My Jesuits… the CIA and the Vatican…

One was tall, handsome, dark eyes that bore right into your brain.

The other, shorter, plain, mild but with eyes that bore right through your soul.

Reed Walsh, guestmaster at the Jesuit Residence in Manhattan, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency — the greatest spy force in the world.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Jesuit Cardinal from Argentina, now the spiritual father of 1.2 billion souls on Planet Earth.

Reed Walsh, you won't see on the nightly news… he lives in that magic world of the crime novel… he helps good guys find the bad guys…

Francis might well be on your nightly news… and in your daily paper… he lives in a little apartment in a big church in Rome. Helps the good guys recognize - and forgive - the bad guys…

The book man lives in my heart and mind.

The other guy came to visit my city, recently, and I swear he looked directly at my soul - right through my TV screen…

I felt I knew him - yet he was a man of mystery, as is the other guy…

Both are deep thinkers, deep feelers. Both are very, very complex men… don't be fooled by the smile and simple language.

You know a lot from the media about what makes the guy who was CIA tick… but you need to look quite carefully at this other unassuming guy… His inner machinery runs very deep… underneath all the quiet and unassumingness…

He is like a quiet giant volcano… what you see is only the tip…

He'll smile at you sweetly, say, "Please pray for me." And… "You try to put the Holy Spirit in a box… at your peril."

This quiet guy was a bouncer at a nightclub in Buenos Aires as a young man - he loved to tango!

This quiet guy has held some pretty heavy jobs: now the first Jesuit elected as the Pope!

Archbishop of Buenos Aires, President of the Bishops' Conference of Argentina, served as Jesuit Provincial in Argentina, got the second-most votes when the old Pope died in 2005.

Was active in political diplomacy and environmental advocacy
Trained as a chemical technician
Taught Lit and Psych in colleges
Got his Doctorate in Theology in Germany

No slouch, this little guy…
Don't be fooled by his meek smile…

As you know, the Jesuits are known as God's Soldiers, God's Marines, and The Company. No little club for the faint-hearted or meek or frail of heart!

The Society's commitment on earth is to accept orders anywhere and to endure any conditions. The Society of Jesus is also known as the papal "Elite Troops."

Jesuits have long been known as the trainers par excellence of lawyers and public officials. Jesuits priests often acted as confessors to Kings - and were noted for their intellectual ability and ability at debate among the European aristocracy.

The Nazi regime considered the Jesuits one of their most dangerous enemies! Many Jesuits were deported to concentration camps!

Maybe you wonder why I'm so devoted to the Jesuits?

Many years ago I was privileged to study the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius at a Jesuit Monastery in Wernersville, PA, with a crack cadre of brains and souls…

I was deeply touched by the intelligence, character and dedication of the Jesuits there and the high level and quality of humanity has remained a deep part of my own life.

As I watched this new Pope, the leader of so many men and women on this fragile earth, I pray he is strong enough to carry the mission he has been given in this trembling planet.

A man with his history and experience in governing, studies and commitments worldwide, is no simple soul.

This quiet man is not so quiet… he is not a "gentle Jesus, meek and mild." If you look at him hard you see he is a rock of ages…

But all of us, whatever our faiths or non-faiths, should be encouraged by the strength this quiet man shows — right through the screens of world-wide televisions…

Thelma Straw

P.S. What is my message to crime writers today?

Infuse your chapters with multi-layered people with many depths of emotion and feelings…

When Protagonists Wimp Out

They aren't your children. Really they're not. Not unless you run your family like a Dickensian orphanage, where the little dears are sent out to make a buck for you, and if they return empty-handed they are sent to bed without supper.

No. Your protagonists are characters who must do work. In the case of Belinda Zorn, heroine (or so I thought) of this thriller I'm trying to write, the work to be done is simply to smash a ring of German spies in 1915 New York City. This calls for certain qualities. First of all, she has to be brave, athletic, and clever. Quick-thinking. Active. She had two jobs, basically: defeating the spy ring and making the readers like her. Instead I find her drooping around, falling in love with one of the spies, dropping the ball, bursting into tears for hardly any reason. Ineffective. Unlikeable.

This has got to stop!! For the last time, Belinda, pull your socks up and get to work. Other women would love to have your job, you know. I can think of three or four. Today is your last chance. After that you will be mercilessly replaced. They don't tell us to kill our darlings for nothing, you know.

Kate Gallison

Comfort Reading—What Does It For You?

