Review of “Spycatcher”

NIGEL WEST

Spycatcher 

By:  Matthew Dunn

William Morrow, 2011. 

$16.88.

Why would Spycatcher (published as Spartan in London by Weidenfeld & Nicolson) be of interest to a non-fiction reader? Most likely because the author claims to have served in the British Secret Intelligence Service for ‘nearly six years’ between 1995 and 2001, a period during which he completed ‘approximately seventy missions, all successfully’. It is also asserted that he is the first SIS officer to have written a novel under his own name, apparently having forgotten Compton Mackenzie and Willie Somerset Maugham and a dozen others, including, more recently, Kenneth Benton. He also says that ‘medals are never awarded to modern MI6 officers’ which will come as a surprise to, for example, Sir Gerry Warner, Sir Mark Allen and more than a hundred members of the Order of St Michael and St George who are entitled to carry the letters CMG after their surname in recognition of their decoration.

These are not the only statements made by the author’s publishers, either in publicity material or on the dustjacket itself that raise doubts, and another example is his insistence that if caught on any of his deep cover missions into highly hostile environments, he would have been executed. Of course, no SIS officer has ever been executed in the more than one hundred years of the Service, so that boast seems a little hollow. However, in conversation the author, who is a graduate of the University of East Anglia and the recipient of a commendation from the late Foreign Secretary Robin Cook for his work in an anti-terrorism case, distances himself from the publicity material circulated on his behalf. But according to the dustjacket, the author has drawn on his ‘fascinating experience’ to craft an ‘authentic picture of today’s secret world.’

Hyperbole or not, the obvious objective of such a marketing strategy is to give the impression to a potential readership that Spycatcher offers a degree of verisimilitude. If not, why promote the author as a former real-life spook? His declared aim is that he ‘wanted my readers to know how it can feel being an intelligence field operative.’

As Dunn’s central theme is that his material is based on his own experiences, naturally one is tempted to take a professional view of his plot and the tradecraft he describes. At the heart of the novel is a thirty-five year-old SIS super-spy, codenamed SPARTAN, whose identity is known only to the Chief and one other senior officer. Allegedly this role is only ever fulfilled by one specially-trained SIS officer who is entrusted with deniable tasks approved by the prime minister of the day. Naturally, each prime minister is sworn to secrecy about SPARTAN’s existence whose true name, William Cochrane, is protected, even within SIS itself.

Spycatcher opens with an account of an Iranian intelligence defector who attends a dawn rendezvous with representatives of his old organisation in New York’s Central Park under SIS’s supervision. We are told that the Iranian defected from the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) eight years earlier, having been persuaded to remain in place for awhile when he first approached SIS. When it was suspected that his ‘cover could be compromised’ he was exfiltrated to Europe to become an entrepreneur, but nevertheless continued to spy. Soroush Abtahi, protected by three armed SIS bodyguards and his case officer, Will Cochrane, has been persuaded to re-establish contact with the MOIS for the sole purpose of finding out why the organization wants to see him.

Thus on the book’s first couple of pages, we are told that Abtahi, who has only now come under suspicion from his MOIS colleagues, with whom he has apparently worked for the past eight years, remains SIS’s most valuable source, and is curious to know why they want to meet him in a large open space in Manhattan. Furthermore, neither Cochrane nor his three colleagues have been declared to the local authorities or to the CIA, so no official back-up is available at the encounter. The scene ends in a bloodbath which left at least fourteen men shot dead and Cochrane with three bullets in his stomach. Later in the book Cochrane is hit in his shoulder and head, but again miraculously suffers no lasting ill-effects. Among the casualties are three British Special Forces soldiers and a further eight Iranian gunmen shot by the New York Police Department.

Thus the reader is asked to accept that a professional British intelligence officer would (a) regard an eight year-old source as currently highly valuable; would be willing (b) to put that source at risk for no discernable advantage; (c) to mount an operation in New York without the prior consent and participation of the American authorities; (d) shoot to kill without any clear rules of engagement and without having been fired on first and (e) be allowed to leave the jurisdiction after such a mass slaughter. Perhaps more damaging for SIS is the proposition that because Abtahi was shot dead by Cochrane and not an enemy, his family had been refused any financial compensation from what is described as SIS’s ‘Benevolence Department’!

