Category: Espionage (Page 1 of 2)

Top Spy Thrillers and Espionage Novels of 2019

January 1, 2019 / admin

Already 2019 is shaping up to be a great year for espionage novels, with fiction from leading authors like John Le Carré, Charles Cumming, Joseph Kanon, Alan Furst, David Downing, and the late Philip Kerr in the offing.

I’ll list my top picks as they are published throughout the year. Please note that I’m partial to historical spy thrillers with a literary flair; the novels I’ve selected reflect that bias.

The Siberian Dilemma by Martin Cruz Smith

Martin Cruz Smith’s last novel featuring wise-guy Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, Tatiana, appeared in 2013. Now, Arkady is back in Smith’s ninth book in series, The Siberian Dilemma, and the cynical detective must once again operate in Vladimir Putin’s autocratic New Russia, where corruption and political violence go hand-in-hand and the rich bend the rule of law to their benefit.

The novel sends Arkady to the far reaches of Russia, to Irkutsk, in search of his sometime lover, journalist Tatiana Petrovna. She is covering the nascent political campaign of Mikhail Kuznetsov, an oil oligarch and potential challenger to Putin, and that puts her in harm’s way. As he seeks to protect her, Arkady allies himself with a local Buryat shaman, Rinchin Bolot, and Aba Makhmud, a young Chechen falsely accused of terrorism by Arkady’s boss, the corrupt prosecutor Zurin.

The Siberian Dilemma becomes more of a traditional detective story when Kuznetsov’s wealthy business partner and close friend, Boris Benz, is murdered, and Arkady realizes he may be framed for the killing. Driven to solve the crime, Arkady finds that the clues lead him to the forbidding and desolate wilderness around frozen Lake Baikal. There, he confronts deadly cold, wild bears, and hardened criminals, and faces the Siberian dilemma of the title—where you are offered only bad choices. And it’s hard not to conclude that in today’s Russia those, sadly, are the only choices available.

Under Occupation by Alan Furst

In The World At Night, Alan Furst’s 2002 novel, a French screenwriter–a colorful character named Fischfang–claims he doesn’t have “a real belief in plots.” Instead, he maintains: “Life wasn’t this, and therefore that, and so, of course, the other. It didn’t work that way. Life was this, and the something, and then something else, and then a kick in the ass from nowhere.” That belief in the randomness of life is mirrored in many of Furst’s recent novels about Paris under Nazi rule. It informs Under Occupation, his latest, and those readers expecting a traditional linear plot-line will instead find a series of lightly-linked episodic stories primarily featuring Paul Ricard, an author of detective novels drawn into the Resistance by accident.

The book begins in 1942; in short order, Ricard finds himself working for British intelligence, gathering information, assisting in sabotage against the Germans, and assessing an escape route for downed Allied aviators. He is aided by Kasia, a Polish woman who is part of the Paris demi-monde. Ricard’s assignments become increasingly dangerous, including a risky mission to the German port city of Kiel, where he is asked to spy on the naval yards in preparation for a British bombing raid–and discovers unanticipated complications.

Under Occupation is not without a healthy dose of romance (no surprise in a Furst novel); Ricard attracts more than his share of female attention, including from his mysterious handler, Leila. While at times Furst asks the reader to suspend belief–the Nazis close in on Ricard numerous times only to have him slip away (a modern-day Scarlet Pimpernel?)–Under Occupation delivers equal doses of history and entertainment.

The Accomplice by Joseph Kanon

In 1960, Israeli agents kidnapped the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in a daring operation carried out in broad daylight on the streets of Buenos Aries. While the government of Argentina protested the capture as a violation of its sovereignty, the Israelis refused to hand over Eichmann. He was brought to Tel Aviv, where he was tried, convicted, and executed for his role as a leading architect of the Holocaust and for his crimes against humanity. There were still, however, many former Nazis living in South America who had escaped from post-war Europe through the aptly-named ratline.

Joseph Kanon’s latest historical thriller, The Accomplice, takes the reader to 1962 Buenos Aires where his protagonist, an American CIA officer named Aaron Wiley, is hunting Otto Schramm, a physician involved in the horrific experimentation that took place on prisoners in Auschwitz. Wiley isn’t acting on orders from the CIA—this pursuit is personal, for Schramm has been complicit in the damage done to Wiley’s extended family in the death camp.

As with all of Kanon’s novels, The Accomplice addresses several weighty questions: Does justice require a public trial and conviction? What should be the punishment for unspeakable crimes?Death? Life imprisonment? When the authorities refuse to act, is there a moral duty to pursue justice, even if it means operating outside of the law?

Kanon paints a dark, complicated picture in the novel. Wiley finds few allies in his quest to bring Schramm to justice. There’s little appetite for war crimes trials in West Germany. The Mossad is wary of another international incident. Many Argentine officials are sympathetic to the Nazis. And the CIA sees Schramm as a potential informer on the Peronists, who are now out of power but a threat to return and .

There are personal complications as well. Wiley finds himself attracted to Schramm’s beautiful but emotionally bruised daughter. Caught between her loyalty to her father and her growing realization of the extent and gravity of Otto Schramm’s crimes, she is the most intriguing and memorable character we encounter in The Accomplice.

Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré

David John Moore Cornwell, the Englishman who writes under the pen name of John le Carré, has been outspoken in his disdain for Brexit, for Donald Trump, and for the rising populist and nationalist tide in Europe. Nor does he want to push the re-set button for Vladimir Putin, either.

Cornwell/le Carré injects these strongly-held political views into Agent Running in the Field, his latest spy thriller, and despite some polished writing and interesting characters, the result is a somewhat muddled tale. Le Carré, known for his left-of-center antipathy for the West’s intelligence agencies (MI6 and the CIA), has been left in an awkward place. Those very same agencies are now seen by the Left as a bulwark against Trump’s erratic foreign policy and authoritarian tendencies. After all, where did the Steele Dossier come from? And the investigation of Russian influence during the 2016 presidential campaign? Further, it was a CIA officer who blew the whistle about President Trump’s alleged improper pressure on the Ukrainian president during a White House phone call. The Resistance to Trump (and to Brexit) is centered in what populists have derided as the Deep State.

What makes Agent Running in the Field intriguing, in a way, is le Carré’s struggle to make sense of this new topsy-turvy environment, and to balance his long-held dislike of British elites with the reality that its adversaries are also his. That leads to a somewhat jumbled focus for the novel. Le Carré centers his latest tale around three characters: his protagonist, Nat, a middle-aged Secret Intelligence Service officer nearing the end of his career, and two younger characters, Florence (an idealistic MI6 officer) and Ed, whose political views are earnest but extreme. When Florence militates for a counterintelligence operation against a Ukrainian oligarch with ties to Moscow Center, Nat encourages her—only to discover that Russian influence over the Establishment is greater than he realized.

Agent Running in the Field isn’t in the same category as the George Smiley series or even more recent novels like The Constant Gardener or Our Kind of Traitor, but le Carré nonetheless knows both how to tell a story, and how to hook the reader.

Metropolis by Philip Kerr

Before Philip Kerr’s death in 2018, he completed his final novel, Metropolis. One more time it features his wise-cracking hero/antihero, Berlin detective Bernie Gunther. The book tells an origin story—Bernie’s first days on the city’s Murder Commission in 1928. This is a younger, more restrained Gunther, one who hopes to learn the ropes of his new job and leave behind the lingering bad memories of his time as a soldier in the Great War.

Kerr paints a vivid portrait of Berlin in the late 1920s, a mix of Babylonian excess, artistic ferment, political upheaval, and grinding poverty. As Bernie Gunther is plunged into two investigations—of a killer who has been scalping prostitutes, and of a murderer executing crippled veterans begging on the city’s streets—Kerr takes us on a tour of Berlin after dark, its sex clubs and dive bars, its shadowy underworld controlled by ruthless gangsters. And lurking in the background is the emerging menace of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi thugs, battling with Communist street gangs and seeking to undermine the Weimar Republic.

Despite its detailing of some grisly murders, Metropolis is a more hopeful book than many of Kerr’s later Bernie Gunther novels. Set before the Third Reich, the Berliners we meet accept traditional notions of right-and-wrong—there are worrying signs, but for now, the moral center has held. Ahead, the horrors of National Socialism.

