Setting the Stage - Ready for Action

The early nineties was an exciting time, a time of change, a time when controversial concepts suddenly lost their validity. Just before the decade opened, one of the Cold War's major symbols, the Berlin Wall, was reduced to a pile of concrete rubble. By late 1991, the vaunted Soviet Union had crumbled apart as well. Meanwhile, the United States showed its muscle in the Middle East by leading a coalition that saw Desert Storm stop Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his tracks.

It appeared to be a heady time for America and her allies, but problems rumbled beneath the surface like precursors of an earthquake. The break-up of the Soviet Union and the demise of communism in the Russian sphere stripped many autocrats of their power and left them searching for ways to reclaim their lofty status. The U.S. venture in Iraq, sending a large army halfway across the globe in record time, put strains on the budget, prodding Congress to call for slashes in military and intelligence spending.

Financial oligarchs, international bankers and corporate heads who felt their world view superior to the insular perspectives of most people, saw the disorganization of the former Soviet states as a hindrance to world order. Something needed to be done to assure the pieces of the puzzle would be assembled in the fashion they desired.

This outlook for the period of transition in the early nineties provides the backdrop for my trilogy of Post Cold War political thrillers featuring ex-FBI agent Burke Hill, his wife Lori, and a cast of colorful characters from around the globe. Here are the covers produced by talented artist Stephen Walker.

The first book, Beware the Jabberwock, shifts from Israel to Hong Kong to the eastern U.S., with much of it centered around a small island off the Florida Gulf Coast. The Poksu Conspiracy, second in the series, alternates between the Washington area and South Korea, with side junkets to San Franciso and Chiangmai, Thailand. The final volume, titled Overture to Disaster, involves two subplots that feature a Special Operations helicopter pilot and a criminal investigator from Minsk, Belarus.

Beware the Jabberwock is available here in paperback or ebook.
The Poksu Conspiracy can be found here as an ebook.
Overture to Disaster will be published in March.

Genisis of a Fiction-Writing Career

When I retired from the workaday world back in mid-1989, I knew my replacement at the trade association I had run for eighteen years would want to redo the office. I had been working at a roll-top desk I painstakingly finished in walnut stain after buying it at an unpainted furniture store. The association president said take it home, along with some matching wooden chairs. I had told everyone I planned to write novels after I retired, so I set up my computer beside the roll-top and attacked my new career.

Beware the Jabberwock will be FREE in the Kindle store July 12-14.

Being a long-time fan of the Cold War thriller, I naturally turned to that genre. Problem was the Berlin Wall's days were numbered, and the Soviet Union wouldn't be far behind. I had avidly followed the Soviet KGB's shenanigans and the CIA's countermoves. So I began to speculate on what might happen as the two long-time adversaries watched their playground plowed up.

Looking back at page after page of handwritten notes in the Jabberwock file, I recall doing a prodigious amount of research before getting far into the story. Much of it wound up on the cutting room floor, to use a film expression. I read extensively about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as spies for leaking nuclear secrets to the KGB. I came up with a scenario for a character whose mother had been a friend of the couple, then scrapped it when a better idea came along.

I originally had a long list of character names, only a few of whom made the cut. The female lead, Lorelei, was originally conceived as the daughter of a once-prominent Virginia family. Her background changed completely when I got into the tale and made her the daughter of CIA officer Cameron Quinn with an intriguing background. I stayed with Burke Hill as the protagonist and gave him the complex past of an ex-FBI agent I had known several years before.

When I opened the book with a clandestine meeting in Vienna of a KGB general and a high official  in the CIA, I read up on ways to detect electronic surveillance devices. My old file contains several pages from an electronics magazine describing the equipment I used in Chapter 1. I did other research on such subjects as mortars, secure telephones, small sailboats, World War II LCMs (Landing Craft, Mechanized), the city of Toronto and much more.

At the time I had no writing credits, but I wrote the Metropolitan Toronto Conventions & Visitors Association with a detailed list of seven questions regarding parades and security in the city. A gentleman named John Hamlton, assistant director of public relations, sent me a two-page answer providing everything I needed. New writers who are afraid to ask people for information are wasting their time. People are eager to help writers.

In those days I depended on my internet service with CompuServe to do online research, though most of it was done with books and magazines from the Vanderbilt University library. My simple word processing program would only create small files, so I wound up with seventeen files to cover the entire book. It required printing one file at a time to get a complete manuscript. When I finally converted to Word, I got them all in one file.

As the Soviet Union fell apart, I kept up with the news of what was happening in Russia and imagined how things would play out of the situation kept deteriorating. Fortunately, what I imagined didn't take place but it made for a chilling story of what might have been. Beware the Jabberwock is available for the Kindle at Amazon.com. It will be released later this month in paperback by Night Shadows Press and at Smashwords.com for other ebook readers.

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.

Down Memory Lane

I'm taking a trip down memory lane this weekend. It goes back sixty years to the middle of 1950. If you were around then, you probably remember that year's most significant event was the invasion of South Korea by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, better known as Communist North Korea, run by ruthless dictator Kim Il-Sung. It was the year following the end of the Berlin Airlift. The Cold War was just heating up.

