Bøker av Joseph W. Michels

On October 30th, 1956, a CIA-sponsored coup (code-named "Operation Straggle") was to take place in Damascus with the support of the Syrian military. The operation was cancelled on October 29th, one day before the planned coup, after Israel, the British and the French launched attacks on the Suez Canal. History refers to these events as "The Suez Crisis", and it provoked the Syrian military into refusing to go along with the coup.Two weeks later, the Soviet Union and Syria signed a Pact in which the Soviets promised Syria heavy weapons and other military support in exchange for more political and foreign policy influence.Alarmed by these events, and suffering an involuntary drawdown of CIA personnel in Damascus, Beirut's CIA station chief sends two covert operatives into Syria a week later to monitor a Soviet intelligence team that had arrived in Damascus, ostensibly to implement the terms of the Pact. Alan Harper, posing as a freelance investigative reporter, and Anne Small, posing as his Arabic-speaking interpreter, soon discovered the real objective of the Soviet team. The action is fast-paced as Harper and Anne, at great risk to themselves, fend off the Syrian secret police, a Soviet hit squad, and the Soviet intelligence team itself, in their attempt to disrupt the Soviet operation.

Jack Taylor, a freshly retired 42 year old U.S. Army MSgt, arrives in Gibraltar and takes up residence as an expat retiree. Informed his military pension won't be enough to live on, thereby jeopardizing his Gibraltar residence permit, Jack is open to recruitment efforts by organizations that hire paramilitary contractors. Capitalizing on the skills he acquired during his military career as a special forces operative, Jack-working alone or with others-takes on assignments ranging from providing security services to undertaking extraction ops of high value individuals. The CIA station chief in Gibraltar, along with agents of MI-5 and MI-6, soon begin to rely on Jack's skills. Wishing to provide Jack a socially acceptable cover for his occasional covert operations they pull strings to secure for Jack a private investigator's license as well as a concealed weapons permit. Jack's debut as a bonafide private detective cements his local reputation as a resourceful person ready to assist, but he knows those who value his covert operational skills will not easily cut him loose.

Istanbul in 1956 was a city very much affected by the Cold War. It served as a destination for Eastern Europeans being smuggled through the Iron Curtain and was a transfer point for smuggling from the Middle East to Europe. Most importantly, the 1950's was a time of growing American military and economic aid to Turkey.Soviet and nationalist communist entities viewed the generous American support as a national security threat, leading to a heightened interest on their part in learning what steps the Americans were planning to take or the status of initiatives already underway.In this novel's fictional scenario the close knit American expat community of Istanbul, composed of U.S. Consulate personnel, undercover operatives of other U.S. agencies, retirees, businessmen, students and others, is rumored to have a spy in their midst.After a CIA agent is murdered while investigating the rumor, Alan Harper, a young CIA operative fresh from an assignment in North Africa, is tasked with finding out who ordered the killing while also being asked to take up where the dead agent left off.The young Alan Harper, only a few years out of journalism school and the completion of his CIA training, undertakes his third major assignment; his first being his undercover work in Calcutta in 1955 in connection with the city's forthcoming municipal elections; his second being an assessment of the geopolitical status of the province of Cyrenaica, Libya, after Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956.Teaming up with Harper during this new and dangerous assignment is Anne Small, a CIA agent based in Beirut who ostensibly works for UNESCO. She poses as Harper's girlfriend while Harper is purportedly in Istanbul to write a feature article on the growing popularity of Istanbul as an American tourist destination.