Philip Kerr’s fourteen Bernie Gunther novels offer more than noir entertainment: they bring to life the tortured history of Europe from the 1920s through the late 1950s, a history of the immense harm and damage caused by totalitarianism. While his thrillers featured more than their fair share of black humor and cynicism, it was always clear that Kerr believed fiercely in the quest for decency and justice. He, and Bernie Gunther, will be missed.

Diary of a Dead Man on Leave by David Downing

Writers have their fascinations. For historical novelist David Downing, one of them has been how left-wing Germans—socialists, Communists, social democrats—coped with life in the Third Reich. Many of them had battled the Nazis in the 1920s; millions had voted against Hitler and his National Socialists. What was it like for them as the Nazis tightened the screws? It’s a theme Downing addressed in his Jack Russell novels set in Berlin, and it’s one he has returned to in Diary of a Dead Man on Leave.

The novel’s title comes from a doomed German radical facing trial in 1919: “We Communists are all dead men on leave.” Downing’s protagonist, a man who calls himself Josef Hofman, is one of those dead men on leave, a veteran agent of the Communist International, the Kremlin’s organization responsible for promoting world revolution. Sent to the city of Hamm in northern Germany in 1938, Josef has been ordered to organize a resistance cell, recruiting ex-Communist Party members from among his co-workers at the railway yard. Josef has served the Comintern in Russia, Germany, Bulgaria, China, the United States, and Latin America. He is committed to the revolutionary cause, recognizing that his life hangs by a thread—if betrayed to the Gestapo he will be tortured and killed. There is another danger in his line of work: in a time of suspicion and of purges, a summons to Moscow by his superiors can end with a bullet to the back of the head.

As he grows close to the people he meets in Hamm, Josef begins to question his purpose. He begins a diary (a risky and foolish act). He knows that he should resist any emotional entanglements, but he can’t help himself. By growing close to the widow running his boarding house, her twelve-year-old son, and their circle of friends, Josef realizes that he may be jeopardizing his mission and his good standing in Moscow.

Downing recognizes that his sympathetic portrait of a Comintern operative, a man dedicated to advancing a totalitarian ideology, a man with blood on his hands, may not sit well with every reader. Yet it is a measure of Downing’s considerable imaginative talent that he helps us see how it is possible for a decent man to serve an indecent cause.

The Moroccan Girl by Charles Cumming

Charles Cumming’s clever new novel is, well, quite meta—The Moroccan Girl is a spy thriller featuring a protagonist, British author Kit Carradine, who writes spy thrillers. As the novel begins, Carradine is about to leave London, headed to a literary festival in Marrakesh, when he is approached by an MI6 officer, Robert Mantis, asking for his help. A covert agent of the Secret Service may be attending the festival; she is in trouble, hunted by the opposition. Will Kit pass along a sealed package to this mysterious woman? Kit is intrigued by the chance to experience first hand the reality of the world of espionage. (The idea of becoming a “writer-spy” appeals to him.) Moreover, he’s bored and welcomes a break in his routine, closeted in his London flat cranking out his would-be bestsellers.

It’s not long before Kit discovers that the “Moroccan girl” he has been tasked with locating is actually Lara Bartok, a member of the violent Antifa group Resurrection, and a fugitive from justice. Resurrection has been attacking right-wing populists in Europe and the U.S. through kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations of politicians and journalists. Described as a latter-day Ulrike Meinhof, the West German radical and terrorist, Lara had been the girlfriend of Resurrection’s leader, Ivan Simakov, but now she’s renounced the violence (or has she?). Lara’s alluring, street-smart, and has a magnetic appeal for men. When Kit meets her in Marrakesh, he finds himself quickly over his head—Russian and American intelligence agents are hunting Lara, intent on retribution. When Kit decides to help her evade her pursuers, the novel picks up speed and keeps the reader absorbed until its resolution.

The Moroccan Girl asks an ingenious question. How would a gifted and imaginative storyteller, who has spent years researching spy tradecraft, fare when suddenly thrust into the secret world? Could the amateur outwit the professionals? Could he stay one step ahead? Cumming has fashioned an intriguing and amusing story built around answering those questions.

A Spy in Exile by Jonathan de Shalit

Ya’ara Stein, a thirty-something Mossad-trained operative, is the protagonist of Jonathan de Shalit’s second spy thriller, A Spy in Exile. (De Shalit is the pseudonym of a retired Israeli intelligence officer with a literary bent). Ya’ara has been recruited by Israel’s prime minister to form a secret unit to battle Islamist-affiliated terror cells in Europe. This elite unit, like the one established after the Munich Summer Olympics massacre in 1972 to hunt down and execute Palestinian terrorists, is designed to administer rough justice to Israel’s enemies while ignoring national boundaries and international law.

De Shalit has produced a well-crafted novel, and he’s created an intriguing character in Ya’ara. Sophisticated, intelligent, unbending, she cooly plans daring, extra-judicial killings and doesn’t shy away from violence action herself. While some of the members of her team express qualms about the vengeance Ya’ara and the unit pursue, she rationalizes it as necessary for Israel’s survival. She believes, as does the (fictional) prime minister that “rampant Islamic terror could only be defeated by means of a hard-fought and bloody war, from close quarters, with continuing and relentless violence….” It’s a grim picture, one with little hope. While many Israelis might endorse these “long war” sentiments, it’s more problematic for European and American readers.

In contrast, the hit Israeli television series “Fauda” has attempted to humanize the Palestinians of the West Bank and their conflict with their occupiers. The recent screen adaption of Little Drummer Girl also offered a more nuanced view of the situation (even more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians than the novel by John Le Carré). If de Shalit continues his series, it will be interesting to see whether future novels reflect the changing political landscape in Israel and the West, and the desire for compromise and a lasting peace.

Here are past lists of top spy thrillers. You can click for:

2018’s top spy thrillers

2017’s top spy thrillers

2016’s top spy thrillers

2015’s top spy thrillers

2014’s top spy thrillers

2013’s top spy thrillers

Ten classic British spy novels

Top Spy Thrillers and Espionage Novels of 2018

January 1, 2018 / admin

What are the best spy novels of 2018? Here’s a list of my top picks (as they are published throughout the year). Please note that I’m partial to historical fiction about espionage that has a literary flair; the novels I’ve selected reflect that bias.

(I’ve not included my own 2018 spy thriller, An Interlude in Berlin, in this list but if you’re interested, Kirkus Reviews called it “an engrossing tale of intrigue and duplicity,” and you can find it here.)

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

In hindsight, the victory of the Allies over Nazi Germany seems inevitable. At the time, however, particularly in the early stages of World War II before the U.S. entered the conflict, it wasn’t clear that Great Britain would be able to resist the German onslaught. Hitler’s blitzkrieg had brought the Continent under Nazi control. And there were members of the British elite who wanted to sue for peace, and some who even rooted for a German victory.

Kate Atkinson’s novel Transcription explores the efforts of MI5 to monitor the potential Fifth Column of British Fascists during the initial stages of the war. Her protagonist, Juliet Armstrong, is an inexperienced 18-year old who is recruited by British Intelligence and employed as a typist creating transcripts of bugged conversations between would-be German agents. She quickly graduates to infiltrating a cell of upper-class Nazi sympathizers. Juliet, who has some secrets of her own, finds the covert work alternatively comic and terrifying.

Atkinson is a talented and fluid writer and Transcription, while slow-moving at times, is cleverly constructed and laced with a dry humor. The novel shifts back and forth in time from 1950 (when Juliet has become a radio producer at the BBC) to the early war years, and Atkinson has a flair for capturing the details of the period. The conclusion of Transcription is much less convincing than it could be, however, as the necessary backstory that would have made the reader buy into the twist ending isn’t fully developed.

The Other Woman by Daniel Silva

Daniel Silva’s series of Gabriel Allon novels have, for the most part, centered on the struggle between Israel and its adversaries, whether Islamist regimes or jihadist terrorists. His latest, The Other Woman, focuses instead on the threat to the West presented by the authoritarian regime in Moscow and its leader, a former KGB officer.

Fans of Allon—the art restorer, assassin, and head of Israel’s secret intelligence service—will find much in Silva’s latest thriller that is familiar. Once again, Allon and his team of loyal agents roam across Europe, from Vienna to London to Bern to Seville to Moscow. This time they are in pursuit of a sleeper mole deep in the heart of MI6, a task Allon has taken on at the request of his British counterpart. As their hunt continues, the clues point to the mole’s connection with the infamous double agent Kim Philby who defected to Moscow in 1963 (and died there in 1988 at the age of 76 just before the collapse of the Soviet Empire).

