BOOK REVIEW: The Moldavian Gambit
By Brad Meslin / Manhattan Book Group
Reviewed by: James Lawler
The Reviewer — James Lawler devoted more than half of his career as a CIA operations officer. He spent much of his career battling the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Mr. Lawler was the recipient of one of the CIA's Trailblazer Awards in 2007. He is the author of “Living Lies,” an espionage novel about the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and of the novel, “In the Twinkling of an Eye,” about recruiting a spy at the heart of a covert Russian-North Korean genetic bioweapons program, and of “The Traitor’s Tale,” a novel of treachery and treason within the CIA.
REVIEW — I confess to a more than passing strange relationship to fifteen-kiloton nuclear weapons, and by the time I finished Brad Meslin’s superb debut thriller, “The Moldavian Gambit,” my stomach was in knots contemplating the detonation of a horror with a yield equivalent to “Little Boy,” which obliterated Hiroshima in August 1945 and killed as many as 140,000 people. Indeed, this chilling novel triggered quasi-PTSD symptoms of cold sweats, chills and at least one nightmare due to the identical nuclear yield of another device in my CIA past that was being provided to a rogue state. So, be warned: Meslin knows his nuclear weapons designs and the extreme threat they represent and clearly is quite familiar with the ins and outs of numerous global intelligence services and their operations, including their strengths and their weaknesses. He also knows about their bureaucratic infighting, a subject I know all too well and how it affects both the CIA and the Russian intel services. Going deeper than just shallow parochialism, however, Meslin also injects some sheer treason into both the West and the East.
The story begins in 1991 with a crumbling Soviet empire and a Moldavian separatist revolt that coincides with the theft of a man-portable nuclear weapon from an arsenal in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic before independence, and a nuclear blackmail threat to detonate it if the separatists’ demands aren’t met. At least that is the initial impression, but the problem is that the nuclear weapons vault is under exclusive KGB control, the vault is unbreeched, and the two senior KGB officers in charge know that they didn’t release the weapon to anyone. It’s a clever locked-room mystery worthy of a KGB Sherlock Holmes, and I found myself cheering for these two decent Russian intel officers desperately trying initially to salvage their careers and ultimately to prevent nuclear Armageddon after the weapon is smuggled to Paris.
Meslin further seasons his thriller with a corrupt U.S. senator, who has been cleverly compromised but self-justifies his treachery with sheer arrogance and how he is only reaping what is owed to him. Besides, he considers the intelligence he provides to Moscow isn’t worth all that much – except that he keeps looking for juicier things to send the KGB so that his remuneration will increase. As a former spy recruiter myself, I would applaud his Soviet recruiter and handlers. And need I mention that the senator has a serious “zipper issue” proving once again that hormones trump grey matter every time?
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It's in Paris that much of the book’s tension takes place, and it’s clear that Meslin has either lived there or visited often because the various scenes were so authentic and detailed that they took me back to a glorious four years of my own. This French venue is fitting because the story, while not derivative, has a vague echo of Frederick Forsyth’s “Day of the Jackal,” this time with a ruthless former Romanian Securitat operative being the ultimate trigger man for the smuggled weapon, as numerous intel officers search for him and the device while time ticks steadily away on a nuclear deadline. Among other things, I was amused by an interlude involving the operative and a stunningly beautiful Mata Hari-like confederate with a surprising climax that gives new meaning to “wet work” or “tying up loose ends.”
International tension soars as the U.S. and France confront a temporarily rudderless and intransigent Kremlin with chilling elements that reminded me of the classic movie “Failsafe” that scared me as a teenager. Mix in a game of “guts ball” involving orbiting EMP devices threatening massive electrical disruption in both countries to further increase the dire drumbeat of doom.
Hints are dropped early in the novel regarding certain malignant elements in the Soviet Union using the Moldavian separatists as a cats paw for some Soviet hardliners and coup plotters besotted with their own dreams of making Russia great again. That brought to mind a conversation I had on my first operational tour in 1983 with a young KGB officer, also on his first tour, who assured me that the USSR had no history of Bonapartism. Right, Dmitri. That sentiment and a fistful of rubles might get you a cup of coffee off Red Square.
Finally, I was delighted to see considerable attention paid in the novel to DOE’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) and its courageous and capable staff, all well deserved. These brave people stand between us and a really bad day for mankind, and Meslin does a first-rate job of telling their story in addition to adding realism to his heart-stopping plot. In fact, the conclusion to this outstanding thriller involves NEST and a solution I did not see coming, but which is plausible and brilliant.
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