"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," said Tallyrand, an old pol cynical about progress and change. Still, there's more than a kernel of truth in his observation, which is maybe why at a certain stage, every society seems obsessed by fashion.
Politics and human nature may resist improvement, but fashion's mysterious currents provide novelty. William Boyd's new historical spy novel, Gabriel's Moon, got me thinking about literary fashions. However creative or imaginative we are, our work seems inescapably set in our own time and in the style of the moment.
Gabriel's Moon, literate and well done, is in a very British style. Indeed, the plot owes a lot to my own absolute favorite in the genre, Eric Ambler's Journey into Fear, which itself owes big debts to John Buchan.
Even if you have not read Journey into Fear, you will recognize the outline: an innocent civilian, in this case, a well-educated engineer, is pressed into service in a dangerous foreign country. The little job he is assigned, getting a roll of film back to the UK, does not seem too dangerous, but precautions are taken, and the would-be courier is booked onto an aging freighter with a small group of passengers.
What could possibly go wrong on this small ship, surely too obscure to have attracted malign notice? Plenty, of course, and our hero soon moves from semi-complacency to a desperate search for friends, to an awareness that he is alone and must rely on his own resources absolutely.
Such a good plot! In Boyd's variant, set not in Amblers pre WW2 but in the early 1960's, Gabriel Dax, successful travel writer, is asked to buy a drawing from a reputable if not exactly famous, Spanish artist. Dax has occasionally done such little favors for his older brother, who is something in the British foreign services. He makes the purchase without trouble and returns home, because this novel is rather more expansive than Ambler's.
The modern thriller must take time to flesh out its characters and give them back stories and complexities that earlier works indicated with a few well chosen lines. Dax has a history of childhood trauma – a doozy it must be admitted; a florid literary style, and eventually an analyst, one of the more interesting characters in the novel.
He also has a girlfriend, Loretta, who works at a Wimpy Burger and whom he sees as exotic because she's working class. Loretta, in turn, introduces him as her "posh boyfriend" which gives her a certain style and very modern, too.
There was, to my memory, only one female character in Journey. Dax has not only a girlfriend and a female analyst, but his spy control is Faith Green, a chilly woman whom he rather perversely finds seductive. Both are very much 21st century women, although in 1960-62, the attitudes of male thriller writers skewed traditional.
There are other stylistic differences, too. While Ambler's novel cut straight to the chase, Boyd's has time to consider the mystery of Dax's childhood (the novel is a spy story wrapped around a mystery); the costs of secrecy and deception; and the restraints of the class system.
He explores the psychology of double agents, a reflection of his fascination with Kim Philby, the notorious British agent, and manages to first extricate Dax and then trap him in a most satisfactory manner, eventually like Ambler's hero, on shipboard.
Boyd's well done Gabriel's Moon is interesting stylistically because it presents an era that itself provided plenty of spy thrillers. Moon reads convincingly today but the novel's attitudes, timing, and style are resolutely of our time and to our taste, as a glance at any equivalent novel from the early 1960's will show.
So was Tallyrand wrong? Not entirely. At least in the literary world, some things don't change entirely but morph one way and another in fashionable variations.
****
The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.
The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:
Fat
Leonard is the worst U.S. Navy scandal since Tailhook.And while Tailhook was about sex – not sex, per se, but the toxic fratboy,
locker-room culture of carrier aviation – Fat Leonard is about greed, with a
side order of espionage, and general embarrassment all around.
Leonard
Francis headed up Glenn Marine, a Singapore-based maritime services
contractor.Over a period beginning
roughly in 2006 (but probably earlier) and lasting until Leonard’s arrest in
2013, Glenn Marine and its subsidiaries provided port security and other infrastructure
support to the U.S. Seventh Fleet.During that time, NCIS, the Navy’s criminal investigators, opened
twenty-seven separate inquiries into Glenn Marine, and then closed every single one, without result.It’s probably impossible to calculate how many
millions DoD and the Navy got burned for.
