WRITEALOT: #secret

Showing posts with label #secret. Show all posts

Tuesday, 25 November 2014

Fedora

No, not the hat. Johnny Fedora is a fictional British secret agent who features in 16 novels published between 1951 and 1984. They were written by Shaun Lloyd McCarthy, using the pseudonym Desmond Cory (he died in 2001). Desmond Cory is one of Britain’s most prolific thriller writers; his writing spanned over 40 years; he used up to three different pen names, such was the demand for his work.

Literary critics dubbed Johnny Fedora ‘the thinking man’s James Bond’. Fedora was also a hired assassin, but for many readers the Fedora plots were more complex and intellectual than Fleming’s. Fedora made his debut in one of two Cory novels published in 1951, Secret Ministry (the other being a crime novel, Begin, Murderer!) Fedora’s initial outing beat James Bond into print by two years (Casino Royale, 1953).

Fedora was the son of a Spanish father and Irish mother; a fact that I’d forgotten when I began writing about my half English, half Spanish private eye, Leon Cazador (Spanish Eye). Fedora was a former Spanish Civil War combatant, Chicago gangster and FBI counter-espionage agent, (as well as being a talented piano player!) Like Ashenden before him, Fedora was freelance, hired by British Intelligence on a case-by-case basis – often assisted by Sebastian Trout of the Foreign Office. He was pitted against Nazi spies, trained killers and Soviet agents. He was driven as much by a need to avenge the death of his parents as by patriotism or loyalty to British Intelligence. His first adventures were written in a more light-hearted manner than the latter ones.

The final five books in the series (in bold below) featured his nemesis, Feramontov, a deadly and highly skilled Russian agent, whose ruthlessness went as far as trying to detonate a nuclear bomb.

Secret Ministry (1951) – republished in the US as The Nazi Assassins
This Traitor, Death (1952)
Dead Man Falling (1953)
Intrigue (1954)
Height of Day (1955)
High Requiem (1956)
Johnny Goes North (1956)
Johnny Goes East (1958)
Johnny Goes West (1959)
Johnny Goes South (1959)
The Head (1960)
Undertow (1962)
Hammerhead (1963) – republished in the US as Shockwave, probably as a book and film with the same title appeared by James Mayo about a secret agent called Charles Hood.*
Feramontov (1966)
Timelock (1967)
Sunburst (1971).

Official Desmond Cory website -

http://www.desmondcory.com/

A 2012 review of Desmond Cory’s Fedora novels can be found at http://www.existentialennui.com/

* James Mayo was the penname of Stephen Coulter, a friend of Ian Fleming; apparently, he helped Fleming with some background on Casino Royale. According to Wikipedia, he was born in 1914 and is still alive, though his last book was published in 1988.

Sunday, 23 November 2014

Secret file 05 – Keith Tyson

Born on 19 March 1933. At the time of the Prague Papers (1975) he was forty-two.

He’s tall, with grey eyes and black eyebrows that arch rakishly, and has a square jaw, a thin face and deep furrows run down both cheeks.

***

Tyson was fascinated by technology and always had been. As a young man he enjoyed an active, outdoor life; a sort of contradiction, being a studious type as well. After obtaining his Spanish degree at King’s College, Durham, he drifted for a couple of months then on impulse joined the Royal Engineers. As the advertisements of the time stated, the Army made a man of him. He thrived on the kind of activity they dished up; a fit body and an alert mind, plenty of action, good money and good food. He cut out drinking, save for special occasions, and then always in moderation. He had never smoked as he couldn’t see anything sensible about ingesting smoke into his lungs.

In his spare time he took a seamanship course and soon obtained a Coxswain’s certificate. His eyes were good and after hours of practice he attained marksman standard with a Browning pistol: heavy but damned accurate – unlike some toy-like automatics he’d tried.

Two years later (1962) he joined the SAS, successfully passing their rigorous courses, proud to be given his wings and the sand-coloured beret.

In 1962 he was in Rhodesia and then in Borneo he spent about ten months in a four man team, training Iban/Border Scouts, the local tribesmen, who became the Army’s eyes and ears to defend the Malaysian border with the Kalimantan region of Indonesia. They were good liaison officers with the locals and also acted as additional infantry and guides.

While his fighting impulse was more than satisfied, he wasn’t being academically challenged until his patrol met up with the Kalabit, a head-hunting tribe who didn’t particularly like the Chinese communists. The Kalabit taught Tyson their customs and, more interestingly, basic Malay, which was far better than the short course he’d undertaken before being shipped out.

Unfortunately, in September of that year the Long Jawi Scout Post was massacred by a group of Indonesians. Tyson had known and trained many of the dead and openly grieved for them with other Scouts. Thereafter, the Scouts were solely used as intelligence gatherers and acquitted themselves well for another three years. But Tyson didn’t share in their successes as he’d moved on to Aden in April 1964 shortly after two SAS soldiers’ heads had been displayed impaled on stakes in the main square of Taiz, across the Yemen border.

