I Spy a Love Story
BOOK REVIEW: THE RUSSIAN DIPLOMAT’S WIFE
By Ken Dekleva
Reviewed by Neal A. Pollard
The Reviewer – Neal A. Pollard is a partner at Control Risks Group and was the lead cybersecurity executive for a global Swiss bank. Prior to joining the private sector in 2011, he spent 18 years in the US counterterrorism community, as a defense contractor and an intelligence officer. In 1996, he co-founded a counterterrorism corporation, sold in 2006 to Blackwater’s holding company. He is working on his first novel “Ordinary Spies,” a story of Silk Road gastronomy and nuclear terrorism.
REVIEW: Ken Dekleva’s third novel, The Russian Diplomat’s Wife, is ostensibly a spy novel set in Vienna. I say “ostensibly,” because at heart it’s a love story of two spies. It’s also a story that explores the core element of espionage and intelligence operations: the intense personal bond between a case officer and the agent he or she handles. This is an element unfortunately lost in many contemporary spy novels, which opt for the shoot-em-up adrenaline dumps of explosions, assassinations and car chases. Make no mistake: having a clandestine meeting to collect critical secrets with global security implications, from an asset living two lives and risking both, all while trying to think through and manage the million things that can go wrong – that can nudge the adrenal gland, too, without explosions or guns. But more importantly, compelling fiction explores the flaws of human nature – misplaced trust, emotion over logic, acting against one’s self-interest for an apparent “greater good” – and prompts the reader to ponder “this could be me, what would I do?” A spy novel should be perfectly suited for this exploration.
Dr. Dekleva’s novel does offer a few murders and action scenes, but it devotes more rewarding time to the human drama that lies at the center of espionage. And as a practicing psychiatrist and former U.S. State Department diplomat, Dr. Dekleva masters this aspect as he tells his story. Thus, it was no random choice to set the story in Vienna, known as both the city of spies and the city of the famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Vienna (and its myriad cafés) plays almost as much of a character as the humans Dr. Dekleva created in his story, adding atmosphere and nuance to the characters’ actions.
The story opens with a CIA officer under non-official cover, living and operating in Vienna with the cryptonym “Copernicus.” The assets he handles operate under cryptonyms of planets: “Jupiter” and so on. Copernicus visits a favorite haunt, the Leopold Museum in Vienna, to gaze at a Klimt painting titled (fittingly) “Death and Life.” While Copernicus studies the painting, a woman enters, silent but seemingly troubled. The two of them alone in the room, Copernicus and the woman engage in an emotional conversation as Copernicus comforts the coincidental stranger. Their meeting was a chance encounter, but Freud believed there were no accidents in the unconscious. The evocative nature of the Klimt painting would have touched something similar in both of their hearts, since it drew them both to it. Such human connections can be the basis of the bond a case officer would try to forge, to develop and recruit an asset. Dr. Dekleva uses this well.
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As the story unfolds, Copernicus and the woman remain in touch. But there’s something off about her. Copernicus detects a secret in her worth exploring, as he learns of her connection to a Russian diplomat, possibly an undercover intelligence officer. What starts as a question of “who is handling whom?” transforms into a starker question of counterintelligence concerns. Copernicus’s assets start dying, and the ranks of Russian, American, and Israeli intelligence services get involved. As the espionage comes into sharper focus, Copernicus and his “target” fall in love: a recipe for tragedy (and, in reality, a career-ender for a CIA officer, irrespective of cover).
The novel has a few flaws. The story timeline can be disjointed, accounting for actions across mere days then leaping forward years. The novel doesn’t emphasize tradecraft or “inside baseball” of CIA operations, and this isn’t the type of novel to look for it. Nonetheless, a few elements are unrealistic, especially the notion that CIA headquarters would knowingly accept a case officer proceeding in a romantic relationship with an asset. Once that disbelief is suspended, the plot as well as the love story unfold more naturally. A major twist with Copernicus’s arc does cause the reader to wonder where the novel should end. But eventually, Dr. Dekleva’s resolution makes sense.
One last point worth mentioning, that also distinguishes this novel from clichéd action tropes: the “enemy” here is human and sympathetic, not cardboard Bond villains. In fact, the adversaries are adversaries by accident of the political systems they were born into (and chose not to betray). In this respect, Dr. Dekleva evokes the human element of espionage that John Le Carré captured so well in his Cold War stories, while avoiding the cynicism. Across the adversarial face-offs, up to the final resolution of Copernicus and his true love’s fate (which I won’t spoil), this novel hints at George Smiley’s reluctant belief “that secret services were the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.” The City of Spies’ most famous psychiatrist would have had a field day with that.
The Russian Diplomat’s Wife earns a solid 3 out of 4 trench coats
EDITORS NOTE: For more on this title – be sure to check out The Cipher Brief’s Cover Stories podcast interview with the author, Dr. Ken Dekleva.
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