Bizarrely, we are also told that although Cochrane used a false passport to enter the United States, he was removed from the NYPD’s custody by a senior CIA officer (who, for reasons unexplained pretends initially to be an FBI special agent) and treated in a safe-house in Manhattan that is not on CIA premises. Although the gun battle in the park was ‘given national significance’, Cochrane is patched up by a compliant doctor and, within a couple of days, returned to London, ready for his next assignment, to trace a terrorist mastermind who, coincidentally, turns out to have been responsible for murdering his father in 1979 during the Islamic revolution in Tehran.

This particular incident is worth looking at in some detail because, we must be reminded, Dunn asserts that his book is based on his own experiences as an SIS officer, and that although Spycatcher is fiction, it has a definite authenticity. Obviously, as a novelist, Dunn could have chosen any historical foundation upon which to build his plot, but he has chosen a period that, in intelligence terms, is quite well documented. We know, for instance, that the CIA station in Tehran was taken entirely by surprise by the collapse of the Shah’s regime, and that there were only three men working under diplomatic cover at the embassy when it was seized. Similarly, there was a single SIS officer at the British embassy, and no western intelligence agency predicted the Shah’s fall. Indeed, this particular event is often cited by diplomats such as the late Tony Parsons, as a classic example of an intelligence failure. Not so, according to Dunn who insists that the Ayatollah’s victorious return from France had been anticipated three months earlier, and that ‘approximately four hundred’ SIS and CIA officers had run a joint operation of unprecedented scale to extract every ounce of intelligence from two thousand SAVAK and other Iranians before it was too late.

This rewriting of history is, of course, complete bunk, and it is hard to imagine there were even two Iranians of interest to either the CIA or SIS in 1979, let alone two thousand. To compound the travesty, the author has a revolutionary defector, to be escorted out of the country via, of all routes, Bandar Abbas, a distance of 1,500 kilometres away. Thus, instead of simply flying the man from Tehran, or driving him over the frontier into Turkey or Pakistan, Dunn has the CIA and SIS engaged in a wholly implausible set of circumstances, bundling the man into the trunk of a car for the long journey to the Gulf port where SIS supposedly ran a local trawler. Of course, it can be argued that the author’s scenario is simply a plot mechanism to tie his central character, Cochrane, to the events of 1979 and the death of his father.

At the core of the plot is a National Security Agency (NSA) analytical paper which draws on a super-secret electronic source codenamed HUBBLE and has been distributed to all America’s European allies. The report contains the splendid contradiction

The location and timing of this attack are unknown, but it is assessed that the attack is imminent.

Since the NSA supposedly is reluctant to share any further details of its source, Cochrane simply goes to the home of the relevant NSA officer in Baltimore and assaults him, threatening to kill his family too, in an effort to learn more. Apparently HUBBLE offers access to sensitive Iranian emails, telephone calls and text messages, and has proved so successful that it has earned the NSA an extra budget appropriation of $200 million. Incredibly, the NSA also suspects that the source has been compromised and manipulated, but has issued no warnings to its clients… because to do so might jeopardize the project’s funding.

A moment of reflection about HUBBLE reveals some problems. For example, why is it so sup-secret if it simply provides the NSA’s standard product, being intercepted electronic communications? And why should an established collection channel cost so much to maintain? And would any NSA manager remain silent about suspicions that a conduit was compromised and being used to peddle disinformation because continued financial support was at stake?

Suffice to say that the content of the facsimile NSA paper is so risible that it is clear Dunn has never seen any such product from that agency. Since he also has a character working at CIA headquarters at Langley who does not answer to nobody in the building, has only a vague budget and ‘no specific remit or function’, he seems to know nothing of how the CIA bureaucracy works. Similarly, he is unaware of Public Law 110, the U.S. statute which allows the Director of Central Intelligence to grant up to five American passports a year to his nominees, thus obviating the need for Cochrane to prevail upon the president for the same purpose.

