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Showing posts with label A Bad Case. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A Bad Case. Show all posts
Monday 25 September 2017
Friday 10 July 2015
A BAD CASE and Other Adventures of Disturbed Minds
http://www.saltpublishing.com/products/a-bad-case-9781844719624
From Publisher’s Announcement
What links Clorinda to the mysterious disappearance of her new friend Theresa, in broad daylight, on the streets of New York? What is the true relationship between high-born, nine-year-old Elise von Alpenberg and her sinister guardian, Kepler von Thul? Why does young Marthe’s uneasy interview with the notorious spy, Anthony Blunt, stir up suspicions of complicity against her boss, the Establishment socialite Barbara Ely? And who is the true Fourth Man? And what connects Barbara to Constance Bryde, an unfaithful wife enmeshed in the cat-and-mouse surveillance operations of a divorce solicitor’s enquiry agent? Or how will jilted mistress, Rhona, deliver a long-overdue comeuppance to her Significant Other, the supercilious on-screen Talking Head? And who, you may well wonder, is the next doomed subject of portraitist Deverell-Hewells’s murderous thoughts? And, finally, can Nina discreetly maintain the façade that hides the eternal triangle of her complicated lovelife? These questions and more are answered in Eisner’s third series of mordant case histories intimately documenting bizarre dramas triggered by the subclinical dependencies of disturbed minds.
Published this year
Pages : 244pp
Format : Paperback
Trim Size : 203 x 127mm
Publisher : Salt Publishing (21 Jan. 2015)
Language : English
ISBN-10 : 1844719626
ISBN-13 : 978-1844719624
From Publisher’s Clippings File for Catherine Eisner’s Fiction
A meticulous recorder of behaviour, pitch-perfect on accents and the faultlines between class, sex and age, Eisner imbues each account with an unsettling verisimilitude that reaches its peak in ‘An Unreined Mind’.
Cathi Unsworth The Guardian
Eisner’s collection is subtitled, Hidden Lives of Love, Madness, Murder, Loss and Deception, and while the sense of madness and loss is amplified by the book’s extraordinary and disturbing cover, there is also a tremendous sense of fun here. The title story is the last testament of its asexual narrator. It’s a odd story, full of strange characters and erotic imagery: the narrator’s husband refers to her as his ‘long noodle’, and poor Uncle Irving’s body has to be identified by dental records – all that is left of him is his toupee. The stories in this collection are dark and the characters are ‘driven by bizarre and sometimes criminal compulsions.’
Carys Bray Postnatal Confession
I’ve long been an admirer of Catherine Eisner’s piquant and highly original fictions in the literary journal, ‘Ambit’, and of her singularly rich pictorial and sensuous prose. Here at last she is given a very much broader canvas for her character studies of women at the end of their tether, though it’s the minute detail of their dysfunctional, drug-dependant (and even criminal) lives I admire so much.
Johanna Behrendt Editor
Eisner herself intrigues me almost as much as her work. This is because she is profoundly knowledgeable in so many different fields: she understands the pop scene of the 1960s; she obviously knows a lot about the publishing industry; she exhibits more than a passing acquaintance with a wide range of ‘mind-altering substances’; she is erudite, although she wears her learning lightly, pronouncing telling mots justes upon the giants (and some of the minnows) of Western civilisation’s authors, artists and musicians across many centuries; she understands Latin and several European languages besides English; she has an acute ear for dialect (in A Bad Case, southern Irish, especially) as well as the varying cadences of speech that derive from differences in social standing; and, if she has not lived among the British aristocracy, she has clearly had opportunities to observe it at first hand. Wow!
Christina James Crime Novelist
Eisner has mastered the twist in the tale and her stories cascade vividly into derangement.
Cameron Woodhead The Age
. . . a genuinely unsettling voice, at once comic, intelligent and slightly, scarily deranged . . . a true technical triumph.
Kate Clanchy MsLexia
Erotic . . . enthralling . . . very pictorial . . . very original.
Neville Marten Ink
Eisner has mastered the twist in the tale and her stories cascade vividly into derangement.
Cameron Woodhead The Age
. . . a genuinely unsettling voice, at once comic, intelligent and slightly, scarily deranged . . . a true technical triumph.
Kate Clanchy MsLexia
Erotic . . . enthralling . . . very pictorial . . . very original.
Neville Marten Ink
Extracts from Narrative (Pages 145 – 196 A Bad Case)
In the humdrum is the beginning of murder.
Since breakfast, by slow degrees, a dark cloud had descended upon my consciousness, assuming a quality of sinister significance to which I was compelled to give thought.
I shivered, and at last conceded that an acute and homicidal hatred, with all the cunning of actual lunacy, now exercised an absolute mastery over my will.
I removed my fountain-pen from the breast pocket of my medical white coat and marked an X on the breakfast tablecloth beneath an offensively large bread crumb.
Just then I did not wish to be reminded of my marriage to Ingrid but once the idea had gripped my mind no steps I took could shake it off.
For mad I most certainly was that morning of the abandoned breadcrumb.
Once the grotesque problem of murder began to dominate my thoughts, it haunted me like a presence, and temptation grew apace.
The descent into Hell is easy.
Do I need to describe my wife when an artist greater than myself has captured her essence . . . It’s a living likeness! For long ago she had reached that moment in the passage of a woman’s life when, as it is said, the mirror no longer returns the expected consoling reflection and, therefore, must be turned to the wall.
Royal Portraitist Prof. Anthony Deverell-Hewells
Now You See It, Now You Don’t.
•
•
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes.