The novel’s central premise, that the KGB could have inserted a mole into MI6 during the Cold War, isn’t wholly implausible. In 2010, ten Russian sleeper agents in the U.S were arrested. They were living under assumed identities, tasked with political and industrial espionage, and had been in the country for more than a decade in deep cover. (This spy ring was the inspiration for the FX series The Americans.) Were there other penetration agents in the West, whose control was passed from the KGB to the SVR after the end of the Cold War? The Other Woman suggests that there were; Silva fashions an intriguing take on how that might have happened.

Paris in the Dark by Robert Olen Butler

The talented and prolific author Robert Olen Butler, who won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his lyrical Vietnam-themed short stories (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain), has recently turned to writing historical spy thrillers. The books feature Christopher Marlowe Cobb, an American journalist/spy with a taste for action. Butler’s latest, and fourth in the series, Paris in the Dark, brings “Kit” Cobb to the French capital in autumn 1915, before the U.S. joined the Allies in their bloody struggle with the Kaiser’s Germany.

While Cobb researches a story about American volunteer ambulance drivers, Paris is rocked by a string of bombings. He is tasked with finding and neutralizing the bombers, while maintaining his cover as a newspaper reporter. As Kit Cobb searches for German agents, the clues lead him in a different direction. Butler knows how to tell a compelling story, and how to develop characters the reader cares about, the most intriguing of which is the lovely young American nurse, Louise Pickering (Cobb’s love interest). Paris in the Dark rewards us with a suspenseful and satisfying ending, one that resonates with more modern concerns about terrorism.

Butler’s attention to period detail is impressive with his evocative descriptions of 1915 Paris. The novel also reminds us that Bolsheviks weren’t the only revolutionary socialists active in the early twentieth century—anarchists were also seeking the violent overthrow of the existing order. (One of the earliest spy novels, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent featured an anarchist.) Violence against the ruling class was common. In the decades before the start of the First World War, anarchists assassinated three kings (Italy, Spain, and Greece), the prime minister of Spain, the presidents of France and the United States, and a Tsar (Alexander II of Russia).

Safe Houses by Dan Fesperman

Dan Fesperman tells two stories in his latest thriller, Safe Houses. One begins in 1979 when a young CIA officer, Helen Abell, overhears conversations in a West Berlin safe house that she isn’t meant to—with unintended and dangerous consequences. The other story commences in 2014 after a brutal double murder in a quiet Maryland Eastern Shore town. A young woman teams up with a former Congressional investigator to try to understand why her parents died. Exploring the hidden connections between these stories lies at the heart of Fesperman’s carefully-constructed tale, and he manages to skillfully manage the back-and-forth in time and place.

While it offers suspenseful plot twists, Safe Houses isn’t a traditional Cold War spy novel—it pays scant attention to clashes between the KGB and Western intelligence agencies. Instead, it delves into the internal politics of the CIA, and the way its Old Boy network treated female employees three decades ago. Fesperman takes a decidedly feminist slant on that history (no doubt influenced by the #MeToo movement that began in 2017), and the novel reminds us of the struggles women faced (and face) in male-dominated organizations. Safe Houses focuses on the female pioneers of the CIA, during a time when they were marginalized and constrained to clerical roles. Much has changed: today, the director of the Agency is a woman.

The Hellfire Club by Jake Tapper

Did you enjoy Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code? Or the movie National Treasure? How about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? If you like mashups of historical fact, popular culture, and over-the-top conspiracy theories, then you’ll relish Jake Tapper’s political thriller The Hellfire Club. Tapper, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, has set his novel in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1954, and it includes all the elements of a breathless (but slightly campy) thriller, offering cameos from political figures of the period including President Dwight Eisenhower, Roy Cohn, Allen Dulles, and Senators Joseph McCarthy, Estes Kefauver, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Margaret Chase Smith.

The novel’s protagonist, New York Republican congressman Charlie Marder, had just arrived in Washington to assume his seat. After too many cocktails at a party with the DC elite, Charlie finds himself entangled in a Chappaquiddick-like incident that makes him vulnerable to blackmail. Despite being a decorated World War II veteran, Charlie is no Profile in Courage when push comes to shove, folding when pressured by a sinister cabal to vote against his conscience and to aid the McCarthy witchhunt. His better half, Margaret, a zoologist, proves to be a sight better on ethical questions, and she helps Charlie maneuver his way through a suddenly-treacherous landscape where friends may be adversaries (and vice versa). Tapper rachets up the suspense; there are mysterious clues, hidden allies, secret societies, and a car chase or two.

Some of the blurbs for The Hellfire Cub suggest that the book is “vividly relevant” in the Age of Trump. That is, to put it mildly, absurd, unless you believe that Deep State operatives in the Swamp secretly decide the fate of the country, aided by amoral Republicats. Then again, as Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong once noted about claims that the moon landing was faked: “People love conspiracy theories.”

The Dark Clouds Shining by David Downing

One of the harder things for any novelist is to seamlessly introduce the necessary context—the key backstories—in a sequel. What storylines from prior books need to be continued or expanded? How should recurring characters be handled? How to accomplish all of this smoothly? David Downing begins his fourth and final Jack McColl thriller, The Dark Clouds Shining, with a clever opening that addresses these challenges: it’s March 1921, and McColl, an ex-British spy, is in the dock in a British court for assaulting a police officer—and his trial helps illuminate McColl’s past, including his disillusionment with Great Britain’s imperialistic foreign policy. After his conviction, McColl is approached by the Secret Service and offered a chance to wipe his record clean if he’ll agree to a clandestine mission in post-revolutionary Russia.

McColl has been tasked with surfacing, and possibly neutralizing, a convoluted assassination plot hatched in Moscow that is meant to provoke conflict in British-ruled India. (Yes, it is convoluted, but engaging). McColl is persona non grata in Russia; he must worry not only about the Soviet secret police but also the threat from the assassins, led by McColl’s nemesis from the past, Aidan Brady, a radical with a violent streak.

The Dark Clouds Shining portrays a Russia where Lenin and the Bolsheviks, having won their country’s civil war, are consolidating power, suppressing their ideological rivals by force. The purges and show trials are yet to come, but it’s clear that state terror is in the cards.

Once in Moscow, McColl is reunited with his lover, the American journalist Caitlin Hanley. She is the most intriguing of the characters in the novel. A feminist who believes in the revolution’s promise of equality for women, Hanley accepts revolutionary excesses as a means to her desired ends—the Faustian bargain that many radicals make in pursuit of their goals.

David Downing is known for his attention to historical detail, and his sympathetic vision—his characters are conflicted and flawed, just like their real-world counterparts. It’s his understanding of human nature, and his compassion, that elevates Downing’s novels. We can only hope that as this series concludes that additional books are in the offing.

Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr

The sad news about Scottish novelist Philip Kerr’s death came in March; Kerr, 62 years old, had lost his battle with cancer.

Just weeks earlier his 13th Bernie Gunther novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts, had been published in the United States. In the past, readers and critics alike had avidly followed the adventures of Gunther, the hard-boiled former Berlin detective, as Kerr told the horrific story of the Third Reich and the shadowy struggles of the early Cold War through the eyes of his world-weary protagonist. Gunther is no hero; he’s a man who compromises and looks the other way in order to survive. Boxed in by the Nazi criminals who have become his superiors, he tries to keep his hands as clean as he can, knowing that at some level he is complicit. Gunther’s defense mechanism against the cruelty of the world is a cynical and sardonic humor.

Greeks Bearing Gifts, set in 1957, finds Gunther living in Munich under an assumed name (Christoph Ganz), hiding from assorted spy agencies and the authorities, for, as he says, “I had more dirty water in my bucket than most…” When Gunther/Ganz is offered a job as an insurance claims adjuster for Munich RE, he hopes to start a new and quieter life. But when he is sent to Greece to investigate a claim by a German owner of a yacht that has burned and sunk in the Aegean sea under suspicious circumstances, the case turns quite dangerous.

