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Tag Archives: CIA

The Company and the Soviet Writer: The Secrets We Kept

29 Monday Aug 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1949, book review, Boris Pasternak, CIA, Cold War, Doctor Zhivago, featureless characters, feminism, Lara Prescott, limitation of history, literary suppression, Olga Ivinskaya, predictable narrative, secret police, sexism, Washington

Review: The Secrets We Kept, by Lara Prescott
Knopf, 2019. 344 pp. $27

The most destructive war in history is four years past, yet in 1949, the world feels no safer. In Washington, the infant CIA watches every move the Soviets make—or appear to make—certain that the Cold War adversary is doing the same. In Moscow, the KGB arrests Olga Ivinskaya, the muse and mistress of renowned poet Boris Pasternak; she’s carrying his child.

Unattributed press photo of Boris Pasternak, 1959, the year after he won the Nobel Prize (courtesy https://www.ebay.com/itm/1969-Press-Photo-Boris-Pasternak-dfpd41533/303830392954, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Having heard that Pasternak is writing a novel critical of the Soviet past, the secret police demand to know what’s in it. (Why they don’t grill the author instead is never satisfactorily explained.) Olga claims not to know, but of course they don’t believe her and, once she miscarries, ship her to the gulag.

Meanwhile, Irina, a young American woman of Russian parentage, is hired for the CIA typing pool, a coveted job, though she has middling secretarial skills. The other typists, underemployed graduates of Radcliffe, Smith, and Vassar, wonder why. But the bosses have plans for Irina, who’s given lessons on how to make a dead drop and other tricks of tradecraft. Gradually, Irina understands that she’s being groomed for a mission involving Pasternak’s novel, which the CIA would like to see distributed.

Irina’s trainer is Sally Forrester, a holdover from the CIA’s wartime predecessor, the OSS. Sally, though a gifted operative, has been shunted aside—note the recurring feminism—until now, which hurts. Sally never feels as though she’s living fully unless she has an assignment, and she’s been waiting to make her mark in the Company, as insiders call the CIA. Sure enough, she’s sent to Milan to suss out Feltrinelli, an Italian publisher believed to have dealings with Pasternak:

Feltrinelli’s nickname was the Jaguar, and indeed, he moved with the confidence and elegance of a jungle cat. The majority of the party guests were in black tie, but Feltrinelli wore white trousers and a navy blue sweater, the corner of his striped shirt beneath untucked. The trick to pinpointing the man with the biggest bank account in the room is not to look to the man in the nicest tux, but to the man not trying to impress. Feltrinelli pulled out a cigarette, and someone in his orbit reached to light it.

As the passage suggests, Prescott knows how to set a scene, has a keen eye, and an able pen. Yet The Secrets We Kept is the sort of novel whose pages turn readily, but which feels lightweight. Whether or not you’ve heard of Boris Pasternak or the history surrounding the publication of his most famous work, the narrative offers few surprises, and what it builds to peters out rather than reach a crescendo.

Four narrators tell the story: Pasternak’s mistress; Sally; Irina, the neophyte typist/operative; and The Typists, an unnamed, collective voice. Only one of this quartet comes through as a full-fledged character, though details of time, place, and profession at times carry the narrative.

I sympathize with The Typists, whose inside view provides an intriguing perspective on the nation’s spy organization. But they add little to the story, and they’re largely featureless and indistinguishable. And even with a relatively small part to play, they undermine a crucial theme: sexual and intellectual freedom.

The typists are warned not to discuss the documents they type. But these women, who wish they earned respect for their minds, could at least have an opinion about the world around them or a book or an idea. Instead, when they socialize, as they do often, they gossip about who’s wearing what, who’s sleeping with whom, and office politics. No doubt, Prescott intends no disrespect; yet doesn’t this portrayal match how their male bosses likely think of them?

Olga, Pasternak’s mistress, has a harrowing story of arrest and persecution to tell, yet I’m not persuaded that his magnetism has earned her loyalty, come what may. She revels in his celebrity and the influence that lends her, but that can’t be enough. Likewise, with Irina, I don’t know what she wants from life, or why she does what she does.

That leaves Sally, who comes across most vividly. Yet the subplot of her private life, though thematically relevant, has little or no bearing on the story. Prescott, who knows her ground (and even bears the same first name as Pasternak’s heroine), is a capable author, but she’s written her narrative as though she senses that the main plot doesn’t fill the novel and carries less impact than it promises.