I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve on graduation from the University of Tennessee journalism school the previous year. While working as a reporter for The Knoxville Journal, I heard about the organization of an Air National Guard unit designated the 119th Aircraft Control & Warning Squadron. It would be equipped with radar as part of new efforts to control the skies over the U.S. I joined the unit as its intelligence officer, a field that appealed to me. Newspaper reporters are always eager to be "in the know." It sounded like just the ticket. (That's me at right on R&R in Tokyo, 1951.)

The 119th AC&W Squadron was a small unit of around 100 men. We met at the National Guard Armory on Sutherland Avenue on the west side of town. The radar sets were a fascinating new toy, with small oscilloscopes that featured a radius line sweeping around as the odd-looking antenna rotated. It would pick up airplanes as small dots on the screen and track their progress across the sky.

As the first year of operations wound down, we held our first summer field training exercise in 1951. As best I can recall, it took place on somebody's farm where we camped out in tents. By this time, the war in Korea had begun to require a force buildup that entailed calling up National Guard and reserve units. We knew our time was coming.

Air Guard personnel could attend regular Air Force schools, so I put in for Intelligence School at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver. I hit the road in my little Plymouth on Labor Day weekend. I had never driven that far alone, and it was a memorable journey. This was before interstate highways, and those with a U.S. designation were usually well-paved but only two lanes wide. Traffic usually moved at the speed of the slowest driver.

At St. Louis I took U.S. 40 west, which generally followed the current route of I-70. I approached Kansas City in late afternoon and saw huge buildups of dark clouds across the Missouri River in Kansas. The road soon turned dark, as did everything within sight. Kansas looked like a mass of wheat fields with no people, no houses. Then came the thunderstorms. Searing, jagged streaks of lightning slammed into the ground around me, illuminating the fields in brief flashes of light. Thunder roared like explosions echoing in the night.

I decided I'd better find someplace to spend the night. That's when it dawned on my that this was Labor Day weekend. Tourist courts, the forerunner of motels, were scarce, and those I saw had NO VACANCY signs out. When I saw a cutoff to Manhattan, I headed into the small town. There I found an old hotel with a room available. The light was a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. I took it happily and slept through the remainder of the stormy night.

I drove on to Denver the next day and checked in at the base. I finished the intelligence course at the end of November and arrived back in Knoxville just in time to go on active duty with the 119th. A few months later I was on my way to Korea and Headquarters Fifth Air Force in Seoul, my home for the next year.

I'll be recalling those days this weekend as the 119th Command & Control Squadron (a linear descendant of the AC&W unit) holds a 60th Anniversary Celebration. I'm told there will be at least two other charter members of the organization there. Plus, I'm sure, lots of other oldtimers. It should be a fun event.

My peek into Hoover's FBI

I’ve encountered zillions of people during my sixty years in the writing business, but none more intriguing than an ex-FBI agent we’ll call Scotty. I first met him back in the sixties during my days of editing Nashville Magazine. He was a friend of one of my equally intriguing staff members. She would relate stories about him that sounded a bit off the wall but still believable.

After a few years, she asked me to meet with him at her place one night to talk about a book he wanted me to co-write. We talked for hours and the strange tale unfolded.

Scotty went to Washington just out of high school and got a job as a clerk at the FBI. He worked there while getting a degree in accounting. According to his story, he got close to Director J. Edgar Hoover in the process, often delivering files to his home. After graduation, he took the FBI training course and became an agent.

At some point, he was assigned to the Nashville office, which is how my magazine staffer met him. This was during the Cold War, and she reported some suspicious activity she encountered. Scotty met her on assignment.

But back to his story. Scotty was chosen to participate in a small group of agents known as Hoover’s Goon Squad. They were tasked to do jobs that were not exactly in the rule book. That included assignments outside the country for counterespionage, something that should have been in the CIA’s bailiwick. But, as Scotty said, the CIA was ignoring the Bureau’s sole jurisdiction in the U.S. also. Records of the operations were buried in a special group of restricted safes known as the T Files.

One of the weird stories he told was of an agent who was sent out to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah to pick up a package containing a chemical compound for use in some kind of skullduggery. They figured he must have gotten curious and opened the package. He was found a day or so later wandering naked around a little town in the Provo area, babbling like the village idiot.

Scotty said Hoover and Asst. Director Bill Sulllivan picked him to try to infiltrate the Cosa Nostra, a favorite Hoover target they had been unable to crack. First he had to resign from the FBI. He was instructed to commit a few crimes like bank robbery to build some bona fides, but not get caught. He said it was easy. Then he hung out in Las Vegas and tried to weasel his way into the mob but was never successful.

When he gave up and went back to report to Hoover, the man he had idolized all those years, the director refused to see him. Apparently Hoover had written him off and didn’t want to admit what they had done.

The last I heard of Scotty, he was trying to get copies of his personal files from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. He sent me copies of his correspondence, including a request for $50 to cover duplication at ten cents per page. That was in March of 1985. We never made it to the point of putting anything on paper. I had contact with his friend in later years and heard that Scotty had died. I know she did.

Though nothing ever came of it, it would have made a hell of a story.

I used Scotty as the model for the protagonist in the first novel I wrote after retirement. It was a post-Cold War thriller, something that went out of vogue about that time. Several of them have been published in recent years. I may resurrect it and try again.