An Afghan resistance fighter of the 1980s, once on the CIA payroll, has come back to haunt the agency. Kareem has become an enemy, a killer working closely with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, involved in drug trafficking and other crimes. He has arranged the murder of an American CIA agent in Pakistan, which may mean that an intricate, long-planned CIA operation to capture Osama bin Laden has been compromised.
CIA officer, Paul Patterson, who had run Kareem as an agent during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, sets out to track him down. Patterson navigates a shadow land of intrigue in England, Africa, the Middle East, and the U.S., where truth and lies seem to merge.
Meanwhile, Muhammad Atta and the other September 11 conspirators prepare their attack on the World Trade Center. Seeking Kareem, Patterson comes closer and closer to Atta. The climax is a stunning reversal of everything that Patterson's quest has led him to expect.
Peopled with dedicated operatives trying to protect Americans from Islamic terrorism, rival Washington bureaucrats jockeying for information and position, old CIA hands who operate by their own sets of rules, African rebels, diplomats, and assassins, this gripping and fast-paced novel, written by the author praised by The New Yorker for capturing "the le Carré manner," inspired in part by The 9/11 Report, captures the world of the CIA and the terrorists with the intensity John le Carré brought to the Cold War.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Your new novel, The Contractor, is about nuclear terrorism. That's a pretty heavy theme. Are you trying to scare people?
Sure. Scary stories are a great way to hook readers. But the problem - nuclear terrorism - is real and it's been worrying me for quite a while. It's easier to make an atomic weapon than people realize. I don't mean a dirty bomb, I mean a real, Hiroshima-style A-bomb that could take out half a city. As I have a character say, "I could probably do it in my garage." He's right. The main problem is getting your hands on enough highly enriched uranium, but if you could do that, building a functioning A-bomb wouldn't be all that hard. Basically all you'd need would be a really strong tube and some dynamite. What you produced might not be a great A-bomb, but it would be an A-bomb. Writing The Contractor gave me a chance to explore plausible ways terrorists might actually acquire the HEU. Also, it gave me a chance to do another spy novel. I like the genre.
How come?
The spy is forever trying to find things out, trying to learn the secrets of inscrutable people and their governments. As a writer, I'm interested among other things in the problems different cultures have in communicating, in understanding each other. We send signals we think the other side can read and they can't. And they send signals to us that make no sense. A spy story can be a metaphor for how we try to solve the mystery, the enigma that other peoples and other cultures present to us. Also, I wanted to evoke some of the far-away places I had known - Pakistan, Turkey, the Persian Gulf.
You know the Middle East well?
Long back, when I was all of twenty-three, I went to Iran on something of a whim, as an English teacher. I found the place fascinating and the experience turned out to be life-transforming. I spent a good deal of my young adulthood in the region, mostly in Iran, but also in Saudi Arabia - seven years when you add it all up. You might call that a misspent youth and I'm not sure I'd argue with you, but I traveled and worked all over the place and it was a fantastic experience. Five of those seven years I lived in Tehran, a city I came to think of as home. And I learned a lot, which you do when you live among people not like yourself.
Like what?
The main thing is that most people in this world just don't think or live the way you do. And they're perfectly happy that way and wonder why the hell you're so strange. Also, I lived in Iran in the most intimate way possible - my first marriage was to an Iranian woman. None of my in-laws spoke English. Once you've made that level of human contact, you can't think in stereotypes anymore. Those are real people in the headlines and the television news who are getting maimed and killed, not abstractions.
Wasn't the Middle East a dangerous place?
It sure is now. But when I first went to the region as a young guy in the '60s - heading for weird places was a very '60s thing to do - there was nowhere near the bitterness and hatred and conflict that we see now.
At least not in the open.
Well, right - maybe it was there under the surface waiting to break out. But, still, it was basically fun to be there back then and to travel around. And easy. Example: if you wanted to, you could hop on a bus somewhere in Germany, say Munich, and go all the way through Turkey down to Beirut, then over to Damascus in Syria, to Baghdad, to Tehran, to Kabul in Afghanistan, then down through Pakistan to India and across India to Calcutta.
