The Deceiver – Frederick Forsyth, 1991 ★★★★½

When a Man's Got a Job to Do

Sometimes it requires a shorter format for a craftsman’s quality to shine through. Not to take anything away from the novelist behind such classic long-form spy-fiction exercises as The Day Of The Jackal and The Fourth Protocol, but with Frederick Forsyth, there's something to be said for the merit of small packages, which is just what The Deceiver delivers.

Published in 1991, just as the Cold War was winding down, The Deceiver is designed as a look back at a series of cases late in the career of a top British spymaster. It’s oddly similar to another book published the same year.

In The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré had his most famous spy character, George Smiley, deliver an informal dissertation regarding lessons learned to a group of English espionage students, which unspooled as a series of short stories. The same is true here, except in this case it's no casual gathering that's the setting, but a tense tribunal to determine whether to ashcan our protagonist as part of a forgotten past.

The Deceiver presents the story of Sam McCready, who for years ran the Secret Intelligence Service’s Deception, Disinformation, and Psychological Operations desk, known as Dee-Dee and Psy Ops. During the 1980s, this had its uses, but with the coming of perestroika and Gorbachev, McCready is an embarrassing reminder of bad old days.

“At fifty-one, he was still lean and looked fit,” Forsyth writes of McCready. “Otherwise, he was the sort of man who could pass unnoticed. That was what had made him in his day so good, so damned good. That, and what he had in his head.”

The bureaucrats who run the SIS see McCready as an unwelcome dinosaur ready for pasture. One of his loyal deputies, Denis Gaunt, takes the opportunity of a final review hearing to detail just how McCready is a man of rare service worth keeping. Gaunt brings up four cases from his past, which serves as a framing device for the novellas that follow.

While all set in the 1980s, the last full decade of the Soviet Union and its undeclared war against the West, the four stories bring out different aspects of the spy game. Only two involve Russian activity directly, but all touch on the same principles of whom one can trust in a career where trustworthiness is neither commonplace nor recommended.

In one of the cases, “A Casualty Of War,” we are told: “For Rowse possessed that quality so beloved of spymasters: He was quite dispensable.” Dispensability is indeed a virtue in the spy game, and McCready, once a fairly handy if not dispassionate dispenser himself, now is the one being disposed. Is that why he seems oddly resigned to his fate?

The first thing that comes across from the stories presented here is just how fine a craftsman Forsyth can be. Yet The Deceiver has a somewhat elegiac tone about it which gives the stories surprising emotional depth. I read Forsyth for the yarns more than the emotions; so I was more than a bit taken aback by the piercing finales of the first two stories, “Pride And Extreme Prejudice” and “The Price Of The Bride.”

Both those tales present Russian-focused activities, with McCready a decent if ultimately utilitarian figure. In his dedication, Forsyth writes about those who spent the period he writes about “in the shadowed places.” Clearly that is where our main character in “Pride And Extreme Prejudice,” Bruno Morenz, finds himself.

Tapped by McCready to help secure a book of top-secret Russian military information, the former East German resident turned boring West German bureaucrat takes the assignment despite a bad drinking problem McCready doesn’t know of. Worse, after stumbling in on his pretty mistress and discovering her laughing at secret video she made of their sexual activities, he finds himself in what might be called a spot of trouble.

Forsyth masterfully puts us on a two-track storyline where Morenz blunders his dangerous way through East Germany while McCready watches with growing certainty something is wrong. There is also a third track, a West German investigation of a murder scene which has a desperate relevance to poor Bruno’s plight.

As good a tight bit of suspense writing as that is, “The Price Of The Bride” is even more impressive. Here you really get the looking-glass-war aspect of the Soviet-U. S. conflict. The Americans manage to land themselves a top Russian defector, about whom they are quite pleased. But a secret Russian asset of McCready’s warns him that the defector, a fellow named Orlov, is playing a double game.

The challenge of determining a genuine defection from a disinformation scheme was one that the West was very familiar. The real-life case of Soviet KGB major Anatoliy Golitsyn (above), a defector to the West in 1951 whose true nature one way or another was never conclusively determined, serves as an overt case example of the dilemma posted in "Price Of The Bride." [Image from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/the-man-from-uncle/cold_war_defectors/]

“No information provided by Orlov will ever actually produce massive and irreversible damage to Soviet interests,” the contact tells McCready. Moreover, “you will see an enormous loss of morale taking place within the CIA.”

Those who claim Forsyth was no le Carré when it came to getting under the hood and daring the possibility that West can be as bad as East should give “The Price Of The Bride” a read. It presents a case of how careerists can be tempted into the ultimate form of nasty behavior just to keep themselves smelling sweet to their superiors. A particularly nasty episode involves a thinly disguised William Casey, at the time of the story the CIA chief.

Here especially Forsyth is at the top of his game. Even when I knew I wasn’t getting a happy ending, I had to keep reading to find out what exactly was in store.

The other two tales, “A Casualty Of War” and “A Little Bit Of Sunshine,” stray off the track to present cases involving terrorism (in 1991, seen as a side issue in the grand scheme of things) and colonial skulduggery, respectively. While neither is as strong as the first two stories, both are well-designed tales involving travel to out-of-the-way places, with McCready operating more openly than he did in the first two stories.

“A Casualty Of War” is where we meet Rowse, a disaffected Special Air Service operative whom McCready recruits to take on the Irish Republican Army, believed to be in preparation for a major arms shipment from Libya. This is a much less ratcheted-down story than either “Pride” or “Bride,” and more in line with the sort of globe-trotting exploits one finds in Forsyth’s normal fare, of an isolated heroic character taking on a conspiracy of bad guys.

Even when it feels a mite too familiar in that regard (just what are we supposed to think when a beautiful woman suddenly beds down with our boy?), “Casualty” is aided by Forsyth’s flair for immersive detail and layered feeling of research. I don’t care if there isn’t an airport in Malta like the one Forsyth describes here. When I was reading it, I felt like I knew what it was like to wait in its luggage carousel.

I found “A Little Bit Of Sunshine” tonally less constricted than the other three tales, with some loose ends but a good deal of flair, especially as we observe what seem to be a pair of unrelated murder investigations play out simultaneously. Forsyth’s dark wit is in evidence when we learn that one murder victim “spent his first night in the afterworld sandwiched between a large marlin and a very fine blackfin tuna. In the morning the expression on all three faces was much the same.”

The only serious criticism I’d offer is the framing device of the stories being used in an attempt to save McCready from the axe makes little sense as we come to learn. At least the stories as presented here don’t show his work reaping the best results. In “Pride,” he unknowingly sends out an emotionally wrecked man to handle a delicate assignment; in “Bride,” he fails to persuade an ally about a dangerous situation.

But as I was not sitting in judgment of McCready, except as an instrument of my reading pleasure, I can't say this bothered me too much. If you like spy fiction, this is a superior example that packs a lot of feeling and action in four tight packages.