In terms of accuracy concerning the international intelligence community, Dunn is woefully misinformed, for example claiming that the DGSE is the only French intelligence agency conducting operations abroad. So what about the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire and the Group de Controlle Radio-electonique, to name but two?

Cochrane’s mission, a term never used in SIS, is to flush out an Iranian terrorist mastermind by having his former sweetheart, a street-wise war correspondent, attempt to reestablish contact with him. However, Cochrane’s initial approach to her is so ludicrously implausible that it breaks every rule of suspended disbelief. As any case officer will confirm, the first step in cultivating a source is the most critical moment which could make, or wreck, an operation. Accordingly, much preparatory work is undertaken before the critical pitch is made. Yet Cochrane propositions his target at nearly eight o’clock in the morning, in Lana Beseisu’s Paris home, pretending to be an embassy official. Using an alias, Cochrane tells Lana that a computer glitch has sent him on a series of house-calls to update his database. According to his records, so he informs her, she is half Saudi and half Jordanian, has held a British passport for nearly twenty years, and has ‘regularly checked in with our embassy’. With such a preposterous tale any self-respecting savvy journalist would throw her visitor out and call the embassy or the police. Yet within moments he reveals “I work for MI6” and threatens her with prosecution for some unspecified crime unless she agrees to cooperate with him. Only as a textbook of how not to gain someone’s assistance, do Cochrane’s tactics have any validity.

SIS is Britain’s principal human intelligence organization, and the recruitment and management of human sources is its business, so this episode, perhaps above all others, is important because it is the only time in Spycatcher in which Cochrane pitches and runs someone. But in doing so he uses a ludicrous cover that could be exposed in a nanosecond, without any backstop, makes an absurdly improbable approach based on an obvious falsehood, and then issues an empty threat as if coercion is a useful methodology to gain cooperation. Finally, having apparently made a successful pitch, Cochrane becomes emotionally involved with his attractive agent who, within moments of meeting him, has stripped off to reveal the disfiguring scars on her torso. One does not have to be a student of human behaviour to recognize this as an absurdity.

Almost every aspect of this episode is phony, from the way in which Lana is alleged to have acquired her British citizenship, through her mother nearly two decades earlier, to Cochrane’s conduct of the interview. In any such encounter the individual intending to make a pitch is well-informed, yet on this occasion he needs to see her passport to confirm her identity, although he does not make this request until halfway through the meeting. He is also unaware whether she has been in telephone contact with Tehran in recent months, noting that this information could be made available to him by the ‘French security services’ upon his request. Why had he not found this out from the appropriate British agency before knocking on her door? Having suggested, completely erroneously, that ‘British residents living in France’ suffer unspecified ‘bureaucratic problems’ if they have not registered with the British embassy, he insists her past association with an Iranian intelligence organization amounts to a criminal offence. “We call people like that traitors’, and insists that not only would the French ‘not stand in our way”, but that the United Nations would ‘fairly or otherwise pin any number of atrocities on you’. In other words, Cochrane sets out a series of patent falsehoods as the basis on which the hapless woman would be encouraged to cooperate.

Much worse is to come. The wretched Lana is installed, much like a tethered goat, in a hotel in Zagreb, assigned the task of dropping tempting letters into the local Iranian embassy addressed to her old lover. Although she instantly attracts the attention of a group of Iranian surveillance experts who trail her every movement, it never occurs to Cochrane that her hotel room might have been bugged. So we are expected to believe that while the hotel and its staff supposedly are riddled with hostile agents, Cochrane can easily slip in and out of her room undetected, and never even bothers to take the most elementary precautions to detect any electronic surveillance. Once again, credibility is lost.

Plausability, of course, depends in part on an author’s skill in carrying a reader through some unlikely scenarios, but the limit is reached when Cochrane tells his CIA subordinates that, for no apparent reason, they are to kill four DGSE officers. None raises any objection, and the SIS man cheerfully proceeds to break the neck of an old friend, a Frenchman he has failed to recognize. Paradoxically, Cochrane’s adversary, the mysterious Iranian known as Megiddo, is described as a ‘mass murderer’ without any supporting evidence that he has ever killed anyone, whereas the Briton’s personal body-count is well into double figures by the middle of the book.