Sounds like a long trip.
Yeah, you'd have to like buses a lot to do that, but the point is, traveling by land from one end of the the region to the other was perfectly feasible back then - no on-going wars, no big hang-ups at the borders. Nobody would bother you. More or less a safe deal. And there you were, you with your backpack and your American passport, seeing the sights and having a hell of a good time. No way you could do that now. Now the whole region is consumed with violence. Very depressing if you knew the old days.
You learned languages?
I learned Persian pretty well, which I came back and taught at Columbia and Georgetown. I learned some Arabic and Turkish too.
Rick Behringer, the main character in The Contractor, is so different from the usual spy novel hero.
Rick started life as a jazz pianist, but he failed at that, so he went into the army, where they put him in communications intelligence - COMINT in the jargon. After the service he went to engineering school and became a computer and telephone security whiz - I mean he's really good at his job - which is why the government now makes use of his talents.
As an outside contractor.
Right. Rick represents a new phenomenon in the spy world - a private sector guy who does actual espionage for the U.S. government. We didn't use to have such people. Now we do, and their numbers are huge. The public doesn't realize this, or realize what the implications are.
You sound dubious.
I am. It's a terrible system. It's expensive, it allows our spook agencies to get around legitimate oversight, and the chances for screw-ups are just boundless. Rick knows all this.
And yet he's happy to participate in the system.
Perfectly. He loves the life, the adrenalin rush it gives him sometimes. Plus the money.
Critics have praised your "tone-perfect dialogue." How do you achieve that?
I listen carefully to people as they speak - language is like music, there's a certain rhythm and tonal quality to it, and everybody's got this different way of talking. When I'm imagining a character, how that character speaks is every bit as important as what he does or what she does, and I try to get that down on paper. And I work in the realist tradition. Realism - verisimilitude - makes the literary experience tremendously powerful.
Critics have also praised your knowledge of the inner workings of U.S. intelligence. How did you learn what you know? Were you ever a spy?
No, no, no. The way for outsiders to learn about spies is to go find some and talk to them, which I did. The Washington area, where I live, is full of spooks and ex-spooks. They have these retirees' groups who get together for lunches and talk about the old days, and after lunch, over the fruit compote, they listen to government officials who they invite in to lecture on upcoming national security threats and that kind of thing. All very edifying. You can go and hang with the spooks and hear what they have to say. Plus, there's an enormous literature on the subject, which if you look at it carefully can be a big help.
What are you working on now?
Another international intrigue novel, partly historical, partly contemporary. It's inspired by a mysterious manuscript - a real one, it's in the Beinecke Library at Yale - written in a strange script no one can read and filled with weird illustrations of imaginary plants and pictures of little naked ladies frolicking in tubs. Plus zodiacal diagrams. Nobody knows when the thing was produced or who produced it or why, though it probably dates from the late renaissance. Even how it came to light in 1912 is mysterious. The guy who supposedly bought it from an Italian monastery, Wilfrid Voynich, was a scoundrel and a mammoth liar and nothing he said about how he acquired it should be believed. His wife Ethel, who was English, was active in Russian revolutionary circles in London and carried revolutionary literature between Russia and England. She was also said to have had an affair with Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies, who was another scoundrel and probably a murderer. Lot of material here.
In Colin MacKinnon, we have a bright new star of the spy novel. Set in the period leading up to 9/11, Morning Spy, Evening Spy tells the story of a CIA operative investigating the death of a part-time CIA contractor in Afganistan. Is the contractor involved in drugs as well as intelligence? Is his death arranged by a former CIA agent, a native Afgan recruited during the Russian occupation of Afganistan? And what is the role of Al Queda, which the CIA is trying to penetrate?
MacKinnon skillfully weaves his account of the search for the killer with a description of the mounting evidence that "something large" is being planned by Al Queda. He has the gift of knowing the territory. His accounts of the machinations and infighting in the intelligence community ring true. His description of the meetings and mannerisms within the CIA brings to mind Len Deighton, at his best, describing the workings of British intelligence.
