How to Betray Your Country by James Wolff (pocket ebook reader txt) 📗

PRAISE FOR BESIDE THE SYRIAN SEA

‘A superb debut… fascinating. The writer has obviously been somewhere or something in the spy business.’

marcel berlins,

The Times Crime Book of the Month

‘Superb: an adventure from London to Lebanon to Syria and the desperate struggle for survival in the face of war and betrayal. Wolff is a new maestro.’

simon sebag montefiore,

Evening Standard, Best Books of 2018

‘A real original… trembles with realistic detail. I know we’ll hear more of him.’

james naughtie,

BBC Presenter of Bookclub, Radio Times

‘Best new spy novel by a mile. Don’t let this one pass you by if you are a fan of intelligent, complex spy thrillers.’

paul burke,

NB Magazine, Top Noir Novels of 2018

‘Wolff writes masterfully about the badlands of Beirut, suggesting that he knows what he is talking about – plots and counterplots, secret agents, ISIS, Hezbollah, the CIA and our own secret services.’

Literary Review

‘Superbly written and plotted, both subtle and aware in its politics, funny and exciting, Wolff’s debut is also the most surprising and genuine novel about love you’ll read all year.’

Morning Star

‘A great read with characters that are developed and multidimensional.’

San Francisco Book Review

‘A British intelligence spy novel with all the classic trappings. Dare I invoke John le Carré here? That’s an awfully heavy burden to place on a debut author, but the comparison is appropriate.’

criminalelement.com

HOW TO BETRAY YOUR COUNTRY

James Wolff

BITTER LEMON PRESS

LONDON

For L.

Without whose belief, patience and encouragement this would never have been written.

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

PART ONE: MONEY

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

PART TWO: IDEOLOGY

PART THREE: COERCION

PART FOUR: EGO

DAY 1

DAY 2

DAY 3

DAY 4

DAY 5

DAY 6

DAY 7

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

PART ONEMoney

1

INKWELL/129

top secret

foia exempt

from:Gatekeepingto:Private Officesubject:Re: Urgent request for INKWELL updatedate:28 September 2016

1. You asked to be kept informed about this most sensitive of matters.

2. Events beyond our control brought Operation INKWELL to a sudden and violent conclusion this afternoon. We are doing what we can to restrict knowledge of the case within the Service, but the sight of an officer washing blood off his face in the toilets and trying to re-set a broken nose was unusual enough to have triggered the rumour mill. We must be realistic: staff will be talking. INKWELL has attracted considerable attention because of the regrettable characterization of the perpetrator as some sort of Robin Hood figure. There will no doubt be those advising you to issue an office-wide bulletin downplaying the incident. My own view is that this would be a waste of time. It is, after all, quite unreasonable to ask a community of spies to accept the official version of things and refrain from further enquiry, even – or perhaps especially – when it is their masters making the request.

3. Almost four years ago to this day, you set my team the task of identifying the insider responsible for this series of most unusual security breaches, and of collecting sufficient evidence to enable a prosecution. We agreed at the time that the best deterrent to others of a similar mind would be the news that a traitor had been caught and placed behind bars.

4. It is with regret, now this sorry episode has come to an end, that I can inform you we have been only partially successful. CPS lawyers concluded last week that there is no “smoking gun” in the attached file. Collecting evidence that would stand up in court against an officer with such extensive operational experience proved too much of a challenge, although the CPS does note the existence of a “damning (but ultimately circumstantial) collection of daggers, ropes and candlesticks” within the pages of our INKWELL file.

5. Despite this, I remain of the firm view that INKWELL has been a model of patient and thorough investigation, and that in August DRUMMOND we have identified a grave threat to the integrity of the British intelligence community. Our strategy of confronting him this afternoon with such a detailed, compelling case is undoubtedly what forced him to accept that the game was up, which in turn triggered his violent outburst and subsequent dismissal. We may not have got the confession we wanted, and there will be those who continue to argue that other than the Egyptian episode the evidence against him is flawed, but the problem has been dealt with. And there is, I maintain in my old-fashioned way, value in the principle of keeping things quiet. I know that in our current incarnation as a counter-terrorism agency we view anything not resulting in a prison sentence as a failure, but the reputational damage ensuing from a prosecution of one of our own officers for multiple breaches of the Official Secrets Act would have been huge. We have avoided that outcome, and for this my staff should be congratulated, not least Lawrence, whom I have sent to St Thomas’ A & E to be examined for signs of concussion.

6. There is a wider point here about the insider threat. Over the past year we have been working at full stretch dealing with reverberations from events in Beirut. While we remain some way off understanding the full scale of Jonas WORTH’s betrayal, it is surely becoming clear that we must broaden our understanding of what a British traitor might look like in this day and age. Concepts of nationality and loyalty are changing, whether we like it or not. This does not mean that we should take our eye off the traditional threat from states such as Russia and China. They will continue to recruit our officers and steal our secrets. But we must reposition our antennae. Inevitably this will require more staff and more resources, at a time when such things are at a premium.

7. I attach for your information five key INKWELL documents (report numbers 001, 023, 046, 071 and 128) that span the years 2012 to 2016. These may prove useful as an aide-memoire in your conversations with Whitehall seniors, as they describe the five acts of