The fraudulent
billing, and the ongoing security failure, continued
for all those years because Leonard and his team infiltrated
and compromised Navy chain of command.Defense
industry procurement is ripe for abuse.No-bid
contracts are common.Leonard bribed
admirals.Cash, travel, luxury gifts,
escort services.What he got in return was
inside information about ship deployments and naval maneuvers, much of it
classified.He was able to redirect Navy
vessels to ports controlled by Glenn Marine, and overbilled for fuel, food, water,
and sewage removal.
To
date, five naval personnel have been court-martialed, and twenty-eight have
pled guilty in federal court.This
number includes eleven admirals, thirteen captains, a Marine Corps colonel and
an NCIS special agent, and a few hapless lower ranks.Logistics, operations, systems, supply, the
entire food chain.The point being that
it wasn’t just money leaking through
the cracks.These guys gave away the U.S. defense
posture in the Pacific - the Order of Battle, generally – but more specifically,
ship positions and readiness, an enormous intelligence advantage to any
potential adversary.
Now,
whether Leonard was or is under the discipline of Chinese state security is speculation,
but information is currency.Leonard was
lining his pockets, and maybe saving for a rainy day.
Leonard
had been in custody in San Diego,
awaiting sentencing.He was under house
arrest and wearing an ankle monitor.He
was subject to round-the-clock surveillance.A week ago Sunday, he discarded his ankle monitor and slipped away.He was missing for seven hours before the U.S. Marshals
Service was alerted.Not to belabor the obvious,
but San Diego is a forty-minute drive from Mexico. You do
the math.Fat Leonard’s in the
wind.
Usually SleuthSayers learn spycraft from the invisible-ink pen of David Edgerley Gates. A month ago, Janice Law slipped past the yet-to-be-built Berlin Wall to recall David Downing. I depend heavily on my SleuthSayers colleagues for reading material, and I ordered up Zoo Station.
The tale has a much older ‘golden age’ feel of the 1960s and I had to double-check the copyright of the first in the series, 2007. The initial half of the book is slow paced but it builds tension out of proportion to pages turned. I wondered how the author accomplished that, and I’m not the only one. One critic’s comment on the back cover says, “Downing has shown that he can produce that creepy sense of paranoia along with the best of them.”
Furthermore, the book contains a feature I’ve rarely encountered outside a school textbook, a ‘Reading Group Guide’. Question 9 reads: “Given the relative lack of overt violence, how does Downing create the novel’s sense of menace?”
Yeah. How did he do that?
I have a few notions, but other readers will surely come up with better insights. Mostly I credit the immersive nature of the story where the author puts us in the scene with the perfect serving of detail.
The story’s set as the 1930s draw to a close. Perceptive people smell war on the horizon, but live in hope it doesn’t come. Kristallnacht has left its mark. Kindertransport is under way. Jews aren’t permitted to work, travel, or dine in restaurants. While the word ‘ghetto’ hasn’t yet arisen, Jewry are evermore isolated in restricted parts of cities.
The author has allowed history to do much of the heavy lifting. Much of life seems normal, ordinary, but it won’t remain so. We know the horrors that are coming; we want to warn the innocent, tell them to flee for their lives.
Whereas trains and train stations appear in backdrops and settings, mentions of government buildings feel eerily ominous. Downing mentions 15-foot high doors, evoking the architecture envisioned by Albert Speer.
No worthy espionage story would be complete without Soviet spies. One Russian spymaster isn’t so bad, but woe be he who crosses the path of Stalinist spymistress Irina Borskaya. She eats her young.
The novel’s protagonist, British journalist John Russell, advances through a character arc from somnambulance to getting his rear into gear, helping to get the word out while saving a life or two. His actress girlfriend suggests a hint of Cabaret, but with far more gravitas than Sally Bowles.
A minor note jarred me. Russell is virtually broke when we first meet him. He lives simply, but he drinks goldwasser. It seems a pretension more in line with 007 than our impecunious reporter. I excused the gold-flecked drink on the grounds it was a product of Gdańsk (Danzig), but the affectation seemed peculiar.
Along the line, our hero obtains a ten-year-old motorcar, a Hanomag. I thought myself reasonably familiar with cars of bygone eras, and those of the late 1920s are the peak of design– the Mercedes SSK, the Cord, the Packard, the Dusenberg, the Bugatti, and the gorgeous Auburn.
