“We all have secrets… Secrets are a part of our lives and the lives of literature’s great characters. But spies operate in a more complex world of secrets – things they hide from family, from friends, and from themselves,” says Paul Vidich, whose latest novel, Beirut Station, buzzes with those secrets. “I found the double lives of spies as a compelling premise to explore.”
Why are we drawn to these stories and their seductive operatives, duplicity, and their unique moral code? Vidich elaborates, as to why he believes spy and espionage fiction is so enticing: “At the heart of spy fiction – really all fiction – is the mystery of character. We read to be entertained and to see the world through a character’s eyes. The spy’s world has all that – sex, betrayal, overall sneaky behavior – and we enjoy it vicariously.”
Vidich takes a measured approach to incorporating that spy world demeanor before he starts each book. “I operate on the principle that the more I get to know a character, the longer I spend with them, the more likely they’ll have the complexity, humanity, intelligence, and cleverness that will engage the reader. I build a story around the historical figure, building a cast of fictional characters.
“Before I start writing, I have a dossier for each fictional character: name, age, birthplace, work habits, religious beliefs, favorite drink, family history, desires, fears, tics, speech habits, education, motivations, and vulnerabilities. I visualize a character’s entire life. Most of what I develop never appears in the novel, but knowing it allows me to give a character depth and gravity.”
But he doesn’t stop there. “I usually do six months of research. The research helps me find an incident, or character, or conflict interesting enough to support a novel. Five of my books emerged from historical figures that I came across: Markus Wolf, the Stasi head of counterintelligence; William Morgan, soldier of fortune executed by Castro; James Kronthal, aide to Allen Dulles, who committed suicide to save the agency from the embarrassment of his Soviet betrayal; Frank Olson, a murdered bioweapons scientist; and Imad Mughniyeh in my new novel, Beirut Station.”
Google any of these names and Vidich’s work becomes, if that’s possible, even more compelling. His previous novel The Matchmaker (2022), is set in the East Berlin of 1989, the waning days of the divided city, and based on one of those historical personages he found, Markus Wolf, the Stasi spymaster who recruited East German undercover agents to marry unsuspecting women and use them as cover for espionage activities. The protagonist, Anne Simpson, is duped by one such man, and when he disappears and a body is found and claimed to be him, Anne sets out to figure out the truth about her husband. As in, Who was this guy, anyway?
(The real Matchmaker, Marcus Wolf, known as “the man without a face” for his ability to remain unphotographed, died in Berlin at 83 in 2006.)
Numerous non-fiction books have been written about the notorious CIA’s LSD experiments on unwitting individuals in the 1950’s, but not many – if any – novels have incorporated the sordid actions by a callous and deceitful CIA. And for Vidich, the story is personal: In The Coldest Warrior, (2020) a government scientist – named Charles Wilson in the novel – who “jumped” from a hotel window in the early 50s is, in fact, based upon the real-life story of Vidich’s uncle, Frank Olson. It seems like an unbelievable story, the CIA dosing unwitting individuals, but Vidich captures the era (and its inherent cruelty) masterfully.
How he came to write that novel in the first place (and become a spy novelist) is as Vidich says, “A bit of serendipity. Years ago, a literary agent approached me after he saw one of my short stories had won an award and asked if I had a novel he could represent, which I did not have. But I did have a personal family tragedy – the 1953 murder of my uncle, Frank Olson, a bioweapons scientist who worked for the CIA. My first effort to turn the story into a novel failed. I was too close to the story to write objectively. I abandoned that initial effort, but I had found a character that interested me: a man inside the CIA doing top secret work that troubled him.”
(According to an NY Times story from 2012, Olson’s sons sued the CIA over their father’s death and the cover up. The suit was dismissed, but a settlement was offered in the late 1970’s and accepted by the family, to their later regret as new evidence about Olson’s death emerged in the following two decades. According to Vidich, the family came to believe that the offer of settlement was the government’s way of covering up evidence that would be revealed in a courtroom.)
Eventually, he found a way to write that story, but not before completing two other Cold War era novels, both featuring a CIA agent, the world-weary George Mueller, who in Vidich’s debut, An Honorable Man (2016) is tasked by the CIA Director to uncover the identity of a Soviet mole in the Agency.
Explains Vidich: “It’s based on the real case of James Speyer Kronthal, a key aide to Allen Dulles, an early Director of Central Intelligence, who was found dead in the upstairs bedroom of his Georgetown home in April 1953. During WWII, Kronthal, a gay man, had been turned by the Soviets in a honey trap in Vienna. To spare the agency the public embarrassment of his treason, he poisoned himself and the whole matter was covered up.”
If there are any takeaways from these CIA themed novels, it’s that the Agency Vidich portrays was – still is? – truly unbridled and willing to protect American interests by means – any means – short of war.