Bernie Gunther novels are filled with memorable characters, and Greeks Bearing Gifts is no exception. There’s an oily Munich lawyer with a shared past with Bernie, a timid Greek insurance agent named Achilles, an honest Athenian cop who makes use of Gunther’s talents in investigating a murder, an alluring young Communist attorney, and colorful minor players who help keep the pages turning. It’s a dark story that involves the wartime murders of Jews in Salonika and the confiscation of their property and money, and a sadistic SS officer who surfaces with an unresolved mission.

As is his wont, Kerr mixes in pointed historical commentary. Greeks Bearing Gifts explores the debate over the question of German reparations to Greece. Kerr makes it clear his distaste for Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, who didn’t exclude all Nazis from German society or its government, and who didn’t pursue payments to Greece for the devastation caused by the Nazi occupation. (Der Alte, who was an anti-Nazi leader during the 1930s, did push for reparations for Israel, and accepted Germany’s responsibility for the “unspeakable crimes” of the Holocaust).

But Adenauer allowed the reintegration of morally compromised German businessmen and lawyers. He reasoned that a strong West Germany (the “economic miracle”) was necessary as a bulwark against Soviet aggression, believing that the Russians represented an existential threat to liberal democracy. While it helped advance European integration, the Faustian bargain that Adenauer struck was to haunt Germany and provoke unrest in the mid-1960s. As Ian Walker has noted: “The Germany he created just didn’t look back. There was an unhealthy silence at the heart of Germany’s sense of itself.” For too many, there’s been a willingness to ignore the crimes of the Nazi era, a willed amnesia that continues even today over the issue of prosecuting war crimes.

Kerr leaves Bernie Gunther’s future unresolved at the end of Greeks Bearing Gifts, hinting at a redemptive return to Germany; his publisher announced that before his death Kerr had finished a final book, Metropolis, which would appear in 2019.

Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher

In January, Picador published a paperback edition of the first novel in Volker Kutscher’s noirish series about a detective in Weimar Germany, a publication timed to capitalize on the interest generated by Netflix’s airing of the “Babylon Berlin” miniseries.

The novel, titled Babylon Berlin and translated by Niall Sellar, had been published in Germany in 2008 as Der nasse Fisch (in English, The Wet Fish). It features Gereon Rath, an ambitious police inspector who has moved from Cologne to join Berlin’s vice squad and is looking to make a name for himself. As Rath tries to solve the mystery of an unidentified murder victim fished out of the city’s Landwehr canal, he discovers a cell of Russian Trotskyists is scheming to exchange smuggled gold for weapons in the hopes of deposing Soviet leader Josef Stalin. Rath’s investigation entangles him in a dangerous and complex world of political intrigue that hits closer to home than he, at first, realizes.

Babylon Berlin explores the dark side of life in Germany’s capital in 1929: Communists and Nazis plotting to bring down the government of Social Democrats; an underworld of nightclubs, cabarets, and brothels; and neighborhoods mired in crime and poverty.

Those who have watched the Netflix series will find significant differences between the novel and the televised version. The main characters are shared: Inspector Rath; Charlotte Ritter, a would-be detective working as a typist in Homicide who attracts Rath’s romantic interest; and the cynical Vice squad head, Bruno Wolter, who has links to reactionary elements in the military. But the screenwriters (Tom Tykwer, Hendrik Handloegten, and Achim von Borries) created additional characters, added backstories, and altered aspects of the plot.

The novel is a well-crafted police procedural, with less of the political and social background that makes the miniseries a compelling watch. For those who enjoy historical thrillers, both the novel and the series are well worth the time.

Munich by Robert Harris

History’s verdict on Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of Great Britain from May 1937 to May 1940, has been harsh—he’s seen as Adolf Hitler’s prime enabler, a weak old man whose policy of appeasement emboldened the Nazi dictator and inevitably led to war.

The accomplished and prolific novelist Robert Harris has constructed his latest historical thriller, Munich, around the infamous 1938 meeting in Bavaria’s capital city where Chamberlain, along with French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, met with Hitler and the Italian Duce Benito Mussolini and agreed to German annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.

Munich takes place over the last four days of September, 1938, focusing on the diplomatic maneuverings of the Four Powers to address Hitler’s ultimatum about Czechoslovakia. Diplomacy is conducted in a blizzard of paperwork—speeches, memos, telegrams, dispatches, war plans. The novel follows two junior, multilingual diplomats, an Englishman, Hugh Legat, and his German friend, Paul von Hartmann, who attend the Munich conference and are called upon to translate and interpret for their superiors. (The two became close while students at Oxford in the 1920s.)

Hartmann has joined the Oster Conspiracy, a plot hatched by Hans Oster, deputy head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) to depose Hitler should he order the invasion of Czechoslovakia and risk a wider and unpredictable conflict. Hartmann enlists a reluctant Legat to help, hoping that exposing Hitler’s true expansionist intentions (the dream of an Aryan Lebensraum reflected in secret war plans) will convince the British to scuttle any agreement. It’s a dangerous mission, with German security forces alert for subversion. To Harris’ credit, Munich is a novel filled with suspense—no easy task when the reader knows the eventual historical outcome.

The novel is deeply researched, blending fact and fiction effortlessly, and rich in period detail (a characteristic of Harris’ books). Munich captures the strong anti-war sentiment in Great Britain, France and Germany. There was a reason that cheering crowds greeted Chamberlain upon his arrival Munich—the memories of the First World War and its ten million dead were still raw. (The mindless slaughter of that conflict is depicted in all its horror in John Keegan’s magisterial The First World War; in Chapter 9, “The Breaking of Armies,” Keegan describes the gory reality for the British, Australian, and Canadian troops in the nightmarish Third Battle of Ypres.) The popular desire for peace was genuine.

Munich raises a series of provocative historical questions. Did Chamberlain concede the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia not only in hopes of “peace in our time,” but also because, as Harris suggests, he was conscious of the relative inferiority of the British army and air force compared to the German war machine? Did he seek to buy time for Great Britain to rearm? In the novel, Chamberlain laments: “The main lesson I have learned in my dealings with Hitler is that one simply can’t play poker with a gangster if one has no cards in one’s hands.” (Certainly Daladier felt he had negotiated from a position of weakness; he later commented: “If I had three or four thousand aircraft, Munich would never have happened.”)

Or did Chamberlain and Daladier squander a chance to confront Hitler? What if France and Britain had stood fast at Munich and risked war with the Axis Powers? As Winston Churchill pointed out in his brilliant speech to the House of Commons on October 5th, 1938, that faced with Allied resolution, Hitler would have paid a high price for the Sudetenland; the Wehrmacht would have confronted a determined Czechoslovak Army “which was estimated last week to require not fewer than 30 German divisions for its destruction.” And perhaps the anti-Hitler resistance, Prussian aristocrats in the German High Command, would have moved to forestall a second global conflict.

In his Commons speech, Churchill rebuked the idea of a comfortable detente with Hitler: “…there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force.”

Churchill understood that totalitarianism (whether in the form of Hitler’s National Socialism or Lenin and Stalin’s State Socialism) represented an existential threat to liberal democracy, one that couldn’t be ignored or bargained away. Tragically, Neville Chamberlain never fully comprehended the nature of Nazism (how it was much more than gangsterism, and how its toxic ideology transcended the traditional nation-state), and millions paid the price for his failure.

Traitor by Jonathan de Shalit

Many observers believe that Israel’s intelligence agencies—the Mossad and Shin Bet—are among the best in the world. During the Cold War, however, the KBG and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) managed to place numerous moles in key positions in the Israeli government. Among the more prominent penetration agents were Lt.-Col. Israel Bar, a military analyst; Marcus Klingberg, an expert on chemical and biological weapons; and Col. Shimon Levinson, a senior Israeli intelligence officer. Many of these agents betrayed their country on ideological grounds, with Communist sympathies trumping Zionist patriotism.

Jonathan de Shalit’s Traitor, a bestseller in Israel translated from the Hebrew by Steve Cohen, focuses on the hunt for a long-entrenched mole, code-named Cobra, in the Israeli government, an agent recruited during the Cold War. (De Shalit is the pseudonym of a former Israeli intelligence officer). Aharon Levin, former head of the Mossad, is called out of retirement and tasked with finding Cobra. Fans of Daniel Silva’s modern spy thrillers will find the recruitment and composition of Aharon’s secret team quite familiar—including two brilliant and tough female operatives. The hunt leads to Europe, Russia, and the United States, and takes on an increasingly political cast. It’s one thing to figure out who the traitor is, it’s another to publicly expose a foreign spy in the corridors of power and risk the political damage both at home and abroad.