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
Monday 1 June 2015
Stoneburgh Spy Campus (Pt. 3): Religio-politico-criminalistics in Profiling MI6’s Predestined Mole
‘Joseph Stalin studied for the priesthood,’ remarked Professor Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s lecturer on politico-criminalistics). ‘Felix Dzerzhinsky, “the iron fist” and founder of the Cheka, considered becoming a Jesuit priest; likewise, MI6 double agent George Blake wanted to be a priest; and, not so incidentally, the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt was the grandson of an Anglican bishop . . . examples that should remind us that, when evaluating such zealots in thraldom to Communism, the dividing line between a political ideologue and a religious idealist can be blurred, especially when their New Testament insists they should sell their possessions and divide them among their poorer brethren, according to need. (Acts 2:45.)
‘Marx, as you know, said much the same thing: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’
But, in my own view, that is NOT the true thrust of the professor’s lecture on Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality, since I believe that in his veering off to discuss a number of psychopathic personalities from recent newspaper headlines — thematically-linked by murder — Weissener was mounting a persuasive case for a more intense examination of those Intelligence personnel warranting enhanced security vetting, with a dutiful concern to identify signs of an active muscular religiosity hidden beneath the secret agent’s mask of cool reason.
By good fortune, I took at the time copious precise notes of Prof. Weissener’s lecture so the following text is, I believe, a faithful transcription of his thoughts. And, since it was a public discourse, I therefore do not accept I am in breach of the presumption of confidentiality or of legal privilege in regard to any information disclosed.
Three Murderers Hanging from a Single Thread.
[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ] In the Intelligence services, Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology (CPIP) teaches us to to look for behavioural patterns in certain classifications of dysfunctionality so we can better determine our analysis of the characteristics of a suspect. For example, the instructive crime pattern that emerges from study of the following cases – whose distinct commonality in sharing a CPIP profile has passed unremarked by forensic criminologists practising outside our own specialist field – can alert us to rogue agents suborned and bribed by foreign powers; agents compromised by fatal inherited weaknesses of extreme ideological beliefs that can remain undiscovered, even at the highest levels of security clearance.
It was Sir Francis Galton FRS who in the late 19th Century introduced us to the technique of ‘Composite Portraiture of Criminal Types’ by combining, through repeated exposure, photographs of many unrelated violent felons to produce a single blended image of the criminal archetype . . . a rudimentary, but effective, early analytical process we now regard as the personification of our CPIP methodology.
Composite Portraiture of Criminality? Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology? The doubters among you are correct in your demands for hard evidence of the theory in practice, although I am obviously prevented by confidentiality constraints from citing cases identified within the Service.
And so I must refer you, correspondingly, to instances found in a number of true crimes of recent decades . . . for the connexions I identify here are profoundly disturbing should we discover this sinister behavioural pattern replicated in the personnel files of serving operatives . . .
1982 An ‘Angel of Death.’ A 46-year-old drifter from Aberdeen, Scotland, stalked a Hollywood film star, then, in broad daylight outside her home, stabbed her in the torso ten times with a 14 cm knife, nearly killing her. The perpetrator believed that he was on a divine ‘mission’ to kill the actress and take her ‘with [him] to the hearafter [sic], the better life, God’s kingdom.’ He served almost 14 years in prison for the assault. He was then extradited to the UK in 1996 to be tried for a 1966 robbery/murder. The accused, who saw himself as ‘the benevolent angel of death’, was found not guilty by diminished responsibility in 1997 and committed to a British psychiatric hospital, where he died of heart failure in 2004 at age 68.
2000 Loner Kills ‘Friend for Afterlife’. An Edinburgh-born university lecturer who battered a Cambridge graduate to death with a rolling pin because he wanted a ‘friend in the afterlife’ was convicted of the manslaughter of his victim. The lecturer, who said he had never had a girlfriend and was still a virgin, told the court: ‘I didn’t want to be alone in the afterlife. I didn’t want to be alone . . . I thought I could have a positive relationship with [the victim] in the afterlife.’ He claimed he attempted to commit suicide by taking a drug overdose and slashing his wrists. He did not die but went on the run and was arrested 12 days later.
2001 Killer Wedded ‘Forever in Heaven’. A teacher, originally from Oban, Strathclyde, shot dead a 19-year-old Italian schoolgirl who had spurned him, before turning the gun on himself near Turin. He shot her three times in the back and twice in the head. He then leant against the back of her car, and shot himself in the mouth. In his suicide note to the schoolgirl’s mother, he stated that he was going to kill her daughter, and himself, because she was ‘leaving him forever’. Once dead, the two would remain ‘joined together forever in heaven’.
George Blake: The Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ] You ask: The common factors in these three cases?
(1) The killers are of Scottish origin; (2) Their victims were intended as Companions-in-Death in the Afterlife; (3) That these killers trusted they were to be spared divine punishment for this mortal sin suggests they also possessed a vestigial sense (or more) of the singularity of Calvinistic predestination, a belief not wholly dispelled within the Scottish Presbyterian tradition that holds to the theology of John Calvin.
The purely Scottish notion of a ‘fey’ cast of mind applies, I believe, to the three murderers cited, insofar as the veil that separates this world from the next was to be effectively breached, by their reckoning, when they attempted to drag their elected companions-in-death with them through the celestial portal.
This certainty in the triumph of mortality over death is shared by a number of Scottish Calvinist-inclined sects who cleave to a belief in the Calvinistic Elect, the Chosen Ones singled out for Salvation. Similarly, it was this specific belief that sustained the murderous modus operandi of George Blake, master spy for the Soviets and a Colonel of Foreign Intelligence in their secret service.