As a result, at times, Sally and The Typists feel like add-ons. Partly, this is the limitation of history, because the story can’t invent drama that didn’t happen. Her point seems to be how women take the blame for men’s mistakes, and I agree. Nevertheless, The Secrets We Kept amounts to less than the sum of its parts.

Disclaimer: I obtained a reading copy of this book from the public library.

Cold War Hallucinations: Night Watch

10 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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"no--and furthmore", 1956, Allen Dulles, book review, CIA, criminal investigation, David C. Taylor, government corruption, historical fiction, LSD, narrative tension, New York City, thriller, tropes

Review: Night Watch, by David C. Taylor
Severn, 2018. 290 pp. $29

At first glance, or even second or third, the crimes seem to lack any connection; after all, this is Manhattan, 1956, and anything can happen. A couple walking through Central Park come face-to-face with a man who threatens them, kill him, and walk away. A man throws himself out the window of the Hotel Astor, and his colleagues, almost shrugging, say he was depressed.

But Detective Michael Cassidy, who knows his native city and what its residents can do to one another, latches on to the details that don’t add up. He refuses to accept the anodyne explanations dished out by unreliable witnesses or the police bureaucracy, overworked and under political pressure from every point of the compass. Before long, the federal government casts its shadow over the investigations, doors close, and odd things happen.

What’s more, a sophisticated, relentless stalker leaves messages promising that he’ll kill Michael at a time and place of his choosing. Michael can’t figure out which criminal he’s put away who would try to take revenge like that.

Like Night Life and Night Work, the two previous thrillers featuring Michael Cassidy (and which bracket the current installment by a few years), this one offers similar pleasures. From the first lines, you have New York City, portrayed as few authors can, capturing the grit, energy, and quirks of an infinitely surprising metropolis. The story begins with horses waiting to pull tourists through Central Park in hansom cabs:

The horses harnessed to carriages at the curb on Columbus Circle huffed smoke from their nostrils as they stood heads down, their backs covered with plaid blankets, and waited for the night-time romantics who wanted to ride through the park bundled under lap robes in private darkness. The shrill wail of a police car siren rose in the west. The horses watched the car pass on 59th Street headed east toward Fifth Avenue, lights flashing. They dropped their heads again to eat hay strewn in the gutter by their drivers. They had been raised on concrete and were used to sirens. In a city of eight million there was always an emergency — someone trapped in an elevator, a restaurant kitchen fire, a domestic dispute, a liquor store stick-up, a body leaking blood across the sidewalk.

The narrative, chronometer-intricate, conveys the fits and starts of criminal investigation, with all the dead ends and improbabilities that Cassidy and his partner sense are built on lies, but against which they can do nothing, for want of evidence. Since Taylor shows you the bad guys at work, the reader knows more than our heroes do. Consequently, the tension derives not just from the “no — and furthermore,” many instances of which involve close combat, but the desire to see justice done — and the fear that the scoundrels will escape because the government protects them.

Unlike the previous two novels, the scoundrels here aren’t J. Edgar Hoover or the Mafia, but Allen Dulles, CIA director. The plot turns on the covert program, much written about in recent years, to test LSD as a “truth serum,” often without the subjects’ knowledge, in the name of national security.

Undated government photo of Allen Dulles (courtesy Prologue Magazine, spring 2002 (NARA, 306-PS-59-17740; via Wikimedia Commons)

Practically no one in the New York of 1956 has heard of this drug or what it can do, which adds to Michael’s difficulties solving the mystery, but the reader will understand, based on the hallucinations several characters suffer. The outrage that the government could inflict this, and with such righteous, cold-blooded cruelty, turns up the narrative heat. Nor is that all. The scientists behind the experiments include Nazi death-camp doctors recruited for their special knowledge about what abuses the human body can stand.

Accordingly, it’s all the more satisfying when Dulles tries to recruit Michael, who bluntly refuses, then, when prodded to admit that he dislikes Dulles, and why, puts it plainly: Michael can’t stand people who tip the table so that everything on it flows toward them. I’m going to remember that phrase.