Tyson and his new team – Dave, Benny and Mark – were ordered to bring back some enemy heads and they did so. It was grisly work and Benny Bateman suffered severe leg wounds that meant he’d never walk again. But they got him out – and brought back six FLOSY heads.

On his return from that mission he was recruited into the Counter Revolutionary Warfare unit to cope with the insurgents in the port of Aden itself. Here, he learned counter-insurgency skills which later would be honed against terrorists.

But he didn’t have much opportunity to use these new abilities as he was asked to attend an urgent hush-hush meeting in a shed at Khormaksar airport. Here he was introduced to Admiral Sands, a short man who seemed uncomfortable in civilian clothes.

They shook hands and it was all very informal. ‘I’m authorised by your CO to put to you an unusual request, Sergeant,’ Sands had said, his sharp features lightening with a slight smile. ‘We’re talking wheels within wheels here, you realise?’

‘Sorry, sir, but you’ve lost me already.’

‘That’s my fault. I’ve been with the cloak-and-dagger crowd for four years now and you tend to go all cryptic. Let me explain.’

Admiral Sands was there on behalf of a certain Sir Gerald Hazard from a covert company called International Interprises. ‘An autonomous bit of MI6, actually,’ Sands said.

Tyson’s life was about to change dramatically. It began with the unorthodox assignment Sands had been sent to set up. Tyson with three other members of the SAS were parachuted into Brazil under the directive of the Defence Minister; top secret diplomatic clearances had been arranged, complete with sweeteners in the form of generous trade agreements. Two Interprises agents, Mason and Cally, had kidnapped a high-ranking KGB Director of Peru. But their plane crashed in the Brazilian jungle. Interprises had no available operatives up to the rigours of jungle tracking; so the SAS had been brought in.

Tyson and his two comrades rescued the Russian and the Interprises agents, taking them to a secret rendezvous with the country’s first nuclear-powered submarine, HMS Dreadnought.

Landing at Rosyth, the two Interprises agents spirited the Soviet spy away. Tyson left his three comrades to some well-earned leave in Edinburgh while he caught the train down to one of Sir Gerald’s country homes just outside Morpeth, as instructed.

‘I’ve already had a report from Mason and Cally,’ Sir Gerald said. ‘They were greatly impressed and again send their thanks.’

‘I was just doing my job, sir,’ Tyson replied, sipping Vichy water. ‘They held up pretty well in that jungle, all things considered.’

‘Yes.’ Sir Gerald grinned and Tyson thought that his features slightly resembled a death-mask from Borneo. ‘Think about what I’m going to offer you. No guarantees, mind. We don’t work that way.’ He gave Tyson a card. ‘Should you want to get in touch.’

There was something about the man that inspired trust. You really wanted to follow him. Tyson wondered what Sir Gerald had done in his war.

For days afterwards he couldn’t settle. That indefinable ‘something’ that he’d been chasing all his adult life, it seemed to be on offer from this mysterious organization called Interprises. Certainly, it was linked in some way to MI6. Yet it had autonomy, which he liked. And it was run by a man he could believe in.

On the fourth day he fished out Sir Gerald’s card and telephoned the man.

Although he was in the middle of a meeting, Sir Gerald made time for him. ‘I’d like to join your team, sir. There’s just the one problem – I’m signed up for-’

‘Your release can be taken care of, no problem,’ Sir Gerald interrupted.

‘Then I’m your man.’

‘You’re happy about doing more training?’

‘No problem, sir.’

‘And although we’re keen on team players, you’ll often be quite alone in hostile territory. You’re used to working in a four-man team. Being alone won’t bother you?’

‘No, sir. I’m comfortable with my own company.’

‘I thought so. Welcome to our little organization, then, Mr Tyson.’

It felt strange, being called that. Mister. He quite liked the sound of it.

Within the month (in 1965), his resignation was sanctioned and he received instructions about training at the Fort in Gosport, where he met Tana Standish.

***

Tomorrow, November 26 sees the release of The Prague Papers published by Crooked Cat. The Papers are based on a manuscript handed to me by an MI6 agent, Alan Swann. It needed some knocking into shape, as it had been a collaborative effort by a select group of agents, all intent on telling the story of Tana Standish, psychic spy, whose career spanned 1965 to 1988. They asked that her story be told as fiction.

As a result, the novel The Prague Papers is the first adventure to feature Tana Standish and is mainly set in Czechoslovakia in 1975.

Certain information was divulged in order for me to write the book; yet some has been concealed to date. This is the fifth secret file – and the last – to be released ahead of the book.

Tyson is featured in the short story ‘Hell for Leather’, scheduled for the Saturday Story slot on 29 November.

Tuesday, 11 November 2014

Secret file – 02 - Professor Dmitri Bublyk

He was born on 17 October 1919. His father was taken away when he was fourteen, in 1933. He was inducted into the army and during the Second World War, a shell-casing exploded close to him and on recovering he discovered his psychic ability. He was in the Leningrad siege in January 1944.

At the time of the Prague Papers mission (1975), he was resident in the Kirlian Institute, Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, and ran a special group of psychics.

