Tag Archives: Russia

The Translator

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Harriet Crawley’s The Translator—lauded by UK media as one of the best thrillers of 2023—is finally available in the United States. In it, a British translator is called away from his vacation in the Scottish Highlands to accompany the Prime Minister on a lightning trip to Moscow. Clive Franklin is one of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s best Russian-English-Russian translators, and before he can say Kinlochleven, he’s snatched out of his vacation and loaded onto a helicopter. The Prime Minister’s staff has taken care of providing everything—documents, clothing, new business cards, and medications—he’ll need.

While staff members tried to prepare for any contingency, they didn’t anticipate that his opposite number in Moscow, Marina Volina, an equally expert translator for Russian President Nikolai Serov, is someone Clive fell in love with when they both worked at the United Nations. Marina broke it off, married, became a widow, and is now one of Serov’s most trusted aides. When Clive sees her again, he’s smitten anew, and Crawley convincingly portrays the emotion they feel for each other and how hard they must work to hide it in a land of paranoia.

If Marina looks older, tired, it is mostly because a young man she considered her son, Pasha, has died, reportedly of a drug overdose. The morning of the UK-Russia meeting, she receives this note from Vanya, Pasha’s brother: “Pasha was murdered. By your lot.” That is, the FSB (successor to the KGB). It’s unthinkable, but Marina is convinced it’s true.

The UK-Russian discussions do not go well. Underneath all the diplomatic blustering, the Russians are evidently up to something. In her grief and anger, Marina determines to find out what it is, tell Clive, avert some unknown catastrophe, and somehow get herself and Vanya out of the country.

Her chief antagonist is Pasha’s former boss, General Varlamov, deputy director of the FSB, who believes himself in line for the top position. Protecting Russia’s secrets and punishing those who violate them would be his crowning achievement. Varlamov’s spies, cameras, and microphones are everywhere. Resentful of Marina’s close relationship with President Serov, Varlamov makes sure her every move is watched.

At their first Moscow diplomatic meeting together, small talk reveals both Marina and Clive are marathon runners. Training for the forthcoming Moscow marathon helps Marina keep her wits about her. Serov encourages Clive to enter also, thinking he’ll get a photograph of the Englishman on his knees—some propaganda victory, there. At first Clive demurs, as he hasn’t planned to stay in Moscow for long, but it turns out that practice runs let him and Marina exchange information, as their minders can’t keep up. Hoping he’ll pry some information from her, the Brits ask him to stay. Clive and Marina must carve a path through a cast of interesting and believable characters—spies, diplomats, apparatchiks, and brave anti-regime protestors, friends and enemies alike.

Crawley creates a strong sense of the oppressive atmosphere—constantly watched, every conversation listened to. Marina is playing a dangerous chess game, calculating every move based not only on what she hopes to accomplish, but how it will appear to Varlamov.

The story contains several ticking clocks that raise the tension to keep-you-up-reading levels. There’s whatever the Russians are planning, the timeline of which is uncertain because Serov is dithering. The British want to deploy countermeasures, but need more information to do it in time. There’s the marathon, which is on a date certain. There is Varlamov’s persistent circling closer to the truth about Marina. And, there is the unfolding of the cleverly planned and innocent-seeming actions Marina sets in motion, in order to secure her and Vanya’s escape. Crawley’s expert plotting brings all these streams together in an entirely satisfying way.

I love a good spy story, and The Translator is terrific!

KGB Banker

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This financial thriller by William Burton McCormick and John Christmas was inspired partly by the real-life experiences of whistleblower Christmas, who worked for the corrupt Latvian bank, Parex. (Follow that link for a “truth is stranger than fiction story!) When the bank collapsed, information about its billions in bad assets was suppressed, and the Latvian government (i.e., taxpayers) covered enormous losses.

In KGB Banker, we meet Chicago banking executive Robert Vanags who is fed up with corner-cutting in the financial industry. Recently widowed, he’d like to make a fresh start. An unexpected opportunity to do so arises when a head hunter recruits him for an executive position with the $70 billion Turaida Bank in Riga, Latvia, where his family was from. This new job sounds like the perfect professional and personal fit.

His interviews go well but as he’s leaving the bank he meets an employee named Ēricks Helmanis in the elevator. Helmanis has one word of advice: “Run.” Bob ignores this puzzling admonition, along with a few other signs that all is not as it should be, and takes the job.

Bob doesn’t know that someone’s monitoring his office, apartment, phones, computer, and even his 17-year-old son David. His watchers know about the elevator conversation and that Ēricks is hoping to meet with a young reporter for an obscure newspaper named Santa Ezeriņa.

His fourth day in the new job, Bob and a large bank contingent attend the funeral of Ēricks Helmanis, who apparently committed suicide. There, he meets Agnese Avena, an executive at the International Development Bank, with which Turaida often partners. He also meets Latvian politician Dāvids Osis, a true national hero, member of parliament, and champion of the European Union. Bob named his son after him.