Murderous?
By Blake’s treachery it’s believed more than forty British agents in the field met their deaths, their names exposed in reports to his Russian masters. His sentence totalling 42 years imprisonment for espionage is said to reflect his remorseless betrayal of agents executed by the Stasi or the KGB.
The title of this lecture is Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality, and my intention is to show that the crime pattern of the three Scottish murderers can be seen to resemble that of George Blake who, like them, sought absolution through casuistry rooted in an apologist’s atavistic Calvinism.
Far fetched?
In his youth in Amsterdam, Blake wanted to be a priest in the strict Calvinist Church of the working class of the Netherlands. He came to believe that freewill is an illusion; that everything is preordained and sins themselves are part of God’s will. In a real sense he believed in the Judas Paradox.
I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Revisited.
[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ] In Intelligence analysis of potential operatives, the success of clandestine HumInt operations depends on psychometric character studies of the highest accuracy. The integrity of agents is determined by the Service’s established I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Intelligence Clearance criteria for operatives, a finely calibrated values scaling defined by the mnemonic, Ideology, Numeracy, Training, Culture, Languages, Experience, Adaptability, and Resourcefulness.
Quite evidently, in the case of George Blake, the matrix descriptors Ideology and Culture escaped the net.
It is my belief that deeply embedded ideology from a subject’s formative years can be awakened (or, in today’s terms, ‘radicalised’) by the very real hostile intent of enemy powers, so the greatest vigilance must be maintained to identify telltale signs or detect unguarded disclosures.
Interestingly, according to one member of our consulting board of criminologists (a Highland Scot), Calvinistic Predestination is to be regarded as the Scottish ‘Super Ego’ (despite the fact that the total male membership of the Free Presbyterian Church numbers probably less than a hundred followers of scholastic Calvinism). However, his opinion is countered by another Scottish consulting member of our Intelligence board, a Medico-Legal Expert Witness and Consultant Psychiatrist accredited by the Mental Health Tribunal for Scotland. He states: ‘Very few Scottish people are Calvinists now – I would doubt if it is 1 percent. Even in Scottish Presbyterian churches very few would claim to be Calvinists. The Justified Sinner of James Hogg does not exist now in Scotland as Calvinism is now dead here. I doubt if it did exist.’
And yet, and yet . . . is not the ‘Scottish Super Ego’ a telling phrase for residual Calvinistic belief? Conversely, according to our Scottish consultants, the ‘Scottish Id’ is represented by a drunken philanderer, the Robert Burns of Burns Night (an occasion some believe to be a Dionysian travesty of a Presbyterian Communion Service).
Whatever you may conclude, in such notorious cases of pitiless betrayal – regardless of whether the sociopathic narcissist is a serial murderer or an enemy double agent – without doubt it is the Super Ego that takes charge of the deviant volition of the criminal, lured by the idealisation of his double moral standard.
Do what thou wilt.
[Prof. Weissener concludes . . . ] I have chosen the case of the traitor George Blake to illustrate my thesis, but if you examine carefully our CPIP category of ‘Justified Sinner’ you will see the classification also embraces a criminal such as serial murderer John George Haigh, a convicted fraudster and suspected serial killer John Bodkin Adams, and an occultist and soi-disant secret agent for the British intelligence services Aleister Crowley. . . the commonality of the latter three evidenced by their childhoods when raised within ultra-religious fundamentalist families adherent to the Plymouth Brethren whose founder’s central tenet was belief in ‘predestination’ as the ‘eternal purpose of God’, a conviction that insisted only ‘God’s Elect’ should receive salvation because the Elect are ‘freely justified’.
As the Great Tempter asserts in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg: ‘. . . is [there] not enough of merit in [the Saviour’s] great atonement to annihilate all your sins, let them be as heinous and atrocious as they may? And, moreover, do you not acknowledge that God hath pre-ordained and decreed whatsoever comes to pass? Then, how is it that you should deem it in your power to eschew one action of your life, whether good or evil? . . . none of us knows what is pre-ordained, but whatever it is pre-ordained we must do, and none of these things will be laid to our charge.’
In other words, as Aleister Crowley has it: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ Because, apparently, the Instrument of Divine Retribution makes exceptions for the fireproof brethren of God’s Elect, even if you’re a treacherous British spy branded a double agent with blood on your hands working for the Soviet Union.
So yes. Despite the Scottish nay-sayers on Stoneburgh’s consulting board of criminologists, a Calvinist Justified Sinner, still ideologically unassailable, actually continues to exist.
Today, an impenitent George Blake, aged 92, lives in Russia with no regrets for his support of Communism, believing Communism was for him the practical opportunity to put Christian values into practice: ‘Looking back on my life, everything seems logical and natural . . . I felt I was on the wrong side . . . that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed . . .’
Heedless of his treason, the nonagenarian Cold War warrior continues to speak of a redemptive utopia in the austerest terms of Calvinistic righteousness: ‘The Communist ideal is too high to achieve . . . and there can only be nominal adherents to it in the end. But I am optimistic, that in time, and it may take thousands of years, that humanity will come to the viewpoint that it would be better to live in a Communist society where people were really equal.’
[End of extract from Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality by Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener.]
Hidden in Plain View . . . a Comrade-in-Death.
Thoughtful Professor Weissener’s thesis has merit: the Calvinist George Blake essentially affirms his fundamentalist belief in the conflation of Communism and Christianity; that is, by relinquishing your possessions to join the meek, who are deemed blessèd, you shall inherit the earth, for the meek are all equal before the Redeemer, and the Lord is maker of them all.
