A Russian Spy Ring at the Heart of the British Establishment
BOOK REVIEW: A Spy Alone: A Novel
by Charles Beaumont / Canelo
Reviewed by Jason Pack
The Reviewer — Jason Pack is the Host of the Disorder Podcast and author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, Senior Analyst at the NATO Defense College Foundation, Director of the NATO & THE GLOBAL ENDURING DISORDER Project, and President of Libya-Analysis LLC
REVIEW — When the truths of our politics are stranger than even the most fanciful fiction, is there any merit in reading political fiction? Furthermore, can serious students, scholars, and civil servants derive real educative or entertainment value from fictionized accounts of today’s politics?
A Spy Alone answers these questions in the affirmative. It is written by a former MI6 officer, using the pseudonym Charles Beaumont. The book illustrates the value and salience of political fiction to help us grapple with our disordered world. It has already received rave reviews from The Times (of London), The Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and others.
A Spy Alone is fundamentally about how the primary challenges of our current era of Enduring Disorder—from the culture wars, to hysteria over migration, to the rise of post-truth neo-populist politicians like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Geert Wilders — have been aided and abetted by Russian penetration of the West’s social, political, media, and financial elites. This ‘blame it all on the Russians’ approach can certainly be taken too far; furthermore, it isn’t something easily proven by empirical analysis. That is why any scholarly work trying to conclusively ‘pin’ Brexit, Tucker Carlson, Trump’s rise, hapless financial deregulation, or popular hysteria over transgender issues on Russia’s intelligence services is bound to fail. That isn’t how scholarship works.
Enter the role of fiction. Fiction can paint a deliberately broad brushstroke picture and the reader can then assess the factual and emotional resonances judging how true to life it seems. Consider: it is widely acknowledged that religion and philosophy are helpful in grappling with the ethical and regulatory questions surrounding AI and transgenic humans, so why can’t literary fiction play that role concerning hostile foreign penetration of our politics and the failures of our Western counterespionage services to protect us?
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A Spy Alone imagines how a sustained penetration of the Western elite by Russian intelligence operatives might function, as well as why the rampant bureaucratization of Western intelligence services and oligarchic penetration of London’s world-leading due diligence industry could allow such hostile networks to persist. The book imagines Russian agents running a professor as a recruiter at an elite university. In real life, we can also imagine a similar scenario at an exclusive golf club, lobbying groups like the NRA, or various think tanks like the Cato Institute. Such a scouting arrangement through an intermediary might be used by Russian agents to cultivate well-placed and talented individuals early in their careers and then to help them advance as witting or unwitting agents of disordering Russian influence.
This is not far-fetched at all. There is ample historical precedent for such conjecture: Philby, Burgess, and Fuchs instantly come to mind. Updating this to the present day, I’ve long been a believer in the ‘outside assistance’ theory, rather than the ‘Manchurian candidate’ theory of Donald Trump’s rise. There are just too many signs that he and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were frequently aided by the Emiratis and Russians, long before Trump ever decided to run for political office. Was ‘The Donald’ ever an overt Russian or Emirati ‘agent’ taking money in exchange for specific actions before he decided to run for President? No, that is unlikely. Was he aided in avoiding bankruptcy and in getting favorable media by Russian, Emirati, Israeli, and Saudi interventions at key junctures? Yes, almost certainly. Just look at how the scandals over Hillary’s emails played out. Russia and various other powers put their thumb on the scale to help Trump. As A Spy Alone highlights, variants of this story are likely playing out in lesser ways at various hedge funds, think tanks, and media newsrooms – where individuals with sympathies for specific neo-populist narratives are subtly advanced by Russian ‘help’.
Given this crucial real-world context, the primary conception of A Spy Alone is completely believable and flawlessly executed — capturing many salient dynamics of our post-2022 Ukraine invasion world. That said, Beaumont is not a trained or experienced thriller writer, after all he is a former British spook, but he does admirably well for a first try. That said the plot twists and turns are a bit awkward at times, especially when it comes to the main character Simon’s romantic entanglements, his thoughts during kinetic sequences, and most crucially, whom he chooses to kill and whom to spare. But in the bigger picture those are just details, and like any Hollywood action movie or sitcom, the consumer has to tolerate some unavoidable hitches in the plotline to enjoy the grandeur of the storytelling.
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Beaumont’s genius comes into play with his treatment of the various British characters’ motivations and psychology. How the high-powered British bankers, academics, and media influencers might justify to themselves their connections with Russian intelligence as part of a web of alliances against a common Woke/Liberal enemy, is masterfully written and rings all too true to life.
The reason fiction like this needs to be read by serious foreign policy and intelligence professionals is that we simply don’t know what Russian agents have been up to over the last decade; and by the time the confidential documents around their activities are declassified it will be too late to convey this understanding to the public. Personally, I assume that Beaumont is fairly accurate in his dramatization and that Russian influence rings still exist in both the US and UK. I also concur with his assessment that our official intelligence agencies are too bureaucratic and navel-gazing to effectively combat them, while the high-end London-based due diligence profession has been effectively bought by Russian oligarchs. Any reader of Thomas Rid’s magisterial Active Measures knows how historically grounded this type of intelligence operation is in Russia’s historical playbook, as well as how Western counter-espionage capacity has become eviscerated since the end of the Cold War.
In fact, indirect Kremlin influence over our Western media and political landscape might be the single most salient dynamic shaping the disordering direction of global affairs since 2016. The Russians won big in 2016 and brought a coterie of neo-liberal, libertarian, neo-populist, anti-globalist, hyper-nationalist, and disorder-loving allies into power across the world. It stands to reason that at least some highly placed people from among Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Aaron Banks, Trump, and their financial and media supporters were cultivated as Russian assets or unwitting agents in the years prior to 2016.
But why try to learn about these dynamics via a fictional spy thriller? The scandals of neo-liberal privatizations, campaign finance deregulation, anti-migrant sentiments, and many other key features of our current discourse are simply too complicated for any comprehensive scholarly treatment to ever unravel their interconnections, antecedents, rhetorical devises, and downstream implications. Therefore, literary storytelling can be used not only to build a sense of adventure and climax, it can also be used to selectively isolate, clarify, and reify the most salient dynamics that undergird the vast complexities of these topics.
Seen in its totality, A Spy Alone fictionalizes the primary dynamics of our age, hitting upon what makes our era of Enduring Disorder so different from the Cold War: Today, the forces of neo-liberalism, neo-populism, and alt-Right nationalism have long ceased to be patriotically American, British, or European. They are thoroughly compromised via Russian ideological infiltration. Simultaneously, these ideologies attempt to masquerade at being unchanged from Thatcher and Reagan’s time — as remaining principled, patriotic, and conservative. It would be difficult to write a scholarly work showcasing exactly how today’s hard Right is no longer patriotic and is actively sustained via Russian penetration, yet it is something most of us in the center and left of the foreign policy field know to be true. Reading A Spy Alone’s fictionalized account of this key dynamic is not only fun, gripping, and page turning, it is clarifying and enlightening.
When the truth of our times has become so much stranger than the most fanciful fiction, the time has finally arrived to read spy thrillers.
A Spy Alone earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
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