Last Sunday afternoon I slipped a disk. This came on top of a couple of weeks of increasing misery—the abscessed tooth, the itchy skin rash from the medicine for the abscessed tooth, and before that the other thing, what was it? Oh, crap, right, the colonoscopy. Increasing misery. After exhausting all the available reruns of Foyle's War I understood that the time had come to read something, preferably something comforting.

The First World War has always interested me. My grandfather was a Royal Canadian Army officer who fought in the trenches. So I like stories about that, and about spies and sabotage, like the story I told you last week where Werner Horn tried to blow up the Vanceboro bridge. In the course of researching Von Papen the spymaster, Germany's naval attache in the U.S., I came across a wonderful book by another spymaster of the early days of the war, a more competent man than von Papen, or so he says. Captain Franz von Rintalen wrote The Dark Invader: War-Time Reminiscences of a German Naval Intelligence Officer, about his days in the sabotage business before the United States entered the war.

American munitions factories were in full production, and though the U.S. was officially neutral, the arms were shipped only to the Allies, since the Central Powers were effectively blockaded by the British navy. Von Rintalin recruited an inventor of timed incendiary devices and a ring of Irish dockworkers in New York, who hid the devices on ships in places other than where the munitions were stored. Far at sea, fires broke out. The munitions had to be soaked with water to save the ships, ruining the cargo but sparing the men.

At some point the clumsy Von Papen was exposed and expelled from the country for activities of his own. He claimed diplomatic immunity as he traveled through Britain, but the British made him surrender his papers. The whole network of German spies and saboteurs in America was blown by the fleeing diplomat's check-book stubs, carefully inscribed with names and addresses. Von Rintalin went to jail. The Irishmen went home and started the Easter Rebellion.

But I was talking about comfort reading. My favorite book about spy work in the First World War is Manning Coles' Drink to Yesterday, a bittersweet account of the life of a British spy in Germany, followed by the more upbeat sequel, A Toast to Tomorrow. I could read those again and again, and after I did the thing to my back (it's getting better, by the way, not to worry) I rushed to the bookshelf (as best I could) and got them down to read once more.

I'm proud to say that the best of my own work has been considered comfort reading. My first agent told me she read one of my manuscripts while recovering from gum surgery. You might ask, why don't I write spy stories, if I like them so much? The answer is that the life of a secret agent is completely foreign to my experience. I would have nothing true to say about it. Okay, there was the time forty years ago, at the height of the divorce paranoia, when I dressed up in a wig to take the train to Manhattan and meet a man for a steak dinner. That was good for a couple of sinister thrills. I'll tell you the story sometime.

Or maybe not.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Tom, We Hardly Knew Ye…

When a young insurance salesman sold his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October, to the erudite Naval Institute Press for $5,000, a new sub-genre was launched and the rest is literary history!

For several stellar films, over 17 bestselling novels and several non-fiction military books, Tom Clancy's "genius for big, compelling plots" and his "natural narrative gift" have entranced hundreds of millions of devotees, and he remains one of the preeminent storytellers of our time.

With secret operational missions, warlords in Japan, Colombian drug busts, nuclear terrorists, European amusement park raids, to name a few themes, Tom took us almost to the end of a tumultuous civilization with unfailing authenticity and detail.

His thrillers, many written over twenty years ago, could well be current Page One stories of any major newspaper on the planet!

Command Authority, published after his untimely death in October, 2013, describes what is actually happening right now in May, 2014, in places like Crimea and Ukraine, with a fictional Russian president named Valeri Volodin. I feel like I'm reading Page One of the New York Times. Or watching the news on TV. For example, in this book, Gazprom, Russia's quasi-state-owned natural gas company features prominently.

The director of the CIA tells the U.S. national security team at one A.M. in the Cabinet Room, "If anyone doubts for a second that the Kremlin is responsible for this, they are hopelessly naïve." (P. 102)

And U.S. President Jack Ryan says, "We've seen this over and over… Volodin is playing to his own room." (P. 103)
"Kiev has turned into a hotbed of intelligence activity." (P. 129)

A common view for years has been that the spy genre was owned by the Brits—writers like Graham Greene, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsythe, John le Carre.

But the emphasis has shifted. With a changing world of intelligence gathering, terrorism, espionage, dirty tricks, Americans like Clive Cussler, Nelson DeMille, Robert Littell, Alan Furst, Charles McCarry, Vince Flynn, David Hagberg, WEB Griffin—are considered to be some of the greatest writers in the genre, along with Tom Clancy.