In my latest book (A Bad Case, Salt 2014), I describe an East German ‘sleeper cell’ in New York at the height of the Cold War that takes advantage of the ideological camouflage afforded by a ‘God-fearing’ leafy quarter of one of the Five Boroughs that ‘seemed to boast a church on every street corner’.
Therefore, brethren, so we may make assurance doubly sure: ‘Hail Judas, Patron Saint of Traitors, pray for us sinners, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.’
See: A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
‘Marx, as you know, said much the same thing: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’
But, in my own view, that is NOT the true thrust of the professor’s lecture on Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality, since I believe that in his veering off to discuss a number of psychopathic personalities from recent newspaper headlines — thematically-linked by murder — Weissener was mounting a persuasive case for a more intense examination of those Intelligence personnel warranting enhanced security vetting, with a dutiful concern to identify signs of an active muscular religiosity hidden beneath the secret agent’s mask of cool reason.
 |
| The Embodiment of Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology: Composite portraiture by Francis Galton, made from multiple-exposure photographs of violent criminals. (Curiously, this resultant composite is not unlike a craggy portrait of Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener, if truth be told.) |
By good fortune, I took at the time copious precise notes of Prof. Weissener’s lecture so the following text is, I believe, a faithful transcription of his thoughts. And, since it was a public discourse, I therefore do not accept I am in breach of the presumption of confidentiality or of legal privilege in regard to any information disclosed.
Three Murderers Hanging from a Single Thread.
[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ] In the Intelligence services, Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology (CPIP) teaches us to to look for behavioural patterns in certain classifications of dysfunctionality so we can better determine our analysis of the characteristics of a suspect. For example, the instructive crime pattern that emerges from study of the following cases – whose distinct commonality in sharing a CPIP profile has passed unremarked by forensic criminologists practising outside our own specialist field – can alert us to rogue agents suborned and bribed by foreign powers; agents compromised by fatal inherited weaknesses of extreme ideological beliefs that can remain undiscovered, even at the highest levels of security clearance.
It was Sir Francis Galton FRS who in the late 19th Century introduced us to the technique of ‘Composite Portraiture of Criminal Types’ by combining, through repeated exposure, photographs of many unrelated violent felons to produce a single blended image of the criminal archetype . . . a rudimentary, but effective, early analytical process we now regard as the personification of our CPIP methodology.
Composite Portraiture of Criminality? Composite Predictive Investigative Psychology? The doubters among you are correct in your demands for hard evidence of the theory in practice, although I am obviously prevented by confidentiality constraints from citing cases identified within the Service.
And so I must refer you, correspondingly, to instances found in a number of true crimes of recent decades . . . for the connexions I identify here are profoundly disturbing should we discover this sinister behavioural pattern replicated in the personnel files of serving operatives . . .
1982 An ‘Angel of Death.’ A 46-year-old drifter from Aberdeen, Scotland, stalked a Hollywood film star, then, in broad daylight outside her home, stabbed her in the torso ten times with a 14 cm knife, nearly killing her. The perpetrator believed that he was on a divine ‘mission’ to kill the actress and take her ‘with [him] to the hearafter [sic], the better life, God’s kingdom.’ He served almost 14 years in prison for the assault. He was then extradited to the UK in 1996 to be tried for a 1966 robbery/murder. The accused, who saw himself as ‘the benevolent angel of death’, was found not guilty by diminished responsibility in 1997 and committed to a British psychiatric hospital, where he died of heart failure in 2004 at age 68.
2000 Loner Kills ‘Friend for Afterlife’. An Edinburgh-born university lecturer who battered a Cambridge graduate to death with a rolling pin because he wanted a ‘friend in the afterlife’ was convicted of the manslaughter of his victim. The lecturer, who said he had never had a girlfriend and was still a virgin, told the court: ‘I didn’t want to be alone in the afterlife. I didn’t want to be alone . . . I thought I could have a positive relationship with [the victim] in the afterlife.’ He claimed he attempted to commit suicide by taking a drug overdose and slashing his wrists. He did not die but went on the run and was arrested 12 days later.
2001 Killer Wedded ‘Forever in Heaven’. A teacher, originally from Oban, Strathclyde, shot dead a 19-year-old Italian schoolgirl who had spurned him, before turning the gun on himself near Turin. He shot her three times in the back and twice in the head. He then leant against the back of her car, and shot himself in the mouth. In his suicide note to the schoolgirl’s mother, he stated that he was going to kill her daughter, and himself, because she was ‘leaving him forever’. Once dead, the two would remain ‘joined together forever in heaven’.
George Blake: The Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ] You ask: The common factors in these three cases?
(1) The killers are of Scottish origin; (2) Their victims were intended as Companions-in-Death in the Afterlife; (3) That these killers trusted they were to be spared divine punishment for this mortal sin suggests they also possessed a vestigial sense (or more) of the singularity of Calvinistic predestination, a belief not wholly dispelled within the Scottish Presbyterian tradition that holds to the theology of John Calvin.
The purely Scottish notion of a ‘fey’ cast of mind applies, I believe, to the three murderers cited, insofar as the veil that separates this world from the next was to be effectively breached, by their reckoning, when they attempted to drag their elected companions-in-death with them through the celestial portal.
This certainty in the triumph of mortality over death is shared by a number of Scottish Calvinist-inclined sects who cleave to a belief in the Calvinistic Elect, the Chosen Ones singled out for Salvation. Similarly, it was this specific belief that sustained the murderous modus operandi of George Blake, master spy for the Soviets and a Colonel of Foreign Intelligence in their secret service.
Murderous?