While Bob becomes uneasy about some activity at the bank, he’s also distracted by an affair he’s started with Agnese. He chooses to reveal his misgivings at a meeting that will determine whether the international banking community should regard Turaida as solid. He tells the group that most of the bank’s loans are made to only a dozen shell companies owned by Russian oligarchs prohibited from receiving loans from EU banks.

From here on, Turaida officials are highly suspicious of him. The only insider Bob can trust is his elderly assistant, Evgeny, and on the outside, the legendary David Osis. Before long, not only is his information discredited, it’s apparent his life is on the line. His last hope is to trust that crazy reporter, Santa Ezeriņa, who is never one to swallow the official story.

Bankers and their secrets, oligarchs and their dirty dealing, politicians and their agendas, reporters and their dangerous probing. In a sea of betrayal, it’s all Bob can do to keep himself and David safe. As this intriguing story spools out, that goal seems less and less likely. William Burton McCormick and John Christmas have both lived in Latvia and establish the setting convincingly. Before you think some of the financial shenanigans are a little far-fetched, recall what has actually taken place there in recent decades, and you’ll conclude the set-up for this fictional story is not far afield. Plus it’s a cracking good adventure for both Bob and the journalist Santa, who sees the flashing neon warning signs that Bob tries so hard to ignore.

Our Biggest Threats Keep Growing

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In The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger talks about nations’ pervasive and growing uses of spyware and malware to achieve their ends. According to Paul Pillar’s review in the Times, Sanger’s book is “an encyclopedic account of policy-relevant happenings in the cyberworld (that) stays firmly grounded in real events.”

It’s not a question of keeping the stuff out of our electric grid, the controls of our nuclear plants, our military establishment, our government. It’s already here. And a piece of spyware in our systems—watching, waiting—can turn instantly destructive on command.

While U.S. companies, utilities, and some government agencies would like to reveal how much they know about these intrusions—“hey, we’re looking at you, too, so watch it!”—the clandestine services argue against it, because they don’t want others to know that we know and what our detection capabilities are, much less guess our offensive capacity. If you were suspicious of that improbable string of fizzling North Korean missiles last year and wondered “could it really be . . ?” you were right.

Sanger’s riveting journalism covers the woes Russia has inflicted on Ukraine, especially its power grid, a seeming test-bed for attacks on the West; it reviews the Stuxnet virus developed by the U.S. and Israel, which exceeded its mission of damaging Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to emerge in the wild; he covers the fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations; and he describes more recent threats. Across at least three Administrations in Washington, the responses to the size and potential scope of this threat have been paltry. “The clock cannot be turned back,” he says, and it’s up to all of us to hear the ticking.

****Kompromat

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newspaper headlines

CC BY-SA HonestReporting.com, flickr/caseydavid

By Stanley Johnson – If you’re one of the millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic who look back on the elections of 2016 and say, to yourself or at the top of your lungs, “What just happened?” this satirical new political thriller is for you.

Its characters are such thinly disguised versions of today’s leading political figures, you can be forgiven for thinking you’ve inadvertently picked up a recent copy of The Times. Much-needed is the list of its many characters—from the US, Russia, Germany, China, various other countries, four “key animals” and, most numerous of all, leaders of the UK. “Kompromat” is a Russian word—a portmanteau meaning compromising material, and in this novel—as, possibly, in real life—most of these countries hold plenty of it on each other.

As the book opens, a 2016 US presidential candidate is participating in an international wildlife expedition that hopes to radio-collar a tiger. Events go wrong almost immediately. The candidate ends up in a hospital where the Russians plant a bug in his body. The CIA, ever on the ball, figures this out, and replaces it with their own bug. And they’re not the only ones. By the book’s end, America’s new president unwittingly has unwittingly become another “Voice of America.”

Meanwhile, the British have problems of their own. Its Secretary of State for the Environment is approached by the Russians, who have singled him out as a leading light of the “Eurosceptic wing” of the Conservative Party. He learns the Prime Minister agreed to the Referendum on EU membership (the “Brexit” vote) for a reason no more complicated than money. Apparently, the PM believed the vote would never actually occur and, even if it did, it wouldn’t succeed, and the Party would receive money for doing nothing.

Author Johnson devises numerous amusing and convoluted scenarios in which the hapless politicians become entangled. In his scenario, these byzantine schemes are organized and carried out by the Russian Security Service—the FSB, heir to the KGB—“ to change the whole structure of international politics.” The book is not only entertaining, it makes you think “what if?” and, as more news drifts out of world capitals, perhaps “why not?”

Johnson is a former politician and member of the Conservative Party, and a former employee of the World Bank and the European Commission, who has held a number of prominent environmental posts as well as being an environmental activist. In the time preceding the Brexit vote, he co-chaired Environmentalists for Europe. Although he’s on record as opposing the Referendum, his son Boris was a key leader of the “leavers.” The book is in development for a six-part television series too.