I hadn’t heard of Hanomag. I had to stop to look it up. It turned out to be one of the homeliest automobiles ever made. Easiest way to tell the front from the back is to look for the single, motorcycle-style headlight, on the left in this photo. Oh well, our hero’s Hanomag ran most of the time and many folks had no cars at all.
As Janice suggests, Zoo Station reads as old style spycraft with luggage storage and postal drops, suitcases with false bottoms, and shadowy men who make others disappear. Downing’s novels aren’t nearly as gloomy as those of, say, John Le Carré.
When you’re bored with the current digital library on your Kindle or Kobo, stop in a musty used book store and pick up a dog-eared copy of Zoo Station. Go old school.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase Jane Austen, that after a certain age the phrase, “they don’t make them like they used to,” enters one’s vocabulary. Material goods of all kinds, favorite foodstuffs, athletes, movies, political figures are all set against the scale of nostalgia and found wanting. Thrillers, too.
When I started writing, one of my idols was Eric Ambler, the god of suspense. Knowledgeable, skillfully plotted, and free of stylistic affectations, his short books did not deal with the big bangs, heavy weaponry, and super-efficient operatives that fill so many modern thrillers and spy novels.
His protagonists tended to be amateurs (part of the old British tradition) without too many pretensions or illusions and with a distinct lack of idealistic posturing. They tended to find themselves in what might be called ordinary life dangers. They weren’t facing the death ray but the possibility of being caught red-handed with incriminating documents, fake passports, or ambiguous passengers. Danger lurked, to be sure, but so did the possibility of a humiliating unmasking and, from the combination, Ambler extracted an amazing amount of suspense.
Zoo Station, start of the Russell novels
They certainly don’t make thrillers like that any more, preferring even amateurs like Lisbeth Salander of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to have preternatural abilities in everything from computing to martial arts. So, I was pleased to discover David Downing’s Zoo Station, the first in a series of half a dozen novels about John Russell, an Anglo-American correspondent in pre-war Berlin.
Russell is an interesting character, a former Communist and a veteran of WW1. He dislikes the Nazis, but he wants desperately to remain in the Reich where his son Paul, age 11, lives with his German mother, and where the charming Effie is a B level actress.
They are his reasons for not wanting to rock the boat, and he only moves out of his comfort zone after he begins tutoring the intelligent Wiesner girls, whose desperate parents are trying to prepare them for a safe exit.
Silesian Station, next up in the series
His affection for the Wiesmers, combined with a mysterious offer to ghost write articles for Pravda, sets in motion the, at first, rather leisurely plot. Russell’s entanglement with not one, not two, but three spy agencies soon commences, and the way Downing works out the unraveling is a real old fashioned example of clever plotting.
If Zoo Station is not quite like what they used to write, it is a welcome variant. Less brutal and cynical than Philip Kerr’s excursions into the same territory, it still conveys the terror of the regime, the desperation of its Jewish citizens and the despair of anti-Nazi patriots, while offering suspense without firearms or official status.
John Russell is one of the amateurs of espionage and he’s a good one.
One of
my Facebook groups, The Deighton Dossier
(link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/deightondossier),
put up a flare that The Ipcress File
was newly available on a KL Studio DVD, and I immediately snapped it up.I’m happy to report that it’s a fine color
transfer, with nice, deep blacks, something the picture requires - and it’s a deal
at $14 ($20 for the Blu-Ray).
It’s
worth remembering that this was a ground-breaker when it was released.Dr. No
had dropped in ‘62, From Russia With
Love in ‘63, and Goldfinger in
‘64.The
Ipcress File slipped in just ahead of Thunderball,
in late 1965.Bond was a huge phenomenon
– and Thunderball was the picture
where Bond turned the corner toward eye-popping FX set pieces: stunts and
spectacle.Not to diminish how flat-out
terrific they were, and the vigorous confidence that Sean Connery brought to
the table.I was just as ga-ga for Bond
as anybody, and Bond set the bar high.
