Novelist: Homeland Security recruited me to 'attack' US

[Jan Klimkowski]

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.

Yup.

The secret plot in Grady's Six Days of the Condor, written in 1974, was CIA drug trafficking from Laos.

Of course that wasn't a work of fiction. 'Twas true.

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.

Colonel Nasz the Gnasher....

From Russia with Love was published in 1957.

In 1976-7, there were allegations that David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz was a lunar serial killer.

Maury Terry's investigation suggested Berkowitz and "Manson II" were, instead, Process(ed) serial killers.

Sometimes the old scripts are the best....