By Blake’s treachery it’s believed more than forty British agents in the field met their deaths, their names exposed in reports to his Russian masters. His sentence totalling 42 years imprisonment for espionage is said to reflect his remorseless betrayal of agents executed by the Stasi or the KGB.
The title of this lecture is Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality, and my intention is to show that the crime pattern of the three Scottish murderers can be seen to resemble that of George Blake who, like them, sought absolution through casuistry rooted in an apologist’s atavistic Calvinism.
Far fetched?
In his youth in Amsterdam, Blake wanted to be a priest in the strict Calvinist Church of the working class of the Netherlands. He came to believe that freewill is an illusion; that everything is preordained and sins themselves are part of God’s will. In a real sense he believed in the Judas Paradox.
In the religious system to which I adhered [wrote Blake, confined at Wormwood Scrubs prison] the doctrine of predestination occupied a central position and I had given this doctrine much thought. I had no difficulty in accepting it as it fitted in completely with my concept of God the Creator of Heaven and Earth, All-powerful, All-knowing, the King of the Universe, without whom not one sparrow falls to the ground and by whom the very hairs of our head are numbered (Matthew 10- 29, 30). There was no room in this system for such a thing as casualty or accident and, even less, freewill on the part of a human being . . . I believe our reaction to events is also predestined . . . Fatalism is not sitting back and accepting what has occurred. It is also the impulses which force you to act in a particular way. That is why I believe it is justified for someone to say, ‘You cannot punish me for my sins because my sins were put inside me and are not my fault.’In 1966, Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison and fled to the USSR.
I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Revisited.
[Prof. Weissener continues . . . ] In Intelligence analysis of potential operatives, the success of clandestine HumInt operations depends on psychometric character studies of the highest accuracy. The integrity of agents is determined by the Service’s established I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Intelligence Clearance criteria for operatives, a finely calibrated values scaling defined by the mnemonic, Ideology, Numeracy, Training, Culture, Languages, Experience, Adaptability, and Resourcefulness.
Quite evidently, in the case of George Blake, the matrix descriptors Ideology and Culture escaped the net.
It is my belief that deeply embedded ideology from a subject’s formative years can be awakened (or, in today’s terms, ‘radicalised’) by the very real hostile intent of enemy powers, so the greatest vigilance must be maintained to identify telltale signs or detect unguarded disclosures.
Interestingly, according to one member of our consulting board of criminologists (a Highland Scot), Calvinistic Predestination is to be regarded as the Scottish ‘Super Ego’ (despite the fact that the total male membership of the Free Presbyterian Church numbers probably less than a hundred followers of scholastic Calvinism). However, his opinion is countered by another Scottish consulting member of our Intelligence board, a Medico-Legal Expert Witness and Consultant Psychiatrist accredited by the Mental Health Tribunal for Scotland. He states: ‘Very few Scottish people are Calvinists now – I would doubt if it is 1 percent. Even in Scottish Presbyterian churches very few would claim to be Calvinists. The Justified Sinner of James Hogg does not exist now in Scotland as Calvinism is now dead here. I doubt if it did exist.’
And yet, and yet . . . is not the ‘Scottish Super Ego’ a telling phrase for residual Calvinistic belief? Conversely, according to our Scottish consultants, the ‘Scottish Id’ is represented by a drunken philanderer, the Robert Burns of Burns Night (an occasion some believe to be a Dionysian travesty of a Presbyterian Communion Service).
Whatever you may conclude, in such notorious cases of pitiless betrayal – regardless of whether the sociopathic narcissist is a serial murderer or an enemy double agent – without doubt it is the Super Ego that takes charge of the deviant volition of the criminal, lured by the idealisation of his double moral standard.
Do what thou wilt.
[Prof. Weissener concludes . . . ] I have chosen the case of the traitor George Blake to illustrate my thesis, but if you examine carefully our CPIP category of ‘Justified Sinner’ you will see the classification also embraces a criminal such as serial murderer John George Haigh, a convicted fraudster and suspected serial killer John Bodkin Adams, and an occultist and soi-disant secret agent for the British intelligence services Aleister Crowley. . . the commonality of the latter three evidenced by their childhoods when raised within ultra-religious fundamentalist families adherent to the Plymouth Brethren whose founder’s central tenet was belief in ‘predestination’ as the ‘eternal purpose of God’, a conviction that insisted only ‘God’s Elect’ should receive salvation because the Elect are ‘freely justified’.
As the Great Tempter asserts in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg: ‘. . . is [there] not enough of merit in [the Saviour’s] great atonement to annihilate all your sins, let them be as heinous and atrocious as they may? And, moreover, do you not acknowledge that God hath pre-ordained and decreed whatsoever comes to pass? Then, how is it that you should deem it in your power to eschew one action of your life, whether good or evil? . . . none of us knows what is pre-ordained, but whatever it is pre-ordained we must do, and none of these things will be laid to our charge.’
In other words, as Aleister Crowley has it: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ Because, apparently, the Instrument of Divine Retribution makes exceptions for the fireproof brethren of God’s Elect, even if you’re a treacherous British spy branded a double agent with blood on your hands working for the Soviet Union.
 |
| John George Haigh George Blake Betrayers of Trust: Predestined ‘Justified’ Sociopaths? |
So yes. Despite the Scottish nay-sayers on Stoneburgh’s consulting board of criminologists, a Calvinist Justified Sinner, still ideologically unassailable, actually continues to exist.
Today, an impenitent George Blake, aged 92, lives in Russia with no regrets for his support of Communism, believing Communism was for him the practical opportunity to put Christian values into practice: ‘Looking back on my life, everything seems logical and natural . . . I felt I was on the wrong side . . . that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed . . .’