The Ipcress File is sly.It has the confidence of the ordinary, of
homely detail.It begins with Harry
making coffee.He’s a little fussy, and
fastidious.He wears a pair of rather
thick-framed glasses.You’re not
thinking some smoothie at the baccarat table, you’re wondering if he’s wandered
into the wrong movie, or you did.And
then the focus begins to skew.Otto
Heller’s camera angles and Sidney Furie’s fey direction, a sort of oops, we led
you to think one way, when actually you should have been looking at the fish
tank off to one side (this is a rhetorical device, there are in fact no fish
tanks, for which we could be grateful), and we begin to pay closer attention.
The
device that Ipcress File uses is to
make the ordinary sinister.Simple
details seem to gain weight.And then
they don’t.Bluejay writes a phone
number down for Harry, but it’s disconnected.Harry’s aggravated.Dalby takes
the scrap of paper, and turns it over.It’s a program for a musical recital.Not the number, Dalby points out,
but the piece of paper it’s written on.The tradecraft isn’t a mystery.It’s elemental.
All of
Ipcress is like this.Half the time, it seems like everybody’s
scoring points on each other.The class
issues are worn on their sleeve.“You’ve
got a good job for a passed-over major,” Ross tells Dalby.“A word in your shell-like ear,” Dalby says
to Harry, putting him in his place.This
fuels the whole story.Ross and Dalby
are offering Harry a place above the salt, and both pretending it’s of no consequence
to them.Dalby and Ross wear regimental ties, but
Harry, in the end, really doesn’t give a shit.One of them betrayed him.
The Ipcress File made
Michael Caine a star.I know, Alfie, but that just confirmed it.He’d done Zulu,
a couple of years earlier, and he’d read for the part that went to James Booth,
the slyboots lower-class enlisted, private Hook.Cy Enfield, the director, cast him as
Bromhead, the aristocratic officer.Only
because Enfield
was a Yank, and didn’t know any better, Caine later said, because a Brit
director would never have cast me.Class
is cast in stone.
Accent
is destiny.
The
sound of Bow Bells.Caine is a
Cockney.So is Roger Moore, point of
fact.He had to pretend to a kind of
generic mid-Atlantic, that wouldn’t fool a Brit, but might work on the rest of
us.When the two of them worked on Bullseye! together, they were clearly
having a lot of fun.Bob Hoskins once
remarked that Michael Caine opened the doors ‘for the rest of us.’I think you might go back to, say, Albert
Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning.It was a time coming.Rita Tushingham in A Taste of Honey.
I don’t think there was any one single
moment.
The
Ipcress File comes close to that single moment.It doesn’t date that badly.The brainwashing parts are pretty lame, but
the personal and political tensions are vivid.It gives us immediate difficulties.We might make fun of those contrived shots through the cymbals, but the
revealed accidents are sudden and genuine.
My sister gave me Charlotte Gray, and I left it lying about for a while. I wasn't familiar with Sebastian Faulks, nor was I terrifically compelled by the jacket copy, and when I did start reading it, I resisted. It seemed too domestic, it didn't appear to have much urgency, but then I fell into the rhythms of the story, and it caught me up. Charlotte Gray isn't a thriller, quite, although it has thriller elements, and it isn't a romance, either, although it's enormously romantic, in its own way. It's more of a meditation on those themes. Which doesn't mean Faulks is trying on literary costumes, or condescending to the genre; he's feeling his way into it, as if it were new to us.