Next came The Good Assassin, set in a hotspot for intrigue: Pre-Castro Cuba just prior to the fall of the corrupt and Mafia-ridden Batista regime. Mueller, now retired from the Agency, is asked to visit an operative and old friend, Toby Graham, in Cuba who is suspected of helping Castro with CIA supplied weaponry – instead of secretly passing them onto the Batista forces – what’s left of them, anyway. It’s a classic cat-and-mouse game between the two men. Rogue? Misunderstood? It’s up to Mueller to sort it out.
Vidich evokes a long-ago Cuba, certainly Havana but also the countryside, where the rebels hide out. One of the references cited by Vidich in his afterword, a New Yorker article from 2012, tells the strange saga of William Morgan, the model for the Graham character. He is described, after traveling to Cuba in 1957 to fight with Castro, “like Holden Caulfield with a machine gun.”
The only protagonist to date in Vidich’s pantheon not based on an historical figure is Alex Garin, a grizzled former KGB officer turned CIA op. In The Mercenary, (2021) set in Moscow, 1985, Garin is “chosen” by a wannabe defector with top secret weapons intel to get him out of the country. The tension during that effort steadily builds and as he races to get the increasingly demanding, prima donna Russian out, it’s Garin who seems more in peril than his charge.
Vidich has an unusual backstory for Garin. “I came to him after watching the television series, The Americans. In the series, the husband and wife are Russian agents (called ‘illegals’) living normal suburban American lives while also serving as Soviet agents collecting intelligence… In one episode the parents have the difficult conversation with their teenage daughter – ‘We’re Soviet spies.’ In my case, Garin is the child of one of these illegals. He allows himself to be pushed by his parents into working for the CIA as a double agent, but his head is pretty screwed up by his conflicted loyalties. He recants, admits his KGB affiliation to the CIA, and is turned back by the CIA to work against the Soviets. He becomes a triple agent. What interested me was the psychological stress of his conflicted identity, and the pressure put on him by his mother.” And Garin is, indeed, a most conflicted protagonist.
In his new novel, Beirut Station, Vidich returns with another female lead, a young Lebanese-American CIA agent, Analise, who is nearing the end of her tour. Vidich describes her: “Analise is a young woman of the 9/11 generation… Patriotic, drawn to serve her country, but then when deployed she discovers the dirty, brutal, heartless, side of covert work. Her values are tested by cynical colleagues, and she struggles not to descend into despair.”
It’s 2006, and Beirut is under attack by Israel in the war with Hezbollah. A joint operation by Mossad and the CIA seeks to kill a longtime terrorist, Najib Qassem. Analise infiltrates his household by building relationships with his two grandchildren, under the guise of her false UN-based identity.
“There was a plan in place, and what mattered was that the plan kept her from thinking too much about her role. She merely had to maintain cover and do her part.” And a quite a part it turns out to be.
Like many of her contemporaries in the field, Analise has a casual sexual relationship with a reporter, Corbin. “[He] was a tough case and she thought she’d met her match. They were masters at giving the other a false sense of what was between them, each coy about what went unsaid.”
Naturally, the plan, involving blowing up the SUV Qassem rides in, runs into problems. The squabbling and competition between a world-weary CIA bureau chief, Aldrich and his counterpart, Bauman, a particularly bitter, intense Mossad agent only adds to the drama. As the final chance to kill Qassem approaches, “One day became two, and waiting for word to proceed was a torturous experience. Patience was an unreliable companion, and patience at the end of a long operation was hard to find and difficult to keep.”
Vidich ramps up the suspense with surgical precision. Analise’s peril increases exponentially, as “Fear’s demons confused her judgment, but she’d learned to quash fear with the soothing comfort of observed details.”
It gives nothing away to note that Vidich incorporates the details of the actual CIA assassination of Qassem’s real life counterpart, Imad Mughniyeh, as detailed in a lengthy Politico article from 2015: “A team of CIA spotters in Damascus tracking a Hezbollah terrorist wanted for decades; a custom-made explosive shaped to kill only the target and placed in the spare tire of an SUV parked along the target’s route home; intelligence gathered by Israelis, paired with a bomb built and tested in North Carolina, taking out a man responsible for the deaths of more Americans than anyone else until 9/11.”
As the story concludes, it feels like Vidich isn’t quite finished with Analise. “Analise is someone I’d like to get to know, but she’s a hard case – a loner not willing to open up and be vulnerable. As the author, I was intrigued by her. Analise is not in my next novel, but she is alive in my imagination and is waiting to make her appearance in another novel. Older, wiser, more kick ass.”
In the end, the novels of Paul Vidich all have one pervasive theme: “All of us have a public face and a private self – but spies take it to a more dramatic level. Spies lie. They lie to everyone, all the time – colleagues, spouses, certainly their children, and even themselves. Their survival depends on deceiving people. Lying in service of work can make for an interesting story, but a life of lying puts enormous stress on the spy, sometimes to the point of cracking up, and that conflict makes them rich source material for a novel.”
And on the horizon? “My next novel is Byron’s Game, set in Moscow and Washington in the fall of 2018. It explores the balled-up mass of suspicion, kompromat, and Washington politics.”
Vidich’s oeuvre already solidifies his place in the genre. Readers unfamiliar with his work will be dazzled by his vision.