Apart from the fundamental flaws running through the entire plot, there are so many amateurish mistakes that each chapter becomes an irritant. In the first few pages Cochrane is shot in the stomach and finds a large exit wound. Then he is shot twice more, making three wounds altogether, and presumably two bullets, yet despite the exit wound, three bullets are dug out of him. There is no ‘Congressional Medal of Honor’, nor ‘Red Label whiskey’, nor any likelihood that a CIA Special Operations Group paramilitary would have operated inside North Korea, China, Zimbabwe or Syria. There is, of course, a Medal of Honor, and Johnnie Walker Red Label is Scotch whisky, not Irish. No SIS controller could be aged fifty-seven (two years over the mandatory retirement age); SIS station commanders are not referred to as a ‘station chief’; and no SIS station in Sarajevo or anywhere in the world has ever run ‘up to fifty agents and as many operations’ simultaneously.

Why does any of this matter? Because the author has associated himself very deliberately with what is widely regarded as an elite body, a service that prides itself on being somewhat cerebral in its attitude to intelligence issues. Not even James Bond killed as many of his opponents in all Fleming’s fourteen books as compared to the first dozen pages of Cochrane’s adventure. Whereas Bond’s parents died in a climbing accident in the Swiss Alps, Cochrane’s father was tortured and ceremoniously disemboweled in a Tehran prison in 1986, and his mother was killed in 1991 by a pair of sadistic burglars who were then stabbed to death by her vengeful teenage son. No wonder Cochrane might be considered mildly dysfunctional, if not formally diagnosed a homicidal maniac. By the end of Spycatcher, Cochrane has killed a grand total of thirty-three people, as well as having seriously assaulted an NSA officer and two American policemen.

Certainly Cochrane’s plan to seize Megiddo seems a trifle eccentric, given that his operation apparently has been approved at the highest levels in London and Washington, DC. Instead of simply handing him over to the appropriate authorities, as in any rendition, he instead decides to smuggle his captive aboard a private yacht, skippered by a heroin trafficker, and sail from the Adriatic across the length of the Mediterranean and up the English Channel. No rational explanation is offered for the need to adopt this bizarre and unnecessary route.

The novel’s denoumont is set on a lake in rural Massachusetts where a large group of heavily-armed Iranian terrorists, led by Megiddo, is holed up in anticipation of yet another bloody shoot-out. Quite why they were not surrounded by local law enforcement goes unexplained, but instead Cochrane and his four paramilitary pals take them on, hopelessly outnumbered, with predictably catastrophic results. Curiously, the appearance of a total of thirty-two Iranian terrorists, including Megiddo and three known bombers, is facilitated by the CIA, apparently in an effort to uncover details of a larger atrocity being planned. The thought that perhaps their arrest and interrogation might lead to the same result, without any risk, does not seem to have occurred to anyone. On the contrary, with definite evidence ‘derived from multiple entry- and exit-port database systems, as well as aircraft rostas’, the U.S. federal authorities learn of the imminent arrival from Iran of twenty-five current members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who seem to have had no difficulty in obtaining the necessary visas, and do not even arrange for them to be searched at customs or placed under surveillance. This expedient allows the gunmen to transform a tourist lodge in the Adirondacks into a veritable fortress.

Setting aside the hideous fault-lines running through Spycatcher’s plot, the question to be answered is whether the author’s narrative is in the same tradition of le Carré, Greene or even Benton. Does the book, whatever its shortcomings, offer the claimed insight into the mind of an SIS case officer, albeit one who operates in isolation from his colleagues? While it is true that SIS personnel undergoing training are encouraged to think laterally and use their initiative, working independently when necessary, their craft is largely one of teamwork. Despite being the survivor of five bullets and three grenades, there would not be any room in Vauxhall Cross for anyone like Will Cochrane.