The story is about a young Scots woman who's recruited to the Special Operations Executive during WWII and dropped into Occupied France to service a Resistance network. SOE did a lot of dodgy stuff in the war, some of it marginal, some of it extremely effective, and they had no problem using women for clandestine work. More than a few of their number were compromised, tortured, and then executed by the Germans. As with an Alan Furst novel, or a le Carre, we learn about tradecraft, and the threat environment, and the strengths and flaws of character, but there's an interesting simplicity about Charlotte herself. As she inhabits her French cover story, she uses 'Dominique' as a counterpoint, one step removed, a frame of reference at right angles - not an alibi, but a different narrator, somebody else telling her own story. Charlotte is herself well aware of the ironies, but as a device, it allows her to hold the story up to the light and reexamine it. This isn't studied or self-conscious: the author isn't breaking in, it's the character who wonders what part she's playing. I found it compelling, and more than that, completely convincing. You might think, Jeez, c'mon, the SS and the Vichy milice are hot on your trail, you don't have time to second-guess your place in all this, but it makes Charlotte real. There's an authenticity of feeling, throughout the book. I think what threw me, in the beginning, is that the story isn't told as a narative of event. The episodes are emotional, which just sounds unlikely, coming from a male writer. You're used to the idea that a guy is going to present building blocks, a structure, rising action. It took me by surprise to realize the story lay, not in what was happening, exactly, but in how people engaged with what was happening. Even a fatal hinge point, the moment where Charlotte and Julien realize they have to assassinate a collaborator, is necessary because of who they are, and its inevitability lies in their sympathy for one another. Of course, the book is not entirely interior, and there's more than enough razzle-dazzle, as it develops, but I'm still struck by the method, the lack of the literal, even though the story is full of concrete, obdurate detail. There is, as it happens, a movie adaption. The novel came out in 1999, and the movie in 2001. I'm now curious to see it. Movies are nothing if not literal, in the sense that you see an object presented. I can't quite imagine how this reconnaissance of a story, this narrative of suggestion, would translate. Charlotte Gray isn't dreamlike, it's in fact very specific, but not specifically about the visible. It's specific about the heart.
Like a lot of people, I always looked forward to the new John le Carré. I admit I found The Looking-Glass War unconvincing - for very specific reasons: it was my old operational area, as it was le Carre's, and I thought the premise was faulty. As for The Naive and Sentimental Lover, I've never managed more than the first fifty pages. But in general, what an astonishing run. Then, after The Little Drummer Girl, we have (dare I say?) a falling-off. I don't buy into A Perfect Spy, despite the amazing portrait of Ronnie, and how clearly the book resonates with le Carre himself. He roars back with The Russia House, but follows up with three more duds. Tailor of Panama is a full-on score, and then four, or even six, passable novels that limp in. I know we're holding him to higher standard, but that's exactly the point. So, let go of your apprehension. I'm here to tell you that Agent Running in the Field (one of his more clever titles, by the by) hits it out of the park. The old boy definitely isn't hanging up his spikes just yet. I like the way he's been telling his stories, lately. The impatience with exposition, when he used to be more lapidary. Dutch Leonard once said, skip all that crap the reader is going to skip. It's unnecessary. If you trust you're in honest hands - and who more honest than Dutch or John le Carre? - oh, wait. Either one would cheerfully lead you down the garden path, and you know full well you'd follow along without a moment's hesitation. Agent Running is in many ways a return to form, although he mercifully leaves out the domestic betrayals this time around, the defections in place, and concentrates on the operation, its collateral, and the product. The scope is necessarily tight. The guy himself isn't some old soldier, turfed out and weary, but mid-career and restless. You might wonder, in the moment, why he so credulously accepts a challenge from a younger self, when the kid so generously telegraphs his own disaffection, but the weakness here is vanity. In fact, when Nat, our hero, takes on the job he's offered, he clearly thinks it's beneath him. Agent Running is really more Smiley's People than any of the recent books. For all that Karla used Ann to blind Smiley to the serpent Haydon, the narrative spine of Smiley's People is always Eyes On The Prize. Karla is looking for a legend for a girl. This is the single detail that drives the story. Smiley fills in the context. In the new book, context appears in the foreground, but of course misleadingly, because as always, the devil is in the details. I don't know if you'll find this as interesting as I do. Legacy of Spies was elegiac and regretful, a swan song, the old boys revisiting past triumphs over a snifter, and not liking their history revised - although George Smiley had a bracing cameo, still with all his buttons and most of his teeth. Agent Running revisits not just Smiley's People, but Call for the Dead, le Carre's first book. It's a story about treachery, how not? That's le Carre's stock in trade. What's refreshing, oddly, is the very retrograde approach: sources and methods.
"I've got a story to tell you," Ricki Tarr says. "It's all about spies." I fell into a familiar comfort zone this past weekend, and watched Smiley's People again. I needed something reliable and even stately, after the random disturbances of late.