Tall, powerfully built and big-boned, he was the antithesis of the common image of a scientist. He was a manipulative man, without compassion.

He possessed a sallow complexion, a sickly yellow; he blamed it on not getting the right food, even with all his privileges. He had hooded eyes, coloured pale, yellowish brown and flaring nostrils and a long nose. His hair was the shade and consistency of straw and always untidy.

***

In the Kirlian Institute of Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, Professor Bublyk paced the control room. Through the glass wall he could observe an adjoining room occupied by six men and four women, all of them sitting at desks. He smiled on them, his best students: The Group. They were all wearing headsets connected to an array of large cumbersome computers and clinical monitors. The men wore drab uniform gray coveralls while the women were dressed in clay-brown skirts and shirts.

Deep crease-lines in his forehead betrayed his worry about next year’s appropriations.

It was annoying but every time they sent an inspection team, he had to recount the history of mind control. As if the idiots understood even a fraction of what he told them!

‘The history of mind control began with our experiments carried out by Pavlov in the Thirties to modify behavior,’ he would say. ‘While the salivating dog experiments were the most well-known, they were merely the precursor.’

Indeed. The precursor to more sinister work. Lenin made Pavlov a ‘guest’ at the Kremlin for about three months until the scientist had completed a special report, relating his research to human beings rather than dogs. Pavlov’s manuscript never left the Kremlin and it laid the groundwork for NKVD brainwashing techniques such as sleep deprivation, systematic beatings and verbal indoctrination. Brain damage, Pavlovian conditioning, hypnosis, sensory stimulation, ‘black psychiatry’ and ‘mind cleansing’ were all employed to subvert the will of perceived enemies of the state.

And as Bublyk was at pains to point out, ‘the ultimate brainwashing tool is the actual invasion of another person’s mind with yours.’ That was the motherland’s version of the Holy Grail.

In the Fifties, when Bublyk first entered para-psychological research, funds were scarce, as most of the work was done without the Stalinists being aware of it. Thankfully for him, the Stalinist taboo was lifted in the early Sixties, and he finally saw funding at last become plentiful because both the KGB and the GRU leaders hoped to harness psychic energy as another weapon in their arsenal.

Bublyk explained with justified pride, ‘It was Russian sleep research that detected the theta state of consciousness, which is found in dreaming sleep.’ This seemed to be somehow linked to psychic awareness. If this theta state could be augmented, they would have psychic spies – or even mind-assassins. To many of his listeners it seemed far-fetched, but the potential from success, no matter how remote, meant that rubles were diverted to this new branch of research.

The Sixties were a golden time for him and those years promised much, with experiments in submarines and in space, but deliverables were scarce. It was an inexact science, prey to mood, to environment and doubtless planetary influences for all Bublyk knew.

Now, halfway through this new decade, all the pressures were building up and cracks were appearing in the structure of the State. Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, was asking awkward questions. He wanted results to combat the Americans. Even members of the Politburo were becoming dissatisfied, though not within the hearing of Brezhnev and his informers.

The party tricks with cards were long gone. Psychical research had come a long way, Bublyk mused, eyeing in particular Karel Yakunin, their star psychic. Yakunin’s good looks and dark wavy hair transcended the drabness of his regulation clothing.

Bublyk smiled, recalling only last night when his mind roamed the dormitories and found Yakunin bedding little Raisa, the flaxen-haired Estonian psychic now sitting at the back of the room. Their coupling was against Bublyk’s regulations, as he believed sexual activity drained the psychic forces – a credo shared by oriental mystics. Yet he had not reported or disciplined them as he had to admit to quite enjoying being a voyeur.

Now, The Group was capable of distance viewing, of projecting thoughts into minds in other lands or of detecting other people’s thoughts in enemy countries. It was arduous work. Some of them suffered rapid weight-loss and heart-strain due to the exertion. Last year, two adepts died. It was no accident that the theta state was so named after the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet, suggesting a sign of doom – thanatos, the ‘death’ sign on the ballots used in voting on a sentence of life or death in ancient Greece.

And, Bublyk reflected, they still had a lot to learn. The prospects were good, but the funding committee wanted solid repeatable results, quantifiable answers. Damned bean counters! If only the measuring apparatus was up to the task!

At that moment, a buzzer jerked Bublyk out of his reverie. The light was on over Yakunin’s name – he’d detected someone!

Bublyk quickly scanned today’s roster and noted Yakunin was covering Czechoslovakia.

***

On November 26, The Prague Papers are released. This book is published by Crooked Cat. It is based on a manuscript handed to me by an MI6 agent, Alan Swann. It needed some knocking into shape, as it had been a collaborative effort by a select group of agents, all intent on telling the story of Tana Standish, psychic spy, whose career spanned 1965 to 1988. They asked that her story be told as fiction.

As a result, the forthcoming novel The Prague Papers is the first adventure to feature Tana Standish and is mainly set in Czechoslovakia in 1975.

Certain information was divulged in order for me to write the book; yet some has been concealed to date. This is the second secret file to be released ahead of the book. Others will follow.