Heedless of his treason, the nonagenarian Cold War warrior continues to speak of a redemptive utopia in the austerest terms of Calvinistic righteousness: ‘The Communist ideal is too high to achieve . . . and there can only be nominal adherents to it in the end. But I am optimistic, that in time, and it may take thousands of years, that humanity will come to the viewpoint that it would be better to live in a Communist society where people were really equal.’
[End of extract from Elective Betrayal: Predestination in the Sociopathic Personality by Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener.]
Hidden in Plain View . . . a Comrade-in-Death.
Thoughtful Professor Weissener’s thesis has merit: the Calvinist George Blake essentially affirms his fundamentalist belief in the conflation of Communism and Christianity; that is, by relinquishing your possessions to join the meek, who are deemed blessèd, you shall inherit the earth, for the meek are all equal before the Redeemer, and the Lord is maker of them all.
But does this mean that, to accomplish this, one should set about a course of treason in the knowledge that betrayal of one’s comrades, and their resultant deaths, are to be considered the Elective Will of God and His Divine Plan of Predestination?
Are all those sacrificial victims of Blake’s treason considered by him to be his Companions-in-Death in the Afterlife?
Did the treachery of Anthony Blunt, who unquestioningly put at hazard the lives of one hundred and seventy-five thousand Allied servicemen by betraying the secret of the D-Day landings to his Soviet masters, follow a similar course? For Blunt and his fellow leftwing bien pensants of the 1930s, in the desperate ideological battlefield of Communism versus Fascism, Marxism had become the new religion of the realpolitik, which fulfilled their callow Oedipal desire to kill God-the-Father, the Nobodaddy of Soviet ridicule. Are all those sacrificial victims of Blake’s treason considered by him to be his Companions-in-Death in the Afterlife?
 |
| From East Germany’s Stasi Files: Evidence of George Blake’s Betrayal of the West. |
In my latest book (A Bad Case, Salt 2014), I describe an East German ‘sleeper cell’ in New York at the height of the Cold War that takes advantage of the ideological camouflage afforded by a ‘God-fearing’ leafy quarter of one of the Five Boroughs that ‘seemed to boast a church on every street corner’.
Yet in no press account of the spy nest have I seen recorded the reasons underlying the choice of that neighborhood for the spy ring’s ‘sleeper agents’. Even now, I continue to speculate on the cunning of the ringleaders and their East German masters. It is my belief they chose for their spy cell a neighborhood that was already shielded from closer inquiry by a cultural stockade, defiant of the reach of federal intelligence bureaux whose pursuit of home-grown terrorism had led them to look the other way.True then. True today. When national intelligence agencies ‘look the other way’, treasonous intrigue prospers in plain sight.
Therefore, brethren, so we may make assurance doubly sure: ‘Hail Judas, Patron Saint of Traitors, pray for us sinners, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.’
•
(Postscript) News Headline 27 October 2015
Chess Grand Master rejected by GCHQ Intelligence because of his ‘devout’ Christianity and ‘loyalty to God over his country’. A ‘devout’ science teacher who was rejected for a hush hush job at the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) plans to appeal against that decision at the European Court of Human Rights. The petitioner in the case, a computer forensics specialist and a World Chess Federation Grand Master, insists his admissions to scrutineers of adherence to religious scripture were behind his rejection for a highly prized job following a gruelling selection process at the GCHQ listening station in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He was eventually turned down for the job for ‘national security’ reasons, and later lost an Employment Tribunal. A judgement had ruled that GCHQ were entitled to conclude that ‘the effect those beliefs might have on his behaviour and judgment in the workplace’ raised genuine concerns as to national security issues.True. It's a tough process. Regulatory ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’ can be daunting.
See: A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
•
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes.
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
(In the latter two volumes, Stoneburgh operatives feature in Lovesong in Invisible Ink, Listen Close to Me and Inducement)
see also extracts from the Stoneburgh Files here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/oreville-spy-campus-introduction-to.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
and for more insights on
Anthony Blunt
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
(In the latter two volumes, Stoneburgh operatives feature in Lovesong in Invisible Ink, Listen Close to Me and Inducement)
see also extracts from the Stoneburgh Files here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/oreville-spy-campus-introduction-to.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
and for more insights on
Anthony Blunt
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html
Sunday 26 April 2015
Oreville Spy Campus: An Introduction to Stoneburgh Military Academy (Pt. 1)
Familiarly codenamed ‘Oreville’ by certain analysts in our spying fraternity, Stoneburgh Military Academy is the elite alma mater for generations of British Intelligence operatives who have graduated as commissioned adepts in cryptography, code-breaking, counterespionage, covert communications, disguise, forgery, infiltration, subversion, surreptitious entry, surveillance and sabotage, not forgetting the duplicities of PsyOps. For our intelligence community it delivers a unique curriculum whose content remains sensitive and highly classified so unsurprisingly its astonishing scope has never been openly itemised
Nonetheless, the unfolding Stoneburgh Chronicles (see Catherine Eisner’s collections, Sister Morphine 2008, Listen Close to Me 2011, and A Bad Case 2014) from time to time reward spy-watchers with teasing glimpses of the Stoneburgh cadre, so for the uninitiated a number of key passages are quoted here as prompts for further study.
Perhaps the most instructive introduction to Stoneburgh may be read in the section, Red Coffee, in Sister Morphine, which acquaints us with the young Russian legation interpreter Irina P., seconded to T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security – to assist in the drafting of the Redistribution Plan under the direction of Brigadier Wingfield, chief of the FFES, the Forum for Federated European Security. Here are Irina’s first impressions (note: Irina does not disclose her difficulties in locating the academy since for security reasons the approach roads are unsignposted).