As I revisit some of Clancy's writing, I am impressed by his incredibly sensitive prose, his moving insights into human nature. Twenty years ago I galloped through his pages like a hungry animal! Now, I savor slowly the emotional depth in his pages, like I would a glass of aged Laphroaig!

In my earlier reading I missed a lot of the real essence of Clancy's understanding of the human psyche and his gifted ability to portray the heart and emotions of his brave warriors.

Since the death of this gentle giant, a guy who was refused personal combat duty for his country because of poor eyesight, I hope my renewed respect for his emotional insights will make me a better writer!

You may ask, who was my favorite character in Tom's books. Not Jack Ryan, the hero in most of them, a man who rose to become POTUS, the leader of the free world.

I favored a young man named John Kelly, the hero in Without Remorse, published in 1993, with one of my favorite Virgilian lines in the front of the book— "Arma virumque cano," as well as John Dryden's wise line, "Beware the fury of a patient man."

Kelly, a former Navy SEAL and Vietnam vet, still getting over the accidental death of his wife, befriends a young woman named Pam, who is abused, then killed by American drug dealers. At the same time, the Pentagon prepares to rescue Americans from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp and assigns John Kelly, now code-named John Clark, to spearhead the operation.

John then fights on two fronts, his duty to his country in Asia and his now personal mission against deadly drug dealers in Baltimore, the killers of young Pam.

Without Remorse shows us the vulnerable,intelligent young fighter more than other books, where John features as a more mature C.I.A agent, a national icon in a secret role. If he had lived, would Clancy have a given John Clark another book like Without Remorse? I think so.

Today, I wish I could drive down to Maryland and visit with Tom. "How did you know so much about the human heart and soul, the lacrimae rerum of life?" I'd ask him.

Would he have answered? We'll never know… Dear Reader, what do you think?

I really, really miss Tom Clancy…

T. Jackie Straw

P.S. This also brings loving memories of our talented colleague, Marty Meyers, and to his beloved wife, Annette, one of the great pillars of the American mystery family, my friend for many years.

Love and prayers to you both. Love conquers all…
TJS

The Espionage Thriller: Post-War and Post-9/11

Al and I have been friends for two decades; we met in a writer’s group (where else?) along with Theasa Tuohy. Being a newspaper man by profession, Al’s a fast writer and with an imagination that works at warp speed, he already has a back list awaiting publication. 

After serving with the Army overseas, Albert Ashforth worked for two newspapers. He is the author of three books, numerous stories and articles. His espionage thriller, THE RENDITION, was described by a reviewer as "smoothly written, fast-moving and suspenseful." He is a professor at SUNY and lives in New York City. -Robert Knightly

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The espionage novel is a relatively narrow literary genre, and as the world political situation over the last 70 years has gone from bad to worse and back again, the fortunes of the espionage novel have also see-sawed up and down – but with a difference. When the world’s political situation takes a turn for the worse, the situation of espionage novels takes a turn for the better. And vice-versa.

During the 1920’s the State Department established an office responsible for breaking codes and reading messages sent between other nation’s embassies and their capitals. It was our country’s first attempt to establish an intelligence agency. But when Henry L. Stimson, then Secretary of State, learned what the office was doing, he immediately had it closed down and famously said, “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail!”

Espionage novels could hardly be written in a time when national leaders regarded one another as gentlemen. Needless to say, things changed with the arrival on the world stage of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, both of whom began throwing their weight around during the 1930’s. It was hardly a coincidence that three early and successful writers of espionage novels, Eric Ambler, Helen MacIness and John Buchan, also emerged around this time.

Before the 1930’s, very few espionage thrillers were written, and it is easy to see why. In order to have spy novels you have to have spies, and the United States didn’t establish the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, until 1944. Something else you need is a tense international situation. You need a foreign government readers really dislike in order to make the gritty, distasteful job of spying acceptable. First Nazi Germany and then Communist Russia filled that bill very nicely. The Cold War provided both spies and a fierce rivalry, and as the United States and Russia competed against each other with every means at hand short of going to war, espionage – the KGB versus the CIA – was the obvious way to try and beat out your rival. The result was that the last six or seven decades have been a truly great time for the writers of international spy thrillers.

Although Ian Fleming’s charismatic James Bond is the best known intelligence agent of the Cold War years, John le Carré’s rather drab George Smiley is the most realistic.