MI6’s superspy, far from slipping in and out of the shadows to make a subtle intervention, leaves behind him a trail of mayhem and destruction, including the bodies of five British and American Special Forces soldiers, with a further two seriously injured due to his recklessness. In contrast, Dunn’s arch-villain Megiddo appears to be a harmless fantasist who dreams of destroying Israel and making Iran a world super-power. Delusional, certainly, but hardly a competitor when compared to the psychopathic Cochrane who demonstrates no intellectual skills and whose principal talent appears to be mass murder. But is he, nonetheless, a true British hero in the 007 tradition, or even Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer? Is he a character, albeit one of fiction, for whom the denizens of Legoland might be proud? He routinely disobeys instructions, shows rudeness and aggression towards his colleagues, kills his own star asset, and seeks to pay off his victim’s family with his own life savings. This is a formula for detention under the Mental Health Acts, not the rational instrument of Whitehall’s secret corridors.

What else do we know about Cochrane? One thing he has in common with James Bond is their creator’s inability to construct a consistent chronology. The reader can deduce that Cochrane was born in 1974 as he waves goodbye to his father in 1979 at the age of five, and we know (because we are told twice) that at the age of thirty-five he has been in SIS for seventeen years, which suggests he joined the organization in 1992 at the age of eighteen. However, by then he has served as a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion for five years and afterwards gained a degree from Cambridge. This means that in the two years since he was at school, and stabbed two burglars to death at the age of seventeen, he had crammed eight years of military experience and a degree course in politics, philosophy and economics. Accordingly, Dunn’s arithmetic is rather worse than Fleming’s when building his hero’s curriculum vitae, not to mention that no PPE course has ever been offered at his chosen university.

If there is not much that makes any sense in Cochrane’s own contradictory background, what about his father’s? It too, upon scrutiny, turns out to be rather unusual, for he was a senior CIA officer working under diplomatic cover in Tehran in 1979 whose wife and children lived in a large home owned by the U.S. government in a wealthy district somewhere in America where the young Will attended a day-school to achieve exam results, presumably in the summer of 1991, that qualified him to go up to Cambridge. What seems odd is that Cochrane’s mother did not know her husband had been anything other than an American diplomat who had died in a tragic accident.

Although we are not told much about Cochrane’s father, we do know that he was seized in 1979 by the Revolutionary Guards, twenty-one days after entering the country, in the act of smuggling a defector into Bandar Abbas, incarcerated and tortured in Ervin prison for seven years before being stabbed in the stomach and his body dumped in the Persian Gulf. In those circumstances one might ask why his wife had not queried his disappearance when the American diplomats taken hostage at the Tehran embassy had been released so very publicly in January 1981. Or why his captors took his mutilated corpse all the way to the Gulf, or how its recovery could have been reconciled with ‘a tragic accident’.

A closer look at Soroush Abtahi also reveals him to be quite unusual too. Allegedly he was found by Cochrane while working at his post in the MOIS and recruited as a source, but eight years earlier, presumably in 2001, he had been exfiltrated to England because it had seemed that his ‘cover could be compromised’. Perhaps, on that occasion he had been accompanied by his wife and at least one of his children, their daughter who would then have been aged two. However, as his ‘cover’ had remained intact, Abtahi had continued to spy on his organization while he became an entrepreneur and had purchased a terraced house in Paddington for his wife and children with a mortgage of just £100,000. Then, more recently, an assiduous MOIS security officer had traced a leak to Abtahi and he had then agreed to meet two of his colleagues, not at his home in London, but at dawn in New York’s Central Park. Such a rendezvous had struck the perceptive Abtahi as unusual, but he had consented to the arrangement nonetheless, as had Cochrane who, for the past eight years, had supervised his safety. Actually, we learn that Cochrane had also concluded that his agent had been compromised, but had allowed the meeting to proceed ‘in order to be sure’, and had set up a debriefing session afterwards at Abtahi’s hotel. Astonishingly, Cochrane had not wanted to give his agent the protection of the additional three British bodyguards, preferring to undertake the task himself, alone. Furthermore, he would later blame the three British bodyguards for the debacle, saying “They let me down. I should have been there alone” and insist that his original plan had been overruled “against my wishes” by some unidentified superior.