De Shalit is at his best in exploring the reasons for Cobra’s treason, that mix of narcissism and feelings of alienation and marginalization that often motivate penetration agents. There’s an intriguing twist—Cobra believes he has been spying for the CIA, but he has been tricked into passing information to the East Germans and the Russians. The team hunting him doesn’t care about his motives: they are eager to catch him and see him face the harshest consequences. The Israelis have always taken a hard line on the question: Soviet spy Marcus Klingberg, arrested in 1982 and tried in secret, was sentenced to 20 years in prison (and served the first 10 in solitary confinement).

Traitor offers an insider’s perspective on the challenges facing Israel’s intelligence community. There’s plenty of suspense in the frantic hunt for Cobra, and an ending that reflects the hall of mirrors that often confronts those responsible for countering espionage.

Here are past lists of top spy thrillers. You can click for:

2017’s top spy thrillers

2016’s top spy thrillers

2015’s top spy thrillers

2014’s top spy thrillers

2013’s top spy thrillers

Ten classic British spy novels

Spies in the Kremlin

October 6, 2017 / admin

This piece appeared on History News Network as: Review of Eva Dillon’s “Spies in the Family: An American Spymaster, His Russian Crown Jewel, and the Friendship That Helped End the Cold War”

We have learned since the end of the Cold War that the West had well-placed spies in the Kremlin, and that those double agents provided timely intelligence about Soviet aims and intentions. It’s impossible to gauge their full impact in hastening the fall of the Communist regime, but it’s clear that these inside sources helped policymakers in London, Paris, and Washington in assessing the thinking of the Politburo and other Soviet leaders.

A new memoir/history by Eva Dillon, Spies in the Family, offers a fascinating and deeply sympathetic account of perhaps the most important of the Kremlin spies, Dmitri Polyakov, code name TOPHAT, who was the third major GRU (military intelligence) officer to pass vital information to the CIA. All three were discovered. Polyakov lasted the longest; the other two—Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky—were betrayed, it is believed, by British mole George Blake (who is in his 90s, living in exile in Moscow).

Popov, a lieutenant colonel in the GRU, was the CIA’s first in-place source in the Soviet hierarchy. He approached an American diplomat in Vienna in 1953 and offered his services as a spy, motivated in part by anger over the harsh treatment of Russian peasants, including his own family. Popov passed along information about Soviet nuclear submarines and missile technology and alerted the CIA that the GRU had classified technical information about the U-2 spy plane. He was exposed and executed in 1960.

Penkovsky is perhaps the best known of Soviet double agents. He played a role in both the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. Penkovsky passed technical information about the Soviet nuclear missiles sent to Cuba that helped steer the Kennedy Administration away from a military response. As the CIA has noted: “Because of Penkovksy, Kennedy knew that he had three days before the Soviet missiles were fully functional to negotiate a diplomatic solution. For this reason, Penkovsky is credited with altering the course of the Cold War.” Also betrayed, Penkovsky was tried publicly and executed in May of 1963.

Eva Dillon’s subject, Dmitri Polyakov, considered himself a Russian patriot who in practice subscribed to the 17th century dramatist Pierre Corneille’s belief that “treachery is noble when aimed at tyranny.” Dismayed by Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s bellicosity, he began spying for the FBI and CIA in 1961 and avoided exposure until 1988. (Popov lasted six years; Penkovsky, only two). Polyakov achieved the rank of general, becoming the West’s highest-placed spy. Eva Dillon’s father, Paul, a CIA officer and an Irish Catholic marine from Boston, was one of Polyakov’s handlers and developed a strong bond with him.

As Polyakov rose in the GRU, he “had access to the highest level of Soviet war planning, strategy, and military philosophy. He knew the specifics of worldwide GRU operations. He knew the identities of GRU agents and their modi operandi.” His courage can’t be underestimated. To spy in the Soviet Union, a totalitarian society, required nerves of steel, with the danger of exposure real and constant. In Spies in the Family, Dillon captures this tension, and the moral dilemma Polyakov faced—he felt compelled to continue spying, even as he knew it placed his family (and their future) at grave risk. Dillon interviewed Polyakov’s son, whose career as a diplomat ended after his father’s arrest, and who moved to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, his career prospects tainted.

In the end, Polyakov was compromised by the CIA’s Aldrich Ames, a mole who betrayed numerous Western agents. When arrested, Polyakov told his interrogators that he saw himself as a “social democrat,” one who saw the Scandinavian countries as a model for Russia. Despite Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, Polyakov’s justification for his spying fell on deaf ears. Earlier, Polykov had turned down an offer of asylum from the CIA, explaining, “I am not doing this for you. I am doing this for my country. I was born a Russian, and I will die a Russian.” His words came true: he was tried, convicted, and executed, all in secret.

Polyakov must have had few illusions about how his countrymen would view him, even those who welcomed the fall of the regime. And yet he persisted, driven by his own sense of duty and an old-fashioned patriotism. As James Woolsey of the CIA later noted: “What General Polyakov did for the West didn’t just help us win the Cold War, it kept the Cold War from becoming hot. Polyakov’s role was invaluable, and it was one that he played until the end—in his own words—for his country.”

As U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and several Congressional committees investigate Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election, it’s logical to ask what the CIA and/or MI6 might know from inside sources in Moscow. Are there “social democrats” in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle who reject his strongman approach and regard cooperating with the West as a patriotic duty? These sources might offer concrete information about the extent of Russian meddling, and possible collusion with Trump associates, well beyond the gossip, rumors, and conjecture of the dossier compiled by ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele.

Another intriguing question: can the current Administration be trusted with the names of any highly-placed Russians passing information? The fear of a leak, or inadvertent disclosure by an erratic President not known for his self-control or caution, is real. The fate of some of Putin’s critics (journalists murdered; opposition leaders assassinated; former cronies dying under mysterious circumstances) suggests the potentially dire consequences of exposure (no less, perhaps, than those faced by General Polyakov.) Putin is, after all, a creature of the KGB.

If history is any guide, there are covert Western intelligence sources in Moscow. (If there are not, then the CIA is not doing its job.) How to shield them, and yet fully explore what they can tell us about the extent of Russian hacking and disinformation campaigns, is a pressing challenge for the leaders of the intelligence community. Before too long we may learn what they know, and what it means for the health of our democratic institutions and the rule of law in our country.

Jefferson Flanders is an independent journalist and author. His trilogy of novels, The First Trumpet, is set during the early Cold War.

Brandenburg Gate in Berlin Germany - panoramic view

Berlin Spy Stories

May 19, 2017 / admin

This essay first appeared in the Mystery Tribune

Spy novelists have long been drawn to Berlin’s dark and violent past, and its mix of seamy counterculture and shadowy intrigue. That should come as no surprise: Germany’s rulers prosecuted, and lost, two world wars, and after 1945 the country occupied the frontlines of the Cold War. With these conflicts came heightened covert activity—false flag operations, code breaking, sabotage, and spying by all sides.

As the capital of Germany, Berlin served as the center of political and military power for both the Kaiser and Hitler. During the Nazi years, numerous intelligence agencies (Gestapo, SD, Abwehr) competed for influence with the Führer, while at the same time Germany’s adversaries sought to place moles in the inner councils of Hitler’s regime. After the war, occupied Berlin became a place where East and West intersected, a unique Treffpunkt (meeting point), a cloak-and-dagger venue for the Western Allies and the Soviets. The city swarmed with agents. By the late 1950s, the U.S. had 15 separate intelligence outfits at work in the city, and the KGB had taken up residence at a massive complex at Karlshorst in East Berlin. Both sides recruited sources, placed penetration agents, and, when it was deemed necessary, took more “direct action,” including abductions and assassinations. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev called Berlin a “swampland of espionage.” Before the Wall went up in 1961, agents and informants could cross sector borders without too much trouble.