Alex Klear, the hero of my novel, The Rendition, also began his career during the Cold War, and he is closer to Smiley than to Bond. He recalls spending much of his time doing the same gritty, dangerous job that many of our intelligence people stationed in Europe did during those years: recruiting and running spies behind the Iron Curtain. Although governments sanctimoniously maintain that the spies they recruit from the other side are motivated by ideological beliefs, the truth is that most come over because they’ve had their arms twisted – in other words, they’ve been blackmailed. Alex and his partner, Buck, often acting on information supplied by the National Security Agency, did the twisting, first recruiting and then running their agents for as long as they could provide useful information. But Alex, who is fluent in German and knows some Russian, finds he is an anachronism after November 1989, the month in which the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. With Russia no longer an enemy, Alex realizes he is no longer needed, and decides to retire.

Although the world cheered the disappearance of the Wall, which was the perfect symbol of Communist oppression, espionage writers didn’t. One espionage writer, Len Deighton, was forced to make last-minute changes to a novel about Berlin, Spy Sinker, but he wasn’t the only espionage writer caught by surprise by this sudden development. The blunt truth is, when world tensions decline, so do the fortunes of spy novelists. During the 1990’s, with borders now open and old rivals becoming trading partners, there were no jobs for spies and no enemies to justify the betrayals and dirty tricks which are part and parcel of espionage thrillers. During the 1990’s, espionage writers had to find new topics to write about.

But with the attack on the World Trade Center things changed yet again. Not since the demise of Hitler and Stalin have espionage writers had such a hated figure as Osama bin Laden. Once again, the end could justify the means, and we could again start opening each other’s mail.

In the years since 9/11, one development in particular has helped make espionage thrillers more popular and more significant. Our government has become tight-lipped. Although the public knows we are fighting a war on terror for which we are spending hundreds of billions, there is very little information about it in the newspapers. Savvy readers are discovering that one of the best sources for finding out what’s going on is the spy thriller, which can take them places even newspaper correspondents can’t go.

For example: Let’s suppose the American ambassador to Afghanistan were to meet with President Karzai to discuss some kind of crisis. If news people are denied access, they can only report that the meeting took place. They can’t make up quotes or write anything they don’t know to be true. The writer of fiction, however, can imagine what the two men might have spoken about and describe a stormy exchange with the president raising his voice and the ambassador storming out of the palace. If the writer has done his job well, he might well have given a roughly accurate representation of what actually happened, and there is nothing to prevent him from connecting the meeting to a subsequent real political development which might involve his hero and heroine. And he could go on from there. The thriller writer is limited only by his imagination and his knowledge of the topic.

And believe me, most thriller writers are experts in the areas they write about.

Since the publication of The Rendition, I have had any number of people ask me, “Say, what is a rendition anyway? Isn’t that when somebody sings a song?”

Well, it used to be, but now the term has an additional meaning, one coined by our intelligence agencies probably because of its lack of either good or evil connotations.

Since 9/11, our government has unleashed a bag of dirty tricks aimed at making life miserable for those who would do us harm. One trick involves kidnapping a terrorist from a foreign country where he might be strolling around openly and enjoying life to the fullest, secure in the belief he is beyond the reach of the American government. A “rendition” takes place when the terrorist, against his will, is snatched off the street or perhaps even grabbed in his home, as one target actually was. In all likelihood, he is transported to a nation friendly to the United States, where he is subjected to “enhanced interrogation,” which means his captors use methods for extracting information that are not permissible in the United States or under the Geneva Convention. Probably the friendly nation passes this information back to us, and we go after more terrorists.

Although Secretary Stimson would be in shock were he to see what’s going on today, we thriller writers are in seventh heaven. In addition to carrying out renditions, our government attacks other nations with drones, hacks into other nations’ computer systems and conducts “black ops.”

When the government doesn’t want to be held responsible for undertaking certain kinds of dirty tricks, it sometimes sanctions a “black” operation, in other words an operation that lacks all traces of government involvement. This is fine as long as things go smoothly, but when they go awry and the government invokes “plausible denial,” it’s nearly always our intelligence officers who find themselves holding the bag. In such cases, they have roughly the same standing with a foreign government that a bounty hunter might have -- in other words, none -- and this is the predicament in which Alex finds himself when the rendition he is involved in goes off the rails.

In the course of the story, Alex bugs a phone, breaks into someone’s home, helps a guy escape jail and of course takes part in a couple of renditions. Although under Secretary Stimson’s definition, he would hardly qualify as a “gentleman,” he makes the grade as a warrior and a survivor.

Albert Ashforth