out the Kennedy assassination. Mafia leaders, incensed by the Kennedy brother’s aggressive prosecution of their activities, and CIA men, equally incensed by JFK’s failure to back the overthrow of Castro, conspire to have the president whacked. They find the perfect patsy in Lee Harvey Oswald, an early subject of a secret CIA mind control program. Two psychiatrists have discovered how to hypnotically create multiple personalities in their subjects and program them to obey commands when code phrases are spoken (readers of classic thriller fiction will be reminded of Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate and Walter Wager’s Telefon). Meanwhile, a sexy British nightclub singer named Debbie Rawlins is recruited and programmed–her gig as a travelling entertainer for military personnel providing a convenient cover for her programmed personality’s more lethal vocation.

The narrative jumps ahead several years as the two psychiatrists, wanting to get away from the heat of Congressional investigations, media attention and public suspicion that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, relocate to a house in the northern English countryside to lay low and continue their research. But when two suspicious British MI6 agents break into the house of their CIA handler they discover incriminating papers connecting the doctors to the assassination program. Being shady operators, the SIS men take full advantage of the situation by blackmailing the American psychiatrists into employing their hypnotic assassins to take out some troublesome IRA leaders in nearby Northern Ireland. So a corporal named Walker is recruited and programmed for the hits, and Debbie Rawlins is reactivated.

The story finally gets a clear protagonist when an MI6 agent named James Boyd is asked to investigate a psychiatrist’s report of a patient who is having dreams about political murders that he should have no way of knowing about. It seems that the patient (Walker) is experiencing mental breakdowns, as memories of the hits performed under their alter egos begin to leak into their daily lives via disturbing dreams. Boyd’s sleuthing uncovers some disturbing facts about bother Walker and Rawlins, the psychiatrists who programmed them, their connections to the MKUltra assassination program and the IRA hits. What are CIA assassin programmers doing in the UK, and why are they offing people for MI6?

Boyd is faced with a moral dilemma: does he go along with his superiors’ desire to bury the scandal in the interest of transatlantic spook relations, or does he seek justice for the pawns of the hypno-assassin program whose lives they ruined? The story has the sort of cynical ending that you find in a lot of British spy fiction, which you’ll never get in more popular spy fiction novels but no doubt has more resemblance to the realities of shadow warfare. Anyone imagining that shadow warfare is some kind of morality play, where there are good guys and bad guys and the former always win, is surely living in a fantasy world!

While the set up of this novel is excellent, the execution was a bit off. The narrative is very disjointed in the first half; it jumps from location to location, introducing characters and plot threads that didn’t seem connected. It’s hard to maintain any narrative tension when you’re not sure who the protagonist is and you’re bouncing around every page or two, though this gets better in the second half as Boyd’s investigation becomes the focus. My other complaint is that the story lacks action and intensity; it’s a bit too political and cerebral, more John le Carré than Jack Higgins, which is not how I prefer my spy thrillers. There were a few short, intense scenes of violence and a bit of shadow operating, but not enough for my liking.

I don’t know if this is typical of Allbeury, but for now I’ll put him in the category of interesting authors who are worth reading further when I’m in the mood for less pulpy espionage fiction.

Get a copy of Pay Any Price here.

[Anders]

In my opinion a well told credible story about the jfk assassination, though that isn't the primary object. Hypnosis, CIA, mafia, cynicism and innocence. I enjoyed it a lot.