About protocol re nuclear weapons, and stopping an agent arrived in UK that is planning to break it majorly.
Sunday, April 15, 2012.
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The great game has been over for a while and the stability of the world has depended on the cold war stalemate with a few guarantees about their own behaviour agreed on by the powers - amongst them, the fourth protocol, that is, desisting from deploying small portable nuclear devices as and when they should become possible, which was foreseen long before they were.
What if one power does break it, in order to bring more members into its fold, in name of disarmament, by deploying a weapon in a way so that another power would be blamed? It is all too easy to attack a democracy where media and people have some power, and someone from the other side could fool them using spies and operators.
And this is the frightful scenario of this work, with solutions almost built in - what with the world of spies and intelligence being far from foolproof, and agents for one side on the other ubiquitous.
So a right wing bureaucrat might be fooled into providing information to left via a South African sleeper who in reality is a German communist, and this comes to light only because a jewel thief is far too good for his own good, at stealing famous diamonds that belong to the wife of the said bureaucrat but neither of them is careful enough to stow them away while on a holiday. The thief in turn is almost brought down because he has inadvertently taken the briefcase containing top secret papers for the heist, and his contact happens to blabber at the pub. The thief is smart, finds the papers, and mails them to what he considers their rightful place, setting a chain of events that culminates in averting a major disaster.
Meanwhile we look at good intelligence operators and bad bureaucrats, serendipitous transfers that seem and are intended as bad for the person transferred but in fact prove to be major help in cracking the case, and more.
And it does not let up until the end, delightfully. Which is a major triumph for this work, fearsome as the premise is.
And while the film is good, the book is better as it often is with good authors.
The book was published in 1984 when USSR was still not yet broken up, but the subsequent events have if anything made this work more relevant rather than otherwise, with other players than left being the threat to the world.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014.
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