For Women Waiting for Heroines in the World of Espionage …
BOOK REVIEW: The Helsinki Affair
By Anna Pitoniak/ Simon & Schuster
Reviewed by: Karen Schaefer
The Reviewer: Cipher Brief Expert Karen Schaefer retired in 2019 after a 25-year career in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, which included overseas assignments in Latin America, Europe and warzones in the Middle East. Schaefer was an operations officer who held numerous senior leadership positions to include Deputy Chief, Near East for Counterintelligence, Chief of Operations, Directorate of Science and Technology, as well as senior CIA representative to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
REVIEW —Anna Pitoniak’s fourth novel, The Helsinki Affair, is the second which delves into the murky world of espionage, following on the heels of Our American Friend. The Helsinki Affair is well researched, written and edited, highlighting Pitoniak’s previous work as a senior editor at Random House. Her love of the spy genre and admiration of well-known writers such as Le Carre and Graham Greene is evident in her complex plot and well-developed characters. She effectively leverages many of the most tantalizing elements of an espionage thriller – walk-ins, political assassinations, Russian honey pots, and double agents – to tell an engaging story.
The plot of The Helsinki Affair unfolds in the present day when Deputy Chief of Station Amanda Cole handles a Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) walk-in at her sleepy post in Rome, who warns of a Russian plot to assassinate a U.S. senator. Simultaneously, Ms. Pitoniak employs flashbacks to the Cold War era when Amanda’s father, Charlie Cole, served as an operations officer in Helsinki and departed his post under questionable circumstances. Then and now, the enemy is Russia.
Pitoniak does a good job developing an intricate storyline involving financial manipulation, corruption, political assassination, and espionage which weaves together the lives and careers of father and daughter. The plot keeps you engaged and guessing in classic genre style. What is particularly interesting is the added personal intrigue which ultimately leads Amanda to a reckoning with her father – forcing her to choose between her loyalty to her country and him.
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The notable differentiator, and greatest attribute of this novel, is Pitoniak’s heroine, Amanda Cole. Her character is a refreshing change to previous fictional representations of female operations officers and is a testament to Pitoniak’s research and well-heeded advice from a CIA psychologist “not to make Amanda a promiscuous headcase.” Amanda is more interested in her work than her personal life. It is what gets her out of bed. She is a workaholic, loyal to her country, and bent on doing her job as well, or better than, her male counterparts. She is forthright and hungry to prove herself. Yet, she is not without fault.
Pitoniak has written a character who manages the stress, fear, and loneliness of the job with alcohol. Amanda is ultimately “rescued,” not by a man, but by an equally strong and fascinating character, Kath. Kath proves to be both a colleague and mentor, who helps Amanda make sense of the intricate layers of clues and intelligence surrounding the assassination of the senator, while forcing her to deal with her father and confront her alcoholism.
Kath is a fiery senior operations officer who has made her way in the male-dominated CIA by going her own way. Like Amanda, she is married to the job and bent on doing the right thing for the right reasons with her own flair.
For women waiting for heroines in the world of espionage, this book may scratch the itch. In the spirit of a Graham Greene protagonist, Amanda is fallible but wholly redeemable, and you find yourself rooting for her throughout.
While well researched and written, and generally an accurate portrayal of both CIA tradecraft and lexicon, there are several key elements of the plot which stretch credibility. The notion that threats against a sitting U.S. senator would not be immediately reported; a CIA officer caught spying for Russia would be “rehabilitated;” or that a CIA officer would be involved in a gun fight in Europe require one to suspend disbelief. While these tradecraft discrepancies may distract the purist, The Helsinki Affair is nonetheless a well-developed, intriguing, and ultimately enjoyable read.
The Helsinki Affair earns a solid three out of four trench coats
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