Coupled with the espionage plot is a love story between the protagonist and his Washington Post reporter girlfriend. Adicts of "action" novels may find the romantic interest interrupting the flow of the plot, but it's a reminder that spies also lead human lives.
We know, of course, what happens on 9/11, and this shadow overhangs the story. Morning Spy, Evening Spy will provide the reader insight into the fight against terrorism and a good espionage yarn as well. Mr. MacKinnon is a welcome entry into a field somewhat depleted with the demise of the Cold War and the unfortunate decline in powers of old favorites like LeCarre, Deighton and Forsyth. Charles McCarry (be sure and read "Old Boys") is MacKinnon's only true rival.
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Colin MacKinnon's "Morning Spy, Evening Spy" is a chilling look at the clandestine world of American intelligence before 9/11, written by a Middle East expert who lived and worked in Iran for years. The first person narrator is CIA Officer Paul Patterson, who tells his story both in the present tense and in flashback. The book opens with the shooting of an American named Ed Powers in a frontier province in Pakistan. Was Ed killed by al-Qaeda because of his government connections or because of his shady business dealings involving drugs and armaments? Another possible scenario is that Powers may have been the victim of a random act of terror. No one knows for sure, but American officials are anxious to find out who murdered Powers and why. An Afghan named Kareem may have some answers but he has suddenly vanished.
Patterson is a former Marine and a twenty-five year veteran of the CIA, who has lived in a number of overseas capitals during his long career. Patterson's obsession with his work has come at a price; Nan, his wife of twenty-four years, has filed for divorce. Paul is in a new relationship with Karen, a Washington-based journalist, who seems to be a bit more tolerant of his work-related responsibilities.
Paul's current title is special assistant for counterterrorism, and his colleague, Bill Cleppinger, heads the Antiterrorism Action Committee. Because the CIA has been under fire of late, Clep and Paul have been summoned by Jim McClennan, chief of staff of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, to answer some tough questions. Although the two pretend to be forthcoming, they carefully censor the truth and deliberately withhold key facts from the committee.
The plot of "Morning Spy, Evening Spy" is incredibly complex, and the book's large cast is, at times, a bit unwieldy. However, the strength of the story lies in the MacKinnon's insightful exploration of several key themes: Why did America's intelligence community fail to thwart the 9/11 hijackers? Does the CIA's penchant for secrecy go so far that its policies actually harm the people whom they are sworn to protect? How does a CIA officer, who is forced to lie frequently and keep secrets from his colleagues and family, survive emotionally?
There is a telling passage in which Paul chats with his friend, a Pakistani journalist named Amjad Afridi. Afridi tells Paul what is wrong with the CIA: "I sometimes think that you cannot see the living, breathing reality in front of your faces or the dangers that lurk just off to the side..." Afridi believes that the American intelligence community is in a state of denial. Furthermore, Afridi insists, the failure of America's leaders to come to terms with the truth about Islam, terrorism, and their own mistakes and shortcomings will hurt them badly someday. These words prove to be eerily prescient. Colin Mackinnon's "Morning Spy, Evening Spy" is a powerful and stunning indictment of a bureaucracy that has outlived its usefulness and has not kept pace with a geopolitical climate that is irrevocably different from the one that prevailed during the cold war years.
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This is not an "action" book. Many fine books in this genre are not action books. The greatest plus for the book lies with the author's use of short inserts describing the activities of the 9/11 hijackers in the months before the attack. The overall plot of the book has little to do with the actual attack but is, instead a rather plodding look at day-to-day CIA activities involving islamic terrorism. This is a great way to highlight the flaws and missed opportunities within the government that contributed to the hijacker's success. Unfortunately, the author stumbles badly when he tries to weave into the flow the personal lives of his characters, primarily the main character. The conflicted love life of CIA officer Paul Patterson is boring and sterile, adding nothing to the narrative and seemingly present only because every book needs a romantic relationship of some sort. Describing Patterson's thoughts on his divorce might have been useful but his teen-like lust for a younger newspaper reporter could only interest a Hollywood producer looking for an R rating.
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