Undercover readers might remember that we introduced you this past spring to Bill Rapp, a former CIA analyst turned author. He’s an interesting character in his own right, with the look and charm of Sam Elliott. In his new book, The Budapest Escape, Rapp brings back old characters and descriptions of a time well before cell phones and cyberattacks.
In real life, Rapp began working in West Germany back when the country was still divided after World War II. He also worked in Turkey and the Aegean, Canada, Iraq and London. It all lends nicely to a series of books he has written around espionage in the WWII era and his main character, Karl Baier.
UnderCover caught up with Rapp to talk about his own journey to become a novelist, and about his latest book.
The Cipher Brief: What we should be expecting from The Budapest Escape – which for some weird reason, Amazon calls The Budapest Express?
Rapp: The Budapest Escape takes the story of Karl Baier as a CIA Intelligence Officer a little further along where he's now directly confronted by revolutionary evil in Eastern Europe and Hungary and Budapest, 1956. He also has to confront Soviet forces directly since they come into the invasion. He has a very high-level source in the Hungarian government who has a rather checkered history as a communist hard liner, but he appears to have evolved. And he's a big supporter of the Hungarian uprising and the new government. But he gets run out of Vienna because we don't really have a station in Budapest at this point. We really didn't have stations behind the wall then. So Baier usually meets him either at the border or when his assets can come to Vienna. One day, his asset fails to show up for a meeting, so he goes to the border and gets confronted by another individual who tells him that his asset is in trouble. And that’s when he realizes, "Okay, I've got to get this guy out," and he has to go into Budapest and find the guy.
He's really on his own and doesn't have the support network that he would normally have for something like this. He thinks the Hungarian service and the KGB are onto him. So, he wants to get his asset out before he ends up in a Hungarian prison. And Karl Baier himself runs into difficulties with the Hungarian service and the KGB and the Soviet Military.
The Cipher Brief: Sounds like a great movie.
Rapp: Yeah. It would be. But then I'm biased.
The Cipher Brief: And like any good author, as this book releases, are you already working on the next one?
Rapp: I've got a first draft manuscript completed. And this one takes the story to Berlin when the wall is going up. So here again, Baier has get somebody out, a KGB officer, out of East Berlin. The guy wants to defect. But there are complications. He has some personal matters to take care of, which jeopardizes the whole mission. And there's a lot of distrust. It's the same KGB officer that Baier has been working with in the past. The guy has never really been an asset, a controlled agent. They've had a more cooperative working relationship. That cooperation moves to a new level, a more personal level, in The Budapest Escape.
The Cipher Brief: You're not only a former CIA officer, but you're also a professor and a historian. Is that why you love to write about this particular time period?
Rapp: I think that's very much a part of it. I've told people that this lets me combine my two passions. One is a story in a modern Europe, and two as a now 37-year veteran of the CIA, so this brings it all together and it's a fascinating time in both European and American history. So that's a lot of fun.
The Cipher Brief: Do you sometimes get distracted by what's going on - on the real-world stage, and particularly with Europe today?
Rapp: In writing, there is a tendency to write with hindsight, which is always 20-20 of course. It’s a challenge to put yourself back in the steps of the guys who are working and operating at that time saying, "Well, would they know this? How would they know this?" You want to maybe put some hints in about the wall actually falling. But at the time, of course, nobody believed that it would, so it wouldn't be plausible. You've got to make this thing authentic. And that's a challenge.
The Cipher Brief: No phones, no technology, not the speed of information that we have today.
Rapp: My publisher for The Budapest Escape, asked me once why Baier wouldn’t have just called Washington if all of this was going on. I said, "You’ve got to realize that everything goes into a cable and those phone links wouldn't be there and they wouldn't be secure."
The Cipher Brief: There are so many Cipher Brief readers who think they have books in them but they’re not really sure. How do you know if you have a book in you?
Rapp: I think most people confront that at some point or other. They think, "I'd like to do this," or, "I think I've got a book in me." My advice is to read, read, read, read. Because one of the things that you need to do to succeed is you need to develop your own voice. It was something I sort of struggled with. I was at a writers' retreat and during the final dinner we were all sitting around putting away a lot of wine and I was rattling on and one woman at the table says, "Bill, if you wrote like you talk, you'd sell a million copies."
I thought maybe that's my voice. And so, I worked with that.
The Cipher Brief: Is there a difference between the detective genre and the spy genre when it comes to writing voice?
Rapp: I think so. I think a detective genre, you can be a lot more personal. There's something about espionage that is a little more distant. It's a world that readers aren’t that familiar with. Now granted, not everybody's a private detective either, but it usually involves cases which are much more common and direct, kind of like murder, which is not common to everybody of course, but the individuals involved are generally from the world you're familiar with. I think it's easier to do detective fiction in the first-person narrative. Espionage fiction, that's a little different. I think that that's a little more exotic and removed from the normal daily life. So that requires a little more distance from the author and hence third person narrative is more effective. Plus, it allows you to explain the background and motivations without seeming as though you're going off on a riff or an incongruous discourse or something like that.
(Ed Note: Rapp’s latest book, The Budapest Escape is now available on Amazon. The Cipher Brief gets paid a small commission based on purchases made via the links provided in this review).
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