When Espionage Meets TikTok
BOOK REVIEW: A SPY AT WAR
By Charles Beaumont / Canelo
Reviewed by: Jason Pack
The Reviewer — Jason Pack is the host of the Disorder Podcast, author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, Senior Analyst at the NATO Defense College Foundation, Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), and Podcasting Fellow at the New Books Network
REVIEW — Spies, influence operations, leaked documents, and the like seem more able to move the political needle in the mid-21st century. Leaked Signal and WhatsApp messages hold headlines for weeks, while actual laws being passed barely make the front page. Leaking a private conversation using the word ‘deplorables’ or ‘transgender’ can swing an election more than a billion dollars’ worth of advertising. Surreptitious filming of a political figure doing something awkward or hypocritical, that could later be crafted into a humorous TikTok video, can tank an otherwise carefully constructed campaign.
Our era of Global Enduring Disorder seems to incorporate what Robert Kaplan calls Shakespearean Politics. A strong case can be made that to understand today’s world one must think much more psychologically — and drill down into human themes like betrayal, leverage, deception, dissimulation, ego, greed, hubris and will-to-power.
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The Ukraine War is most frequently presented in the Western media and in political policy debates as a struggle over territory, arms deliveries, and defense expenditures. Yet, in reality, antecedent to those factors is a struggle over narrative and sentiment, which ‘largely predetermines’ those outcomes — exactly the way that the NFL draft and free agent signings ‘largely predetermine’ the ensuing season. Most fans don’t grasp that signing a specific offensive lineman in free agency is a precondition for winning a championship later in the year. Similarly, most news consumers are unaware that the outcomes of the drone battles that they read about have largely been pre-determined by prior spying to obtain documents, expose traitors, or reveal battle plans. Given this state of affairs, it doesn’t seem farfetched to conclude that influence operations are now the top table currency of the contemporary spy.
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Enter the role of fiction: In the first book in the series A Spy Alone a former MI6 officer, using the pseudonym Charles Beaumont, illustrated the salience of political fiction to help us grapple with our disordered Shakespearean world. I wrote a review of that book for Cipher Brief that you can read here.
Beaumont has now produced a sequel to that work, A Spy at War. In this book, Beaumont hits his stride as a novelist, rendering Kyiv ministries, interagency Whitehall meetings and the special operations around Bakhmut cinematically. Most crucially, Beaumont takes a moral stand against the broken British establishment, which for short term financial reasons had allowed its institutions to be hijacked by Putinist fellow travelers. Beaumont fictionalizes the relationships between British aristocrats and City money managers who have benefited from Russian money and hence facilitated the rise of pro-Putin neo-populism in Western capitals. A Spy at Warsketches how chess moves made behind the scenes by spies affect the checkers moves made in front of the global audience by politicians.
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The book starts fairly slowly as Simon (the protagonist of both volumes) goes to Ukraine to seek revenge for the murder of his friend, Evie, in the previous book. The action develops ploddingly as the connections between developments in Kyiv in mid-2022 and the murder of Evie in Prague over a year earlier are quite murky. Interlaced with this narrative is the escape of Evie’s killer from Kyiv to wander Eastern Europe and find odd jobs for pro-Putin gangsters. Aspects of the plot appear quite coincidental and are occasionally hard to follow. There is a strong reason to believe the plot would be better received in TV or movie format, where it is normal for disconnected snip bits of action to be presented with the casual chain obscured.
Beaumont portrays beautifully how the immediate lead up to the Russian assault on Kyiv in February 2022 involved a frantic effort on behalf of Russia’s intelligence services to mobilize its loyal clandestine assets, while simultaneously eliminating its moles inside the Ukrainian government that could oppose the invasion. This dynamic remains an under covered aspect about the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and of Putin’s decision to go to war. It is under reported in mainstream journalism and academic literature because it is difficult to research. Nonetheless, we have been able to see the tips of the icebergs via Putin’s miscalculations that the Russian army would be in Kyiv in three days and that Russian paratroopers should pack their dress uniform in their backpacks.
Beaumont brilliantly brings this shadow war to light via one representative human example. In this case, a Ukrainian government official who has been feeding information to Moscow all of a sudden has a pang of conscience and decides he must tip off Ukrainian intelligence about the upcoming Russian invasion.
All the details of the incident described in the book are of course entirely fictional, but I believe that Beaumont is right to satirize the woeful unpreparedness of the Ukrainian state concerning the upcoming invasion and the willful disbelief that characterized official Kyiv in mid-February 2022. Beaumont is also on point in lionizing the heroism of morally ambiguous characters, like Ukrainian agents of Russian handlers who turned on Putin in the days leading up to the invasion and proved instrumental in thwarting his plans. A Spy at War’s fictionalization captures the sheer chaos of those days arguably better than any war correspondent’s memoires could.
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The tanks bogging down in a column rather than marching unopposed on Kyiv were actually the result of prior struggles waged by spies. Beaumont knows the fog of spy war from the inside and paints for us a delicious picture of agent/handler meetings, the awkwardness of obscuring curious fumblings through their desk from a colleague and trying to evade surveillance while on the underground. He takes us into the world of the contemporary spy where a lot of energy is spent watching crowds and determining who might be watching. He explores how secret agents interact with mainstream bureaucrats, how spies might pose as headhunters to obtain source meetings, and how IT wizards are useful for determining the identity of Russian intelligence officers.
Some of this is painted fairly accurately, much is sketched quite amusingly, and the rest is narrated rather awkwardly, but no matter. All of it makes ‘good television’ with a wholesome moral. The evil, meany bad guy Russians have willing accomplices inside our institutions and are working with cynical media hacks to create cultural controversies about Ukrainian corruption to distract from Russian atrocities on the frontlines in the Donbass.
For a non-British audience much of the book’s geography, cultural references, discussions of cricket matches, and recounting of tube journeys will seem obscure and possibly difficult to follow. The Britishisms around social class markers and awkward humor around sexual consent may however prove interesting for American readers to observe how truly different British concerns are than our own.
A Spy at War comes into its own in the last hundred pages. The chaotic hellscape and permeable frontline around Bakhmut is artfully illustrated, the battle preparations and team dynamics are elegantly captured, and the excitement of kinetic operations and their stunning reversals are grippingly page-turning.
I will confess that just as the book reaches its crescendo, I found the final bold plot twists and mistakenly imagined betrayals difficult to buy into. Furthermore, the book ends with a cliffhanger, the plot implications of which I struggled to grasp. That said, I genuinely believe that all could be made clear in a potential TV version, and in fact, Beaumont has crafted a tale that is perfect for a Netflix-style six-part series with a season for each book. One must not sweat the details. I very much enjoyed the reading experience and am sure even more people would enjoy binge watching it.
Yes, foreign policy and intelligence professionals will be able to enjoy picking out specific aspects of the plot that they deem unrealistic. While still an enjoyable read for those inside the Beltway and M-25, I think that A Spy at War’s flowing prose and cinematic rhythm makes it a truly gripping beach read for our civilian friends. The book brings to life the evil of Putin’s illegal war on Ukraine and the righteous need for Western support for the Ukranians’ heroic defense of our collective freedoms. A Spy at War is a motivational manifesto for Ukrainian sovereignty, for NATO membership, for Western solidarity, and for why we need the best and brightest of the young generation to be willing to spy to protect democracy.
A Spy at War earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats
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