I don’t believe all of the physical confrontations, at which Michael excels — a trope of the genre, to be sure, yet still implausible. Michael also rescues his beautiful girlfriend (trope number two), a newspaper reporter, though, to be fair, she rescues herself too and is hardly helpless. (Her clothes, especially high heels, cause trouble in the action scenes, a nice touch that underlines the gender straitjacket she struggles to wear as a journalist consigned to “women’s interest” stories.) Michael has a few convenient resources, like a brother who’s a political TV commentator and an aunt who’s a Washington, DC, powerbroker. Finally, despite the ever-present “no — and furthermore,” loose ends get tied up rather neatly.

But I can’t resist these novels — I’ve reviewed all three — and if you read them, maybe you’ll feel the same way.

Disclaimer: I obtained by reading copy of this book from the public library.

Defenestration and Other Sports: Night Life

06 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1954, Broadway, CIA, David C. Taylor, FBI, historical fiction, J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, Mafia, Manhattan, murder, New York Police Department, Roy Cohn, thriller

Review: Night Life, by David C. Taylor
Forge, 2015. 332 pp. $26

I have to like Michael Cassidy, a New York detective who throws a cop out a third-story window–the guy needed it–and who, in 1954, at the height of the McCarthy witch hunts, tells Roy Cohn to stick it. For those of you whose grandmothers didn’t wish Roy Cohn a lingering death from throat cancer, as mine did, and have therefore never heard of him, he was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s legal counsel. So within the first ten pages of Night Life, I was already enrolled in the Michael Cassidy fan club and having a good time.

The Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954. McCarthy stands at right; Joseph Welch, opposing counsel, seated, left. (Courtesy U. S. Senate Historical Office)

The Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954. McCarthy stands at right; Joseph Welch, Army counsel, seated, left. (Courtesy U. S. Senate Historical Office)

Cassidy defies expectations in several ways. First, he’s not of Irish ancestry, no matter what the name suggests, and how his father got that name figures in the story. Second, Michael comes from a comfortable, middle-class background (his father’s a successful Broadway producer) and appreciates jazz and modern art. Third, though he’s uptown by birth, there isn’t a pickpocket, madam, or hood he doesn’t know in Hell’s Kitchen or the meat-packing district, and he has a tolerant, persuasive way with them that nets him bits of information.

And that’s what Cassidy needs, because a Broadway dancer has been found tortured to death. Normally, nobody would care. But for some reason, the FBI (“the Feebles”), the CIA, and the Mafia are all interested, and they have ways of declaring their curiosity or punishing those who talk out of turn. Meanwhile, a tough, beautiful woman moves into the apartment downstairs from Michael’s, just the cure for his lonely, broken heart, a person with whom he can share his bed and his troubles.

I like how Taylor portrays his characters, including Michael’s father and siblings–the family scenes are terrific–the theater folk, the political figures (McCarthy, Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover), Michael’s building superintendent, the police. They seem alive to me, and they make the novel hum, even more than the constant reversals or conflicting evidence that Michael must sift through. Best of all, to this transplanted New Yorker, the city feels alive too, in its speech, sights, and smells. I’m so tired of reading about New York from authors who don’t know the place. Taylor does:


A bearded man in a white robe stood on a milk crate at the corner of 49th and tried to interest the hurrying people in the fast-approaching end of the world. The clatter and bong of pinball machines and the whoops of players at the shooting games rattled out the open door of the arcade on 47th. Just past it was a discount store that had been GOING OUT OF BUSINE$$$$ for six years. It sold cheap portable radios, Japanese cameras, World War II surplus equipment, and knives that couldn’t hold an edge at ROCK BOTTOM PRICE$$$$$.


Night Life does suffer from stereotypes, though. Nearly every woman in this book, Cassidy’s sister included, is gorgeous, and she’s just about the only one who doesn’t want to take his clothes off. Michael performs many feats of derring-do, some of which are less than believable, particularly toward the end. Yeah, this stuff belongs to the genre; but still.

Most dubiously, he has dreams that predict danger–correctly, as it turns out. Taylor handles the clairvoyance well enough so that you don’t hear wind chimes or spooky music, yet for a cop who has his feet firmly planted in the grit, it doesn’t quite add up. The ending, too, stretches credulity in a couple ways, not least a loose end–a dangerous loose end–left untied.

Even so, Night Life is just too lively to dismiss. When Michael catches one of the Feebles rifling his desk and tells him to buzz off, the Feeble asks, “Got something to hide, Detective?” To which our man replies, “Pictures of your sister from when I worked Vice.”

Got to love it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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