Beyond the clandestine, Germany’s largest city has offered an intriguing, and sometimes contradictory, backdrop for fiction. Berlin has been a cosmopolitan home for artists, writers, painters, actors, and the “decadent” demimonde for more than a hundred years—think the “anything goes” atmosphere of Cabaret during the 1920s and 30s, or the free-spirited city of bohemians, drop-outs, permanent students, and punk-rockers that David Bowie and Iggy Pop inhabited in the 1970s. There’s always been a gritty Berlin underworld, filled with petty thieves, pimps, prostitutes, con men, and crime bosses. Berliners have proved remarkably resilient. They’ve endured Allied bombing raids, the brutal Soviet pillage of the city in 1945, the Berlin Airlift, the erection of the Wall, and the years as a divided and (for West Berliners) isolated place.

Berlin’s spies

John le Carré, a master of the espionage genre, began his breakthrough 1963 bestseller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with a fatal encounter at a Berlin checkpoint, and ended it with a desperate escape attempt at the Wall. In the character of Alex Leamas, a jaded MI6 veteran, Le Carré offered readers a more realistic and nuanced alternative to James Bond, Ian Fleming’s dashing super-spy. Graham Greene praised the novel as the best spy story he had ever read, and JB Priestley said it possessed “an atmosphere of chilly hell.” The screen version of the book, directed by Martin Ritt, starred Richard Burton and Claire Bloom, and introduced the general public to Le Carré’s bleak vision of the twilight struggle between the liberal democracies and the Soviet bloc.

Le Carré wrote later that Berlin in the 1960s was “a paradigm of human folly and historical paradox.” Stationed at the British Embassy in Bonn, he had “watched the Wall’s progress from barbed wire to breeze block; I watched the ramparts of the Cold War going up on the still-warm ashes of the hot one.” (Le Carré has had a life-long interest in Germany and its literature and culture; he has set many of his other thrillers there including A Small Town in Germany, The Looking Glass War, and A Most Wanted Man.)

Other spy novelists have mined the rich material in Berlin’s troubled history, producing numerous thrillers, including series by Len Deighton (ten Bernard Samson novels), John Lawton (two Joe Wilderness books), and, most notably, David Downing (six John Russell novels) and Philip Kerr, with his critically-acclaimed Bernie Gunther series.

In Downing’s first Berlin novel, Zoo Station, we meet John Russell, an Anglo-American expat journalist of leftist political tendencies who has been living quietly in Berlin for more than a decade. It’s 1939, and Hitler is threatening war with Poland. Russell wants to stay in Germany; he has a glamorous girlfriend, an actress named Effi Koenen, and a young son, Paul, from a failed marriage. As the Third Reich moves toward outright conflict, Russell draws the attention of the Soviet, German, and British intelligence agencies, who all see him as a potentially valuable operative. To protect his family, Russell begins to cooperate with various and sundry spymasters, reluctantly compromising himself in the process.

In the five novels that follow (the Train Station series), Russell struggles in his role as amateur spy, caught in the very dangerous game of “playing the ends against the middle,” as Germany careens into war. While he despises the Nazis, Russell has little choice but to work with the Abwehr (while also running errands for the NKVD, MI6, and American military intelligence). When he can, Russell tries to help Jewish friends and acquaintances escape the roundup in Berlin, the beginning of the Final Solution, but there are limits to what he can accomplish—the Gestapo is a watchful and ever-present threat. Downing’s novels brilliantly capture the fear and paranoia of life in a dictatorship, and they illustrate the moral conflicts that confront average men and women face in a society that has abandoned the rule of law. Downing paints a harrowing portrait of the impact of the Nazi regime on Berlin and the brutal consequences of German militarism, the devastation of the city by Allied bombing and by the rampaging Red Army.

The prolific Philip Kerr offers an equally dark vision in his Berlin Noir trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem), which he had extended into another nine (and counting) Bernie Gunther novels. Kerr’s Germany is run by uniformed criminals with swastikas on their armbands, arrogant men driven not only by a warped racist ideology but also by greed, lust, and corruption. While Kerr’s work is categorized as crime fiction, his novels bridge several genres— they’re a compelling mashup of police procedural, murder mystery, and spy thriller. His plots typically follow the thriller outline established by John Buchan in The 39 Steps: take an ordinary man, give him a difficult and dangerous mystery to solve with a pressing deadline, and then have him chased by shadowy enemies.

Kerr’s brash, wise-cracking Everyman hero Bernie Gunther is a veteran of the Berlin police department from the Weimar years. He’s a survivor, willing to work for the Nazi elite in solving politically-sensitive crimes even as he recognizes the absurdity of traditional police work when civilized moral boundaries have been erased. Gunther has a stubborn sense of right and wrong, and when confronted with evil, he’s not above settling scores and seeking rough justice. The series, which spans the 1930s, the Second World War, and the early Cold War, illuminates a violent and tragic period of human history.

The Cold War and beyond

It’s been the American author Joseph Kanon who has most evocatively explored the struggle between American and Soviet intelligence agencies in the ruins of post-war Berlin. In The Good German, his protagonist, war correspondent Jake Geismer, is shocked by the devastation as he flies over the divided city: “Below them there seemed to be no movement. Shells of houses, empty as ransacked tombs, miles and miles of them, whole pulverized stretches where there were not even walls.” When Geismer is drawn into a murder investigation which involves his pre-war lover, Lena, he learns that the line between guilt and innocence is blurred. Who should take responsibility for the horrific Nazi past, and for wartime atrocities? Who is complicit? And how is justice best served?

In Leaving Berlin, Kanon focuses on life in the Eastern sector of the city, occupied by the Soviets and watched over by the dreaded East German secret police. During the Berlin Airlift in 1949, Alex Meier, a German-Jewish author, is blackmailed by the CIA into returning to East Berlin as an agent. The novel explores the moral and psychological costs of betrayal: the German Workers Paradise is a grim, oppressive place where informing on friends and colleague has become commonplace. Meier must negotiate a vastly altered personal and professional landscape, where he can’t be sure who to trust, where the fear of the Gestapo has been replaced by fear of K-5, later known as the Stasi. As the novel ends, Meier crosses from East to West through the Brandenburg Gate, a man wounded and hardened by his experiences.

The end of the Cold War hasn’t diminished Berlin’s allure for those crafting spy stories. In 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, Jason Bourne (played by Matt Damon) meets a CIA contact in Alexanderplatz during a student demonstration; later, he’s chased through a Berlin subway station. The producers of Homeland chose the German capital as the locale for the series fifth season with storylines involving the Islamic State, a resurgent Russia, and terrorism in Europe. Novelist Olen Steinhauer’s Berlin Station television spy series focuses on modern-day CIA field agents dealing with terror plots and damaging cyber leaks. And the creative team responsible for the well-received BBC adaptation of Le Carré’s The Night Manager has announced its next project will be a limited-series remake of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

With renewed tensions between the West and Russia, and with German intelligence agencies warning about jihadists hiding in the recent flow of Middle Eastern migrants into Berlin, the city will continue to have more than its fair share of intrigue—and writers eager to tell new spy stories.

Jefferson Flanders is the author of The First Trumpet trilogy about the early Cold War. His novel An Interlude in Berlin will be published in 2018.

Top Spy Thrillers and Espionage Novels of 2017

January 1, 2017 / admin

It has been a banner year for spy thrillers and espionage novels, with new books from some of the masters of the genre.

Friends and Traitors by John Lawton

The British traitor Guy Burgess, one of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring, was notorious for his drunkenness, lack of personal hygiene, and proclivity for picking up younger men in public places (when homosexual liaisons were prosecuted as a crime). Some in London’s elite circles found him witty and smart and overlooked his often crude and outrageous behavior. But the American officials who encountered Burgess in Washington in the early 1950s when he served as second secretary in the British Embassy were astonished that the British Foreign Office not only employed Burgess as a diplomat (despite his open anti-Americanism and dissolute lifestyle) but also allowed him access to confidential information. There were red faces aplenty in Whitehall when Burgess defected to the Soviet Union in 1951 along with fellow Cambridge spy Donald Maclean.

Burgess has always been a figure of fascination for British journalists and authors. Andrew Lownie’s recent biography of Burgess, Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess, suggests that he was a very effective intelligence operative, not a harmless “licensed jester” of the ruling class as he has often been characterized. The Burgess that John Lawton portrays in his latest Inspector Troy novel, Friends and Traitors, comes across as a well-connected and brilliant con man, not a master spy. Burgess finds acceptance as “one of us” by the upper class establishment—what Lawton calls “clubbable Britain”— despite his flaws. The novel—part detective story, part spy thriller—traces the friendship between Burgess and Lawton’s protagonist, Frederick Troy, a chief superintendent at Scotland Yard. Troy and Burgess share an alienation from their privileged backgrounds.

