What Motivates Assassins

The first book in my Post Cold War thriller trilogy, Beware the Jabberwock, involves an operation designed to eliminate the American and Russian presidents in a highly public assassination. It is code named Jabberwock. The team of assassins is composed of three men with widely different backgrounds. They train for the operation at a tiny island off the Florida Panhandle coast. Those charged with getting them prepared for the job compose an  equally varied group of four men.

What motivates people to get involved in such a reprehensible plot? For the trainers, it's just part of the job. There's a CIA clandestine officer and a KGB lieutenant colonel who have been involved in nefarious activities during the Cold War, each man totally committed to his superiors who devised the scheme. The other two involved in training the operational team are former military officers now in well-placed industrial positions directly beneath corporate chairmen who believe the current  administration is dangerously compromising the nation's position of preeminence.

The team of assassins includes an American ex-Green Beret, Gary Overmyer; an explosives expert with the old Stasi, East Germany's hated State Security Service, Hans Richter; and a Palestinian freelance hit-man, Naji Abdalla. Each man was given $125,000 with a promise of an additional $350,00 at conclusion of the operation.

Overmyer had wound up in a psychiatric ward after Vietnam. He then failed at several jobs before succeeding in writing Vietnam War stories for adventure magazines. He enjoyed taking to the woods to practice his stealth skills, scaring the daylights out of people along trails when he jumped out dressed in camouflage gear, features darkened with face paint, carrying an automatic weapon. The reason for his dedication to Jabberwock resulted from falling in love with a young  Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra cellist a couple of years before.

When Overmyer went to Moscow to try and arrange an exit visa for Natasha Grinev, he was thwarted at every turn. He had thought perestroika and glasnost would have softened the Soviet bureaucracy. He sought help from the White House, but got the same story: "These things take time." He returned to Russia to visit Natasha and received shocking news. She had been killed in the collapse of a poorly constructed concrete apartment building. He blamed both presidents for the delay that ended in her death.

As the East German communist government fell from power, the Stasi began burning its documents to hide the records of its misdeeds. The German people fought to halt the destruction, and Hans Richter's records survived. He fled the country and saw no prospects for returning.

Naji Abdalla spent his formative years in a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, waiting for the day he could carry a rifle and join in the battle to free  his homeland. But he soon learned the leaders spent more time fighting among each other. He moved from one band to another, learning the use of every kind of weapon, including the curved Bedouin knife an old Arab taught him. He finally broke with the bands and established himself as a one-man guerrilla force available to the highest bidder.

To learn more about these assassins and what happened to them, go to Beware the Jabberwock.

Beware the Jabberwock

That's the title of the first book I finished after taking up mystery writing on retirement in mid-1989. It was an end-of-the-cold war thriller. After completing the manuscript, I sent out a few queries to New York agents and got a positive response from one. The agency began sending it to editors and sent me copies of their responses. One referred to it as "creepily plausible and nicely audacious." Another commented on the timeliness of the book but said their fledgling thriller line was taking a style and characterization different from the genre as a whole. An editor at the Berkley Publishing Group wrote, "It is a very well written thriller, but this genre is just too hard to sell in mass market at the moment. Maybe this would work well in hardcover." Another said, "It's a competent and entertaining piece of work." But it wasn't the type of novel published at his house.

After about six months, the assistant handling my manuscript left the agency. The principal agent wrote that she was concentrating on non-fiction and wouldn't be able to represent me. So the manuscript went onto the pile on my office floor. It had been created in one of the early word processing programs before I knew much about Windows. I later converted it to Word and it has been on a succession of hard drives since.

I followed Jabberwock with two more thrillers in a trilogy featuring disgraced FBI agent Burke Hill, who was hired to run a CIA spin-off disguised as an international public relations firm. The second book went to an agent who sounded like an old guy when I talked to him on the phone. He kept telling me post cold war spy stories were difficult to sell in those days (early nineties). After nearly a year, I tried to call him and found he had died. By then I had the third book finished and this one landed with a major New York agency (the one that handled John Grisham). I finally learned the manuscript had been sitting on the shelf until when it finally went to an editor, he wrote that it was too dated.

In the hindsight of two decades, the Cold War spy story has made something of a comeback. I'm too jaded now to venture back into the agent search business, however. So I decided to revise the manuscripts and make them available as ebooks. I have about completed work on Jabberwock and hope to get it up soon for the Kindle and on Smashwords for other ebook formats.

The character of Burke Hill was based on a former FBI agent I met back in the sixties when I was editing Nashville Magazine. His name was Jim Scott and he had quite a tale to tell. We talked about my writing his story for a book, and I taped a few hours of reminiscences. He wrote the FBI to get a copy of his files under the Freedom of Information Act. I still have a copy of the reply he received, asking for money to pay for making copies. But before anything came out of it, he moved on and I eventually lost touch with him. The last i heard he had died in his home state of South Carolina. My character followed Scott's story about being chosen by J. Edgar Hoover to attempt to infiltrate the Mafia. In preparation, he resigned from the Bureau and committed a few bank robberies to establish his bona fides. When he failed to get close to the mob, he went back to Washington and was rebuffed by Hoover. Then the FBI blocked his attempts to find another job.

Jabberwock opens in Vienna shortly before dissolution of the Soviet Union with a clandestine meeting of a high CIA official and a KGB general, where a plot is hatched that would change the course of the two countries.