George Smiley was introduced in Call for the Dead (filmed in 1967 as The Deadly Affair), but he slips out from the wings, almost apologetically, and takes center stage in the Karla trilogy: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honorable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People. He has a couple of curtain calls later on, but they're essentially cameos. Smiley's been played by James Mason, Denholm Elliott, and Gary Oldman. For most of us, including John le Carre, Alec Guinness holds the crown. Nor has le Carre been poorly served, for the most part, by the movies. Deadly Affair and Spy Who Came in from the Cold are both excellent. On the down side, the feature film iterations of The Little Drummer Girl, The Russia House and Tinker, Tailor aren't as successful - probably due to the necessities of compression. A Wanted Man and The Tailor of Panama fall somewhere in the middle. The books work better as TV miniseries, when they're given room to breathe. Not that the long form is foolproof. A Perfect Spy and The Night Manager both suffer from being over-faithful and leaving in too much.
Which is where the BBC/Guinness versions of Tinker, Tailor and Smiley's People seem so exact, rigorous narratives that still allow for silence, melancholy, inhalation, even the appearance of accident, although no detail is accidental in George Smiley's world. "Topicality is always suspect," he says, in Tinker, Tailor. In other words, when you buy intelligence product, it pays to be skeptical if the product fits your needs too perfectly. And he's of course proven right: the Witchcraft material is manufactured, it's been carefully massaged to send all the wrong signals. My particular weakness for Smiley's People is I think due to its structural integrity. It doesn't have, for example, anything like the extraordinary supporting turn by Ian Richardson as Bill Haydon - although Bernard Hepton as Toby Esterhase comes close. It simply seems all of a piece.
Originally, the producers meant to follow the story arc of the complete trilogy, starting with Tinker, Tailor, following with Honorable Schoolboy, and wrapping with Smiley's People. Schoolboy apparently presented production difficulties, and they skipped it. Quite honestly, Schoolboy is the weakest of the three books, but more to the point, Smiley isn't in fact the lead actor. It makes dramatic sense to move on to book three. (It actually took five years in between.) When it was first shown on the BBC, radio guy Terry Wogan ran a weekly feature called, "Does anybody know what's going on?" Let's storyboard Smiley's People out.
The old lady in Paris writes the General in London. He, in turn, takes a bullet in the face on Hampstead Heath. George, the old man's former vicar, is called in to clean up the mess and put the whole thing to bed. George smells a rat. What is it Toby Esterhase tells him? Karla is looking for a legend for a girl (a legend, in the jargon, is a manufactured biography, a cover story). And with only this to go on, George begins to tease out the plot. The plausible back-story, the collateral. Otto's pal in Hamburg, the sex-club owner. The spymaster's mistress, and her hidden child. The secret Swiss bank account and the fumbling Russian diplomat in Bern. The long coat-tails of KGB's foreign operations, and why in this particular instance the organs themselves can't be trusted.
Of course it's a tangle. How not? The method is that we learn only as much as George learns, although he might very well be a step ahead of us, from habit and his larger experience. But how he proceeds has a firm logic. Toby, then Connie Sachs, which leads him to Claus at the club in Hamburg, to the kids house-sitting Otto's place, and the campground, with Otto's boat moored in the shallows and the music unbearably loud, to drown out the torment. The formality, the inexorability, makes it all the more satisfying. Smiley gathers his resources, and closes his hand. The title is a pun, not simply Smiley's crew, his favored inside team, but his people in the sense that Kipling used it, Mine Own People, Great Britain and the British. There isn't much of the moral relativism le Carre is sometimes faulted for. Smiley's defeat of Karla isn't ambiguous, in spite of the cigarette lighter Karla discards on the cobblestones. The win is personal.
Smiley, then, represents a certain kind of Englishness. Decent and disciplined. The war generation, We Happy Few. They took on Hitler, and then fought the Cold War. "Survivor of every battle since Thermopylae," Connie Sachs says. Le Carre himself might smile, and shake his head, to imagine George characterized that way. But he's said in the past that a country's spy services reflect the nation's character. Mossad, KGB, MI-6, CIA. The way they conduct operations reveals their inner nature and their calculation of political gain or loss. Smiley is also betrayed by his wife (with his best friend, who's also of course a Soviet asset), and you could make the case that British SIS, once dominant, is the cuckold of the intelligence world, abandoned and orphaned by its CIA stepchild. Or perhaps that's too fanciful. Let's just say that Smiley, like Alec Guinness, is emblematic of his time and class. We might even be allowed to think of class as the key to Smiley, his protective coloration. He navigates the currents, eddies in still waters, and waits his turn.