The plot of Friends and Traitors centers around Burgess’ desire to return to England from Moscow (a grim place he grew to hate). While in Vienna on vacation in 1958, Troy is approached by Burgess to help broker a possible homecoming. When an MI5 agent sent to meet with Burgess is murdered, Troy (whose father was a Russian émigré) becomes a suspect in the killing. He must clear his name and in doing so discover why powerful forces are determined to keep Burgess from returning to England. In the last third of Friends and Traitors, Lawton picks up the pace of the novel, and he keeps the reader turning pages to the very end.

A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carré

When John Le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was published in 1963 to wide-spread acclaim, it represented a dramatic shift in tone for espionage thrillers, a clear departure from the derring-do of Ian Fleming’s rakish super agent, James Bond. Instead, Le Carré (the pen-name of David Cornwell, a former British intelligence officer) offered a darker vision, of Western intelligence agencies that skirted moral and ethical lines in their struggle against their Soviet and East Bloc adversaries. The protagonist of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Alec Leamas, is far from glamorous: an aging MI6 agent, haunted by his failures in life, inserted into East Germany on a risky mission. Both Leamas, and his hapless lover, Liz Gold, are treated as disposable chess pieces in the spy game. The novel became an international best seller and was praised by critics and authors; Graham Greene called it the best spy story he had ever read.

Now, five decades later, A Legacy of Spies revisits Alec Leamas’ botched mission and examines the moral choices made by the top British spymasters, including George Smiley (the hero of a series of Le Carré’s books). Le Carré has made some intriguing choices in crafting the novel, employing Peter Guillam, a supporting character in the Smiley series, to recount the story. We don’t encounter Smiley until the very end of A Legacy of Spies.

Guillam is summoned from retirement to answer questions about the Leamas affair: the British Secret Service is worried about lawsuits from family members and a possible Parliamentary inquiry. It’s an interesting conceit: what legal or moral responsibility do the victors of the Cold War have for any “collateral damage” inflicted during the cloak-and-dagger operations of the 1950s and 1960s? As Guillam is quizzed by the lawyers, we learn more about the operation and its aftermath, and the many layers of deception involved.

While A Legacy of Spies is full of wry humor and engaging dialogue (which keeps our interest), it’s not as dynamic or suspenseful as some of Le Carré’s more recent books like A Most Wanted Man, which deals with the war on terror, or The Night Manager, which explores the illicit global weapons trade. There’s some irony in that, because after the Cold War ended, there was speculation that Le Carré would struggle to find his literary way; in fact, he has found much to write about in a world confronting the challenges of ultra-nationalism, terrorism, and corporate malfeasance.

Le Carré makes a curious choice at the close of A Legacy of Spies; he has Smiley make the case for the pan-European project that British voters rejected in Brexit. While it fits with Le Carré’s public support of Remain during the referendum campaign, it doesn’t seem quite in character for Smiley. Yes, he is Le Carré’s creation, but Smiley has always struck me as the traditional English gentleman who could recite, by heart, John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II: “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” Would he really warm to the notion of an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels setting policy for “this scepter’d isle”?

Defectors by Joseph Kanon

During the Cold War, several high-profile British Establishment figures defected to the Soviet Union, including Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and George Blake, but there were few American moles of similar prominence who fled to Moscow. Agents like Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, and Morton Sobell denied their complicity in espionage and stayed to face prosecution (and conviction) in the United States. Two members of the Rosenberg spy ring—the relatively-obscure American scientists Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant—did make their way to Russia and held high leadership positions in the Soviet military-industrial complex. Their story is told in Steve Usdin’s masterful Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley.

In Defectors, Joseph Kanon has imagined what it might have been like if an American double agent, an Alger Hiss-like figure, a true believer in Marxism and world revolution, had decamped to the Socialist Paradise. It’s an intriguing premise, and Kanon has constructed a taut thriller around his defector, Frank Weeks, a Harvard-educated OSS veteran. Weeks had betrayed both his CIA colleagues and Latvian agents inserted behind the Iron Curtain during the early Cold War. The novel picks up his story years later, in 1961, as Weeks’s younger brother Simon, a successful New York publisher, arrives in Moscow. Simon has come to finalize the details on Frank’s about-to-be-published book, My Secret Life. (The KGB had encouraged the British defectors to write “tell-all” memoirs, largely as a propaganda exercise).

Simon is conflicted about seeing his brother, the infamous traitor. They were close during their Boston childhood, and Frank’s betrayal and defection had not only come as a surprise to Simon but also had ended his promising State Department career. Their relationship is captured perfectly in this brief back-and-forth:

”You never change. I can still read your face,” Frank said, a fond smile, the intimacy of drink.

”Yes? What’s it saying?”

”You’re worried. You don’t want to take your hand off the checker, until you’re sure. Remember how you used to do that? No move until you thought it was safe.”

Kanon deftly brings the other characters in Defectors to life: Frank’s wife, Joanna, who drinks to deal with the isolation of exile; Boris, the grim, proud KGB agent assigned to watch Frank; Pete DiAngelis, a CIA agent in Moscow who can’t hide his dislike of Frank and all he stands for; and Gareth Jones, a forlorn British defector not above informing on his fellow Westerners. While Defectors is well-plotted, never flagging, it is Kanon’s ability to illuminate the inner worlds of the people encountered in its pages that make it a novel well worth reading.

A Single Spy by William Christie

At the center of William Christie’s A Single Spy is the character of Alexsi Ivanovich Smirnov, an orphan who lives by his wits in the lawless desert of Soviet Azerbaijan and is recruited into the NKVD in 1936. The spymasters in Dzerzhinsky Square have selected Alexsi because he speaks German and they send him as a teenager to Germany as a deep penetration agent. Alexsi is a survivor, ruthless when cornered, and he successfully infiltrates the Abwehr (German military intelligence) and begins to feed Moscow vital intelligence, including Hitler’s plans for an attack on the Soviet Union (information which Alexsi’s superiors ignore).

Much of the tension in the novel revolves around Alexsi’s precarious position inside German intelligence circles and the risks he must take in communicating with his Soviet handlers. He becomes entangled in Operation Long Jump, the Nazi plot to kill Winston Churchill at the 1943 Teheran Conference of the Allied leaders. When Alexsi realizes that both German and Soviet intelligence agencies want the same outcome—the British leader eliminated—he also discovers that he has become expendable. (It’s a threatening situation perfect for a resilient and imaginative survivor to overcome.)

A Single Spy is reminiscent of Alan Furst’s Spies of the Balkans with its depiction of the way the NKVD trained and handled its agents, and with its deeply-researched period detail. The novel is an entertaining and historically informative read, and Christie’s ability to build suspense is impressive.

The Good Assassin by Paul Vidich

Paul Vidich’s second spy thriller, The Good Assassin, (a sequel to An Honorable Man), sends his hero, former CIA officer George Mueller, to 1958 Cuba. Mueller undertakes an informal mission to assess whether one of the Agency’s men in Havana, Toby Graham, has “gone rogue” and is secretly assisting Fidel Castro’s rebels with arms shipments.

There’s much to like in Vidich’s novel: he captures the pervasive corruption of dictator Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, the grinding poverty, the dominance of American mobsters and corporate interests, and the fear of SIM, the brutal Cuban secret police. Then there’s sultry Havana, filled with casinos, bars, sex shows, brothels, and gawking tourists. (Vidich teases the reader with the prospect of Mueller meeting Cuba’s most famous foreign resident, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, but the hard-drinking author remains off-stage.)

Vidich stretches the boundaries of the spy genre. He has a literary style, with longish ruminations by his characters, and he’s quite willing to drop readers into the middle of a scene and let them piece together the backstory. There are times when the novel seems unevenly paced, but The Good Assassin closes with a flourish.

