11-01-2011, 10:27 PM
Shades of James Grady's Six Days of the Condor (cut to Three Days by Hollywood's Lorenzo Semple, Jr.).
In that story, a small group of CIA "egg heads" reads thrillers to mine ideas and determine if actual operations are being blown. They end up being sanitized when at least one of their number stumbles onto a Middle Eastern oil-related off-the-books op.
There is, of course, real-life precedent for this sort of thing. I give you Ian Lancaster Fleming, for example.
Well known tales of his anti-Castro provocations aside -- and as I was first to note and write about -- Fleming was the first novelist (to my knowledge) to incorporate into a plot an intelligence service's manipulation of a serial killer: Red Grant, the lunar cycle murderer recruited by SMERSH, trained as an assassin, and later assigned to kill James Bond in From Russia with Love.
(For the climactic Orient Express encounter with his prey, Grant takes the cover name "Colonel Nash" -- that's "nash," as in a transliteration of the Russian term for "one of ours." Oh, that Ian ... )
Was Fleming the inspirer or the inspired?
Alas, Ian, we do not expect you to talk.
As expected, you died.
In that story, a small group of CIA "egg heads" reads thrillers to mine ideas and determine if actual operations are being blown. They end up being sanitized when at least one of their number stumbles onto a Middle Eastern oil-related off-the-books op.
There is, of course, real-life precedent for this sort of thing. I give you Ian Lancaster Fleming, for example.
Well known tales of his anti-Castro provocations aside -- and as I was first to note and write about -- Fleming was the first novelist (to my knowledge) to incorporate into a plot an intelligence service's manipulation of a serial killer: Red Grant, the lunar cycle murderer recruited by SMERSH, trained as an assassin, and later assigned to kill James Bond in From Russia with Love.
(For the climactic Orient Express encounter with his prey, Grant takes the cover name "Colonel Nash" -- that's "nash," as in a transliteration of the Russian term for "one of ours." Oh, that Ian ... )
Was Fleming the inspirer or the inspired?
Alas, Ian, we do not expect you to talk.
As expected, you died.
Charles Drago
Co-Founder, Deep Politics Forum
If an individual, through either his own volition or events over which he had no control, found himself taking up residence in a country undefined by flags or physical borders, he could be assured of one immediate and abiding consequence: He was on his own, and solitude and loneliness would probably be his companions unto the grave.
-- James Lee Burke, Rain Gods
You can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.
-- Graham Greene
Co-Founder, Deep Politics Forum
If an individual, through either his own volition or events over which he had no control, found himself taking up residence in a country undefined by flags or physical borders, he could be assured of one immediate and abiding consequence: He was on his own, and solitude and loneliness would probably be his companions unto the grave.
-- James Lee Burke, Rain Gods
You can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.
-- Graham Greene