Some of you might remember - not that long ago! - when I did a couple of blog posts (Mata Hari in South Dakota) about Russian spy Maria Butina and her paramour, South Dakota's own GOP operative, Paul Erickson. They lived here in Sioux Falls and Ms. Butina did the South Dakota speaking tour, representing her own [Russian] Right to Bear Arms organization. The tour - all about God, Guns and Let's Be Friends With Russia! - included SDSU, USD, and the Teenage Republicans Camp in the Black Hills. The last was an interesting example of how you should be careful who you bring in as a guest speaker, considering the number of past and current South Dakota legislators (including recently elected US Representative Dusty Johnson!) were counselors, attendees, or just there for the party. Bet Dusty's banging his head every day over this little tweet:
Well, now Maria's pled guilty to conspiring to be a foreign agent in the U.S., and is cooperating with authorities.
Her partner, in more ways than one, was Paul Erickson - whose resume includes:
National political director / campaign manager for the 1992 Pat Buchanan presidential campaign,
Advisor to both of Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns.
South Dakota Trump campaign, claimed he was on the Trump presidential transition team. and during the 2016 NRA convention sent an e-mail to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump (via Trump's campaign advisor Rick Dearborn and then-Senator Jeff Sessions) with the subtle subject line: "Kremlin Connection."
Mr. Erickson has been hiding in Virginia, and has recently "lawyered up", which is the best idea he's had in years. For one thing, he's "Person 1" who, according to the Statement of Offence, "agreed and conspired, with a Russian government official [that’s Alexander Torshin, Russian billionaire and close personal friend of Vladimir Putin] and at least one other person [ooo! a new mystery player!] for Butina to act in the United States under the direction of [Torshin] without prior notification to the Attorney General.” The purpose of this conspiracy was for Butina to “establish unofficial lines of communication with Americans having power and influence over U.S. policies… for the benefit of the Russian Federation.” Butina acknowledges that she used the National Rifle Association to forward the Russian Plan, because she believed the NRA "had influence over" the Republican Party. (Thanks, Cory Heidelberger, for the summation)
NOTE: The NRA is STILL staying silent as a tomb about Ms. Butina, despite the fact that there are pictures out the wazoo of her at various NRA functions (see below),
even though both Ms. Butina and the missing Mr. Torshin were made lifetime members of the NRA.
AND former NRA president David Keene visited Moscow at Mr. Torshin's behest.
AND the NRA spent a lot of money on Donald Trump's campaign. $30 million, to be specific. All of this is currently being investigated.
Ms. Butina in 2014 with James W. Porter II, then president of the N.R.A.; Wayne LaPierre, the group’s executive vice president; and Rick Santorum, the former senator.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/us/politics/maria-butina-nra-russia-influence.html
NOTE: Russian President Vladimir Putin - who was eager for her release while she was first arrested - currently says he never heard of her. Considering that Alexander Torshin has gone missing and is rumored murdered, Ms. Butina may want to try to stay in the US after trial, rather than be deported back home.
Meanwhile, though, a lot of people have asked me the simple question: why South Dakota? Why did she come here, other than for Paul Erickson's rugged good looks?
Well, South Dakota is a large rural state with a very small population (under 900,000). Our politicians are extremely, notoriously frugal - i.e., cheap. Our current assets are $3.13 trillion (yes, you read that right) in commercial and savings bank assets. We have the weakest reporting regulations you can imagine. The FBI recently busted a major New York auto theft ring using South Dakota because, "South Dakota, a state that lets people register out-of-state vehicles by mail and wasn’t thoroughly checking to see if they were stolen, the FBI said." (Citation) We also have (among?) the most pro-business laws regarding credit cards, payday loans, and setting up LLCs and their like in the country. In my last blog I mentioned that Butina and Erickson formed a couple of LLCs here in Sioux Falls - which, it turns out, may have been laundering money from Torshin and from an as-yet unidentified Russian oligarch (perhaps the anonymous person cited above?) who has a net worth Forbes estimates to be about $1.2 billion. (This Vox article is still pretty darned good on the ins and outs of the whole thing.)