On a historical note, Vidich is spot on in highlighting the covert support Castro received from some in the CIA. The conservative U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Earl E. T. Smith, later blamed the CIA and some diplomats in the State Department for enabling Castro’s victory. The Cuban Revolution had its admirers in the United States (not just Herbert Matthews of the New York Times who declared Fidel’s revolt to be “radical, democratic, and therefore anti-Communist.”) While Castro may not have started out as a Communist, by the end of the revolution, those close to him, his brother Raul and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, were determined to establish Latin America’s first Marxist-Leninist state. That they succeeded has been a tragedy for the Cuban people.

Vienna Spies by Alex Gerlis

Vienna Spies is set during the final months of World War II. It has become clear that Germany will lose the war and Austrians realize that their embrace of National Socialism will come with a heavy price. The Red Army is driving the Wehrmacht back toward the west, and it is only a matter of time before Vienna falls.

In Alex Gerlis’ taut thriller, British policy makers have become concerned that Soviet leader Josef Stalin will renege on promises made to support Austria’s post-war neutrality and independence. They decide that they need to find and protect Austria’s leading anti-Nazi politician, one Hubert Leitner, who is hiding in Vienna and who could lead a future government sympathetic to the Allies. MI6 sends two agents, Rolf Eder and Katharina Hoch, who pretend to be a Swiss married couple (he a banker from Zurich, she a nurse). At the same time, the Soviets have also dispatched an experienced NKVD field agent, Viktor Krasotkin, to locate Leitner.

Vienna Spies captures the unrelenting tension for spies living behind enemy lines. The threat of being denounced to the authorities is always present, and the Gestapo is eager to hunt down anyone resisting Nazi rule. Gerlis is aware that modern readers might be skeptical about the ability of foreign agents to survive in a hostile city filled with supporters of Hitler, and he highlights the immense difficulties of trying to establish a cell under such circumstances. (In his Author’s Note, Gerlis cites a scholarly work, The Austrian Resistance 1938-1945, and interviews with Austrian refugees from the time, to bolster his case that they were pockets of anti-Nazis in the city).

Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr’s latest thriller, Prussian Blue, features his battered hero/anti-hero Bernie Gunther, a former Berlin detective of the Weimar era, once again in peril because of his checkered past. The novel offers parallel storylines: Gunther is on the run in 1956 France, chased by the East German secret services after he has refused to assassinate a Stasi agent in England (who was his lover); he finds himself flashing back to his investigation of a murder at Berchtesgaden (Hitler’s Alpine lair, the “Eagle’s Nest”) in the late 1930s. There are twists-and-turns along the way, but the stories eventually overlap before they are resolved.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels is their clear portrayal of the top Nazis not as rulers of a modern nation state but instead as corrupt crime family bosses, intent on amassing money and power (justifying their brutal actions by a horrific ideology). Traditional histories sometimes miss this element. Prussian Blue captures this insight, as Gunther learns during this investigation that the local Nazis in Berchtesgaden are dealing drugs and running a prostitution ring. Kerr is also clear-eyed about his protagonist: Bernie has committed crimes, done horrible things to stay alive—but his moral compass is not broken, and this native Berliner does what he can to set things right in his rough-and-ready way.

Prussian Blue draws on recent historical research suggesting that the Third Reich’s leaders and soldiers were jacked up on stimulants, particularly Pertavin, a version of methamphetamine. There is some irony in the hypocrisy of Nazis high on meth when their Führer was a strident non-smoking vegetarian (with his own secret drug habit).

If there’s a weakness in the novel, it’s that Kerr asks the reader to suspend belief when it comes to Bernie Gunther’s colorful and often subversive verbal pyrotechnics, which are typically aimed at high-placed Nazis and other grim authority figures. The wise-cracking Bernie has “no filter” (to use a 2017 term), when expressing his views. In real life, his sarcasm, thinly-veiled political insults, and outright insubordination would have bought him a one-way ticket to a concentration camp, no matter how useful his talents as an investigator might be.

Lenin’s Roller Coaster by David Downing

It’s been 100 years since the Russian Revolution, and David Downing has chosen the world-changing events of 1917 as the backdrop for his latest Jack McColl novel, Lenin’s Roller Coaster. His globe-trotting protagonist, McColl, a British spy, holds much more progressive political views than, say, John Buchan’s resolute Tory patriot, Richard Hannay (who had little use for the infernal Huns or for the subversive Bolshies!): McColl has his doubts about British colonial policy and Whitehall’s approach to the revolutionaries seeking reform in Russia.

As the novel opens in the winter of 1917, the Allies and Germans face a bloody stalemate in the trench warfare raging in France and Belgium. While the Czar has been deposed, the British hope to keep the Russians fighting the Kaiser on the Eastern Front. The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin wants Russia to withdraw from the war, which (along with his anti-capitalist ideology) make him persona non grata for the British and French.

McColl is sent on an undercover mission to Central Asia, ordered to stop supplies from reaching the Germans. After a series of harrowing adventures, he ends up in Moscow, where his lover, the Irish-American journalist Caitlin Hanley, has taken up residence covering the Revolution. There, London tasks McColl with a dangerous and morally-dubious mission—to assist the White Russians, the counter-revolutionaries conspiring against Lenin and his government.

Downing’s fictional account of the early days of the Russian Revolution in Lenin’s Roller Coaster is largely sympathetic, capturing the excitement and idealism of the feuding socialists and anarchists who thought they were on the brink of altering world history. They were, just not for the better—the 20th Century butcher’s bill for adopting Marx’s state socialism (Communism) approached 100 million dead. This creates a problem for Downing: readers in 2017 may find it difficult to empathize with those (like Caitlin Hanley) who fervently embraced the Bolshevik experiment with its inevitable descent into state terror. As historian Sheila Fitzpatrick noted recently in the London Review of Books, the current scholarly consensus is that: “If there is a lesson to be drawn from the Russian Revolution, it is the depressing one that revolutions usually make things worse, all the more so in Russia, where it led to Stalinism.”

In his concluding historical note, Downing acknowledges that the outcome of the “grisly Soviet experiment” makes it hard to understand “the inspiration provided by the original revolution—one that captivated millions of men and women in the interwar years and beyond…” Yet, there are disturbing echoes of that same ideological fervor in today’s challenges to liberal democracy mounted by populists of the extreme Right and Left in Europe and the United States. Radicalism is making a comeback. Sadly, the appeal of utopian solutions, whether socialist or nationalist, hasn’t died despite the sobering lessons of history.

A Divided Spy by Charles Cumming

It’s not easy to write a believable spy thriller set in the here-and-now, because these days reality (Russian hacking, the Deep State, jihadist attacks in Europe’s major cities, Wikileaks, etc.) often is stranger than fiction. Today’s headlines about real world espionage and clandestine skulduggery are hard to top. Charles Cumming’s latest novel, A Divided Spy, is very current in its concerns: Russian espionage directed against the West, and the threat ISIS-inspired violence poses to Western Europe. His protagonist, former MI6 officer Thomas Kell, returns to action, haunted by a lost love and eager to take revenge on the Russian FSB officer, Alexander Minasian, he holds responsible. When Minasian is spotted at an Egyptian resort with an older man in what appears to be a gay relationship, Kell sees an opportunity (through blackmail) to avenge the murder of Rachel Wallinger, his lover.

Resolving this plot line would be more than enough for most authors, but Cumming weaves in a further complication: a potential terror attack on British soil. A young British-Pakistani man, Shahid, has been recruited by ISIS for nefarious purposes, sent to the seaside resort of Brighton, where he blends into the community. When Kell is alerted to this jihadist plot, he must convince a skeptical MI6 establishment of the looming danger with time running out.

Cumming has researched the process by which young Muslim men in Great Britain are drawn into the sick jihadist fantasies of ISIS and this informs the novel in a powerful way. He provides a chilling portrait of Shahid, a man torn between new-found religious fervor and his upbringing in the secular West. Just as disturbing: Cumming suggests British counterintelligence is unprepared to deal with the threat of lone wolf terrorism. A Divided Spy can be read as a warning of what may lie ahead, and an implicit call for a ratcheting up of internal vetting and surveillance in the United Kingdom.

Here are past lists of top spy thrillers. You can click for:

2016’s top spy thrillers

2015’s top spy thrillers

2014’s top spy thrillers

2013’s top spy thrillers

Ten classic British spy novels

Click to view the video trailer for Jefferson Flanders’ critically-acclaimed: First Trumpet Cold War trilogy.

Click to purchase the First Trumpet novels: Herald Square, The North Building, and The Hill of Three Borders.