Katya The Informer Delivers some Surprising Twists
BOOK REVIEW: KATYA THE INFORMER
By David Bickford / Coinkydink Limited
Reviewed by: Anne and Jay Gruner
The Reviewers — Anne and Jay Gruner were career CIA officers in analysis and operations, respectively. Anne was Deputy Director of WINPAC; her fiction, non-fiction and poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including a Pushcart-nominee. Jay Gruner served as Chief of Station in multiple countries and as an area division chief, and founded J.K. Gruner Associates, a business intelligence consultancy.
REVIEW — In his latest book, Katya the Informer, British author and former Under Secretary of State and Legal Director to the British Intelligence Agencies, MI5 & MI6 David Bickford, goes back in time from his earlier novel Katya to provide a portrayal of Katya Petrovna’s early years with the G8 Security Service and its involvement in fighting highly damaging international criminal groups, particularly Russian Mafiyah gangs, and the money laundering techniques they use to finance those organizations.
Much of the action in the novel takes place in 2002, in a casino on the Black Sea in Russia, and the vivid descriptions of the often-fatal actions taken by the Russian mafia Dons to further and protect their interests and fortunes is frightening, nerve-racking and revealing.
However, what really captures the reader’s attention is the author’s detailed description of the novel’s heroine, Katya, a former junior officer at the FSB—the Russian Security Service and successor to the KGB—who following her initial and occasionally hair-raising training experience, applies and successfully becomes a member of the G8 Security Service, an organization of professional intelligence and security officials from eight countries. Their mission is to combat terrorism and organized crime around the world.
Katya, the daughter of a deceased KGB officer, is a captivating and intelligent risk taker whose personality, beauty and physical strengths enable her to infiltrate the various criminal cliques which she encounters, convince the organized crime leaders she is loyalty to them, and deeply penetrates the groups to determine just how they operate, whether it be in southern Russia or an island in the South China Sea.
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Despite her youth and relative inexperience, she is able to confront and overcome a series of obstacles which would have more than challenged most higher-ranking officials. There is some real-world irony that Katya hails from the FSB, which FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko—who died from polonium poisoning in London in 2006—claimed in his book “Lubyanka Criminal Group” had itself transformed into a criminal and terrorist organization working with and protecting other Russian organized crime groups as they expanded their international reach.
But of course, this is a work of fiction, and many of the organizations and locations included in the plot are fictitious. It also takes place, as mentioned above, more than 20 years ago, so it is more historical than contemporary. And finally, it focuses on organized criminal activity rather than on espionage, and the G8 Security Service reminds one more of Interpol and the G-7’s Financial Action Task Force (FATF) than of MI6 or CIA.
Nonetheless, the novel provides excellent insight into a major problem, the important role that organized crime plays at the highest levels of Russian society. Vladimir Putin was in his first presidency in 2002, when this work takes place, and many if not all of the major Russian oligarchs are known to have had close and continuing ties with organized criminal networks for more than two decades.
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If there were one area of the plot which might have been expanded, it concerns the nuts and bolts of the money-laundering schemes. The reader sees the movements of large amounts of money through credit card and cash payments in casinos, but from what we know from sources such as The Panama Papers, the Russians have shown considerable skills in moving funds through offshore corporate and financial vehicles rather than through suitcases full of dollar bills.
Katya is well-developed as a character, with lapses of judgment from inexperience and flashes of intuitive brilliance and an incredible ability to remain calm as she calculates how to escape from the most-dire of circumstances. In her single-minded pursuit of accomplishing her mission, she places herself in great danger, having just escaped from great danger. Her actions are both surprising and admirable, which makes it a page turner for readers who may themselves see little prospect for Katya’s survival. It is refreshing to have a woman, especially a young woman, with exceptional intelligence, quickness, and nerve as the successful protagonist of a spy novel dealing with today’s contemporary problems. Moscow hands should read Katya The Informer in the imaginative spirit in which it is offered and how the world might have been.
Finally, and without revealing critical plot information, some readers may find the end of Katya’s mission disturbing —in the same way Katya did—as revealed in the final chapter. But that is a matter of legal and philosophical concern, not a literary one. It may open future literary avenues to explore as Katya does not seem to be the reticent type. A novel in which Katya penetrates the actual FSB of today to expose and defeat its criminal and terrorist plots would be welcome.
Katya The Informer earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
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