Anybody can form a shell corporation in South Dakota for $50 per year, without requiring a physical presence and a minimum of personal information. We have had at least two major scandals - EB-5 and Gear Up! - in which suicide (?) and/or murder-suicide and/or plain old murder followed on millions of federal dollars going missing (and still unfound). (For that matter, we haven't yet found the Westerhuis safe.) We are ranked 3rd in the country for corruption, because of single-party government, lack of transparency, backdoor decisions, and we got an "F" in executive and legislative accountability, as well as next to last in lobbying disclosure.
In other words, you can could get away with a lot in South Dakota, and nobody would notice. It was the perfect place for a red-haired, gun-toting, freedom-loving, handy Russian to be.
Which leads me to the second obvious question: why did everyone fall so hard for, and buy so completely into, Maria Butina, and her story about her pro-gun rights Russian organization, Right To Bear Arms? In Vladimir Putin's Russia? HAH! But buy it they did.
The quick answer: look at the photos:
Maria Butina, Washington Post
I wrote back in April of 2015 that "As societies show greater respect for "the interests and values of women" things get better, more peaceful, more prosperous, as a whole. Ironically, we're currently trying to masculinize women both in business and entertainment, where the ideal woman is now presented as a slim, beautiful, brilliant, athletic ninja warrior." (The Better Angels...) Meet Maria Butina. Or at least her photographs.
"Maria Butina was the ultimate NRA Cool Girl" says a Washington Post article, and goes on to add, "But is there a surfeit of highly intelligent, hot, bilingual Eastern European graduate students who love Jesus, cooking, guns, big-game hunting, bourbon, lipstick, cowboys and tenderly repairing the hearts of damaged men?"
Maybe. At least, that appears to have been the general conservative male hope. And, according to Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl, THE male hope. Read all about the Cool GirlHERE.
Back to WaPo: "The fact that Butina became so popular in conservative circles so quickly seems to point in the other direction: There aren’t a lot of (real) women like her. “She was like a novelty,” a former Michigan GOP chair told The Washington Post last week. “Friendly, curious and flirtatious,” described another anonymous source, who met her through the Conservative Political Action Conference. The men who championed her were so pleased to meet a woman who fit an ideal mold, they never stopped to think that maybe she was an ideal mole." Washington Post
Red Sparrow came to South Dakota, [Grateful] Deadheaded the NRA, was invited to and attended the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast, CPAC, and everything else she could find. Even John Bolton made a video for her in 2103. (YouTube.) Hell, she even interviewed Candidate Trump, who was happy to take her question and answer freely (and exceptionally eloquently): You Tube Video.
Everyone loved her. No one could get enough of her. But they're being awfully quiet about it now.
Maria in Moscow,
2012
PS: A lot of Russians also bought Maria's story and her organization. The Right to Bear Arms united almost all the gun rights' organizations in Russia, largely thanks to her personality. Butina was the "battery that ignited everyone" and "things started to decline" after she left, said the improbably named co-founder Muslim Sheikhov.
But Vladimir Milov, a veteran Russian opposition politician, said he noticed at the time how "well technically equipped" Butina's group appeared to be and the quality of the merchandise at their rallies. "There was a clear idea from the beginning that somebody is behind them." But, at the time, "Butina's associates... believed that Right To Bear Arms was being funded mainly thanks largely to member fees and the sale of several furniture stores she owned in her Siberian hometown of Barnaul." Radio Free Europe
Instead, it was Russian billionaires Alexander Torshin and Konstantin Nikolayev, both friends of Putin. And with that knowledge comes the fear that the charismatic Butina had "founded" an organization whose chief purpose was to infiltrate Russian opposition groups and, later, the NRA. And which succeeded in doing both.
In other words, Putin managed to find a way to kill two birds - in two countries - with one stone.