Oddly, Abtahi manifested no resentment of Cochrane’s exploitation of his information that had endangered him. The logic of all this, of course, is hard to fathom. If, eight years earlier, Cochrane had been willing to exfiltrate his agent to London in the mistaken belief that he was in danger, why put him in jeopardy again in New York? Why indeed had he taken action on Abtahi’s information in a way that had incriminated him? One might imagine that even if the MOIS had not suspected Abtahi of being a mole prior to 2001, his sudden departure to London might have been regarded as something of a clue. And if Cochrane truly suspected that Abtahi was in peril in Central Park, why did he not fit him with a radio link or some other emergency communication device, instead of simply waiting to meet him afterwards at his hotel? Bizarrely, Cochrane gives the impression that he expected Abtahi to be sufficiently free after his meeting.. to confirm that indeed he had been compromised!

Abtahi’s value as an agent was evidently immense, for he had access to the regime’s plans, nuclear research, military strategy and support for international terrorism. He was ‘MI6’s best-placed Iranian agent,’ yet he was able to achieve all of this from Paddington, or so one might deduce from MOIS’s choice of meeting-place, which implies that Tehran was not on his immediate travel itinerary. Unanswered is quite how Abtahi had accomplished his elevated status as the west’s star spy if he did not occasionally visit Iran.

The novelist would answer such nitpicking with the defence that the speed of the narrative and the excitement of the action is intended to sweep the reader through any doubts, but again the recurring problem is that in this case the author is peddling his wares on the basis that he is a true professional who knows what he is writing about. That too is a line that is unsustainable.

The carnage wrought by Cochrane is so totally alien to the way SIS conducts its business that the reader might be forgiven for thinking the book is about a sequence of Special Forces engagements perhaps gleaned from the activities of the Increment, the organisation’s SF support team, but nothing in their past would come even close to the deployments described by Dunn. The Increment’s principal role is one of close quarter protection, assisting unarmed SIS personnel and their communications equipment. Like other SF, the Increment is well–trained and kept at a high state of readiness, but their small membership does not place lives in jeopardy unnecessarily, and undertake the most careful preparations and assessments with detailed rules of engagement before any plan is adopted. While Dunn’s account of weapons and tactics may be more appropriate in an Andy McNabb fantasy, they are strangely out of place in the urban environments of New York, Boston and even Zagreb.

In his description of U.S. Special Forces Dunn makes some passing references to, for example, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, also known as SEAL Team Six, and his use of the (unexplained) acronym DEVGRU suggests some knowledge of his subject, but in what circumstances could the CIA have sent personnel to Zimbabwe, China or North Korea. Perhaps they had fulfilled training or close protection duties for diplomats, which is hardly indicative of their supposed covert abilities, but why would SF soldiers be deployed to North Korea? This is an unnecessary and jarring detail that presumably has been inserted into the text to be intentionally provocative, perhaps carrying the message that the author knows about such clandestine operations, but does he really? He refers to the CIA’s Special Operations Group when actually the correct name of the unit was Special Activities Division, so perhaps the author is not so well informed as one might think.

Any reality-check will have weighed the possible advantages of such an undertaking with the likely risks and diplomatic blowback. The repercussions of the capture of an SF operator would be immense, so what would be the task or the advantage gained? One implication is that Dunn has a grasp of issues that are far beyond the average reader’s understanding. The other explanation is that the author is blundering in the dark, completely insensitive to the high-level deliberations that take place before any risky plan is submitted for ministerial approval. Yet in Cochrane’s world, firefights with dozens of fatalities and casualties are the routine, with nary a word of dissent from SF personnel taking on adversaries who numerically are vastly superior. To put the loss of Cochrane’s three British SF soldiers in central Park into perspective, this would have represented more casualties than the Special Air Service’s deployment over thirty-two years in Northern Ireland, or three times the fatalities suffered by all British SF during combat in the Falklands War. At the very least, British SF have a high sense of self-preservation and emphatically are not mindless killing machines, as portrayed in Spartan.

Of course, it could be argued that to take Spartan too seriously is to misunderstand the genre, and neither the author not his publishers make any claims about great literature of following in any literary tradition, and perhaps if no link had been made with SIS this tale might not have attracted the kind of close attention that it has. However, given Dunn’s trumpeted background, comparisons are bound to be made, and they are not very favourable.

To buy a copy of this book by Matthew Dunn, Spycatcher, click here