Paul Vidich’s Moscow: Get Off the ‘X’
BOOK REVIEW: The Poet’s Game: A Spy in Moscow
By Paul Vidich / Pegasus Books
Reviewed by: Kenneth Dekleva
The Reviewer — The Reviewer – Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist with the U.S. Dept. of State from 2002-2016, and is Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Psychiatry-Medicine Integration, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX; he is also a Senior Fellow at the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations and a Salzburg Global Fellow. He is also the author of The Negotiator’s Cross, The Last Violinist, and The Russian Diplomat’s Wife. The views expressed are entirely his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Dept. of State, or UT Southwestern Medical Center.
REVIEW — Paul Vidich is a former media executive and highly regarded spy novelist, who has written numerous novels set during the Cold War. In his superb newest novel, The Poet’s Game: A Spy in Moscow, he expertly confronts the psychological, moral, and espionage challenges posed by the Cold War, which even in 2018, the year that this book is set it, has never really ended. For CIA officers serving in Moscow – one of the most challenging counterintelligence environments in the world – two sets of principles are burnished into their psyches: (1) Get off the ‘X’; and (2) always pay attention to ‘Moscow Rules.’ But as Alex Mathews, the key protagonist of The Poet’s Game, knows all too well, Moscow is the ‘X.’ To get off the ‘X’ he must leave Moscow and return to CIA Headquarters — a different kind of ‘X.’
Vidich’s novel begins with Alex, a former CIA station chief in Moscow, now working as an investor in a private equity fund in Moscow, called back to duty at the CIA Director’s behest, to exfiltrate a former agent – BYRON – who claims to have explosive (‘kompromat‘) intelligence regarding America’s president. Earlier in his career, Mathews had recruited BYRON, along with numerous other Russian assets – all named after poets – several of whom have recently gone missing or ended up executed. The Director and his cold, ruthless head of counterintelligence, suspect that a Russian mole has penetrated the CIA.
Mathews must navigate between two perilous worlds, those of Moscow and Washington DC, not knowing whom he can trust. The Director? His colleagues in ‘Russia House’ (the CIA’s division of Russia experts), any of whom is a potential mole? The director of counterintelligence, with his sinister, paranoid, and cunning view of the world, akin to the legendary James Angleton and his wilderness of mirrors? Mathews’ wife Anna, a Russian-American translator working at CIA? BYRON? Vidich’s description of the agency’s and Washington DC’s corridors of power is as good as those of Ward Just and David Ignatius. So, move over, gentlemen.
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But the best parts of the novel involve Alex Mathews’ psychological, emotional, and physical journeys in Moscow, and his interactions with BYRON, Olga (a journalist), Sorkin (his firm’s lawyer), and FSB Colonel Zhukov – a ruthless, persistent adversary. Mathews is both a gifted and broken man, haunted both by tragedy and by his espionage skills and love of Moscow. As Vidich writes, “Mathews wasn’t from Moscow, but he was of Moscow, and it was the city that had drawn him to her warm bosom.” As a diplomat who lived, worked in, and embraced Moscow’s many challenges for five years, this line resonated deeply with me, as it surely must with other ‘Russia Hands.’ And in a sense, Moscow, with its gorgeous parks, cafés, restaurants, museums, GUM, the Kremlin, St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Bolshoi Theater, the Lubyanka, and other settings, is both place and character in Vidich’s novel. I found myself rooting for Alex, cheering him on, as I felt the tension of his mission in Moscow, its never-ending ‘Moscow Rules,’ the inability to get off the ‘X,’ and the sense that in Moscow, one is never truly alone.
Overall, Paul Vidich’s novel about Moscow is a terrific read. In addition to its stirring plot and realistic characters, it raises interesting questions. What, in today’s world of 24-7 social media, fake news, and disinformation, is ‘kompromat?’ Vidich seems to suggest that it’s a siren song, very much in the eyes of the beholder, tempting us with what we wish to believe. This to me sounds just like the Cold War. As The Poet’s Game suggests, for us, the Russians, and for Alex Mathews, it never quite ended.
The Poet’s Game earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
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