The approach to Stoneburgh Military Academy was through the garrison’s camps, on a concrete road flanked by gorse thickets and wild heathland churned by tank tracks.
‘The English soil,’ she thought fondly.
For she could not deny that in her long-dreamt-of assignment to the foreign fields of England, after all those oppressive years of diligent study in Moscow, her soul had recognised what her masters would condemn as the delusions of a spiritual home-coming.
When she arrived at the guardpost she saw a soldier remove a black disc from a hook and hang an orange disc in its place on the message-board.
‘Security state raised to Condition Orange,’ Irina thought, suppressing an impulse to laugh, ‘but surely I alone can’t be the cause of their heightened threat alert!’
The Ministry of Defence guards inspected her Cyrillic passport, unsmiling. Not until Colonel Rees-Sholter rang the gate-house was the barrier raised.
Irina drove the hired car cautiously; nerving herself to remember the rule of the left hand lane.
Where two broad avenues met she halted before a huge, black eighteenth century mortar with a mouth wide enough to fire a Landseer lion.
The Palladian façade, she observed with a pang of disappointment, was disfigured where the portico pilasters were parcelled up in green plastic for restoration. She felt deprived of her proper due.
The guards had directed her to ‘K’ section. The college blocks for the gentlemen cadets and the great park of over six hundred acres had been laid out in tribute to beleaguered forts, border disputes and skirmishes in the Indian and Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century. An entire square mile was divided alphabetically into twenty-six sectors, ranging from Alipur and Berar, through Charasia to Zulfikar. Irina was detailed to ‘K’ sector (the siege of Kotah, 1858) which adjoined the Residency of the Lieutenant Governor.
A cadet platoon, selected from the New Intake Group of that momentous year, jogged by with war-whoops, thighs sweating like champion gladiators.
As she parked her car, a soldier-cyclist rode up and blew the midday lunch recess on his buglet.
Today, instead of answering demands within the alliance to deter Russia by permanently stationing at least a brigade in the Baltic states, Nato is reliant on its strategy of the provision of a very high-readiness task force of 5,000 troops for rapid deployment to the Russian border. (See Irina’s reference in 1997 to rapid MSRs below.)
In Red Coffee, Irina was privy to the ramifications of that trade-off, which Colonel Rees-Sholter had outlined to her on her arrival, a trade-off that demanded new nonbelligerent uses for the demilitarised zone.
From Day One of her induction, Irina had been determined to honour the supreme trust the Academy had invested in her. In those early weeks she could scarcely believe her good fortune. The six historic cannon evenly spaced along the South Terrace, the great Park, the ornamental Lake, the Piranesian vaulted library, all conspired to create a classically golden atmosphere of privilege and distinction in which she basked.
The day was warm; the month was March; Shirt Sleeve Order was five weeks away. She sat at the lakeside and wrote an airmail to her sister.
Irina described Stoneburgh as a ‘time capsule’. In her own country Time and Change raced like the clouds reflected on the water. She could not conceal her yearning to ‘remain always in ancestral gardens, seated on soft grass, without thinking’.
Privately, the colonel had told her she had ‘made a hit’ in K section; Duncan had referred to her as ‘the lady of the regiment’.
She had almost completed the blue features on her map. The scheme was classified ‘Most Secret’.
Under the auspices of the IRP – the International Redistribution Plan – the conversion of military bases was proposed on a vast Central European demilitarised zone where three state frontiers met. This forested land-mass cradled more lakes than Finland.
The trade-off was two-fold: admission of the former satellite states to an Entente with the Powers, and development of the infrastructure for new rapid MSRs – Main Supply Routes – to their borders, in return for cutbacks in front-line military establishments.
The MSRs had been carefully assessed for vehicle choke points
Wingfield’s Redistibution Plan was to integrate a series of foreign equity-funded water sedimentation plants to yield highly mineralised compounds for fertilizers and animal foodstuffs. Fifty lakes taken together contained more than five hundred million tons of sapropel, it was estimated, based on optimal utilisation of the natural resources beneath waters surrounded by the largest undisturbed ancient forest in Europe.
The Report’s centre-fold map summarised the Industrial Reclamation Plan with a legend keyed to Irina’s own symbols.
Lakes containing sapropel were marked with a gold leaf.
Formed by broadleaf and coniferous forests, sapropel organic matter is an aquatic carbonaceous nutrient lying in ooze on the lakebeds.
But Irina’s earnest desire to be an instrument of European rapprochement is thwarted by a powerful puppet-master emerging, still active, from the crucible of a dismembered USSR transmuted by its desperate ideological reconstitution. Very soon not-so-subtle pressure to betray her new comrades is exerted on Irina by dark forces from her Soviet past.
Irina’s boss, General Yegor Bolkashin was the former Chief of Intelligence in the republic where she was born. They had met in the state capital where he chaired the powerful, post-separatist Land Utilisation Policy Commission whose delegates pulled the strings of puppet states still in thrall to Soviet centralism.
The general zeroed in and expertly squeezed Irina’s well-shaped knee.
‘Irinka. Your knees are the property of the republic. So is sapropel. You should think carefully about what you are doing.’
••••••••••••
However, Colonel Rees-Sholter at Stoneburgh is more gallant in his appreciation of Irina’s zeal.
Irina’s efficient progress with her Report for T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security – pleased Colonel Rees-Sholter.
His trusty workhorse he called her.
‘Don’t think for that I am all horseflesh!’ she sparked up.
‘Nor you are, my dear,’ brayed the colonel amiably.
The emergence of ex-Soviet ‘placemen’ in the West, identified in Red Coffee, is highlighted in a more recent Stoneburgh instalment, Turnaround, in which my anonymous correspondent – a novice codebreaker in Stoneburgh’s exclusive cryptanalysis sorority – makes clear the continuing threat.
Hans-Jürgen Weissener, a former agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, taught politico-criminalistics at Stoneburgh.
Klara Weissener was the only daughter of this eminent spy-catcher and master intelligence analyst whose lectures had been a memorable feature of our first year’s cadetship at Stoneburgh.
I remember so clearly his visionary conspectus of the Anno Jericho emergency – the collapse of the Berlin wall – and how, in his own words, ‘surveillance of Tumbleweeds from the Badlands’ should be classified as an immediate Heightened Alert Condition. By the label, ‘The Badlands’, he denounced the entire Eastern Bloc.
Attendance at his acclaimed lecture on Soviet Sleepers was compulsory.
He spoke English correctly but slowly. ‘Do not doubt,’ he cautioned, ‘when I tell you that any number of placemen in the West are still in position feeding secrets to the Soviets. Beware of Latebloomers!’ A disarming smile had flickered for a moment. ‘I speak horticulturally. My subject is Badlands fauna but my metaphor is drawn from flora. (There had been a scattering of knowing laughter.)
••••••••••••
This continuing global threat shapes the academy’s strategies for spycraft that must answer to constant vigilance, the watchword of the Stoneburgh cadre. Of course, the academy’s more colourful personnel will become known to you in time, but a résumé is not out of place in this brief introduction, together with one or two directions as to where principal characters may be encountered in these occasional chronicles.
(From Red Coffee and Turnaround and Lovesong in Invisible Ink
and In Search of the Fourth Man)
Brigadier Wingfield: chief of the FFES, the Forum for Federated European Security.
Colonel Rees-Sholter: director of T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security, with special responsibility for the IRP – the International Redistribution Plan.
Major Roland ‘Rollo’ Poultney: a ‘Green Fly’ from Intelligence seconded to the Task-Force as the colonel’s ADC.
Lieutenant Duncan Pym: administers the Surreptitious Entry Unit and Special Surveillance Teams for his mentor, the colonel. (Poultney’s opinion of Duncan? ‘Mission creep? He was Mission Creep!’)
Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener: former agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, lecturer on politico-criminalistics.
Klara ‘Flags’ Weissener: brilliant daughter of the professor and leader of Stoneburgh’s Cryptocomms, an exclusive cryptanalysis sorority.
Hilary Challis: youngest daughter of Stoneburgh’s Custodian-Marshall, on non-regular assignment to Klara’s Decrypt section. A mathematical prodigy, a fixated numerologist, she is a hyper-systemised teenage savant with eidetic recall.
Mrs Greenham: only representative of non-regular personnel at top-brass level. She is Colonel Rees-Sholter’s secretary. (‘Wretched name for the unfortunate woman,’ the colonel would often confide to newcomers.) She is sometimes retained as an innocuous-seeming ‘handler’ in sensitive cases involving compromised women.
‘Barbara Ely’: Establishment socialite and co-opted to work with Stoneburgh’s psychological operations unit as a psycho-scenarist of criminal rôle-play for lectures in state espionage.
Major Vivian X: Intelligence officer and undercover operative in ‘Paddyland’.
Off-site deep-cover operatives.
(From Inducement and A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men)
Edward Faucon: manages a ‘shop window’, the Faucon Detective Agency, a bureau for commercial surveillance operations under a cloak of legitimacy.
Verity Y: Successful divorce lawyer, working as a ‘talent spotter’ in the recruitment and vetting of potential intelligence operatives.
See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
General Yegor Bolkashin: ex-Chief of Intelligence, semi-retired career intelligence officer in the Soviet military security service; chairs the powerful, post-separatist Land Utilisation Policy Commission whose delegates pull the strings of puppet states still in thrall to Soviet centralism; founder of his Institute for Security Affairs.
Konrad W: operates his own press agency in Warsaw – Biuro K – and exchanges communiqués with Yegor’s outfit in the neighbouring republic.
Stefan Mikhailovich Kazimirov: Intelligence officer with diplomatic cover as a geologist; sub-section chief at his trade mission attached to the Russian Embassy in London.
Classified Operatives – Access Denied (Highest Level SC accreditation required)
(From Red Coffee and Turnaround and A Room to the End of Fall and Inducement and The Cheated Eye and Listen Close to Me)
Irina P: Rôle classified.
Frieda Tace: Rôle classified.
Dr. Walther T. Reindorf: Rôle classified.
Anneliese Hildegard Wintermann: Rôle classified.
Constance Bryde: Rôle classified.
Nadezhda Stepanovna Cheremisovna: Rôle classified.
Professor ‘Pappi’ and his nephew Vernon: Associate Lecturer in Cognitive Robotics in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Applied Neural Computation, and wunderkind astrophysicist/roboticist, respectively; both non-regular Stoneburghians. Rôles classified.
Any overtures to establish closer ties with the West are so often subverted by the ‘placemen’ and ‘placewomen’ Professor Weissener identifies in his seminal monograph, Red Whitewash. It’s pretty evident that Stefan Kazimirov (Inducement) was not the geologist he claimed to be. More than this, is it not curious that Stefan’s London address was Chesterfield House, Mayfair W1, just a stone’s throw from MI5 operatives’ quarters in South Audley Street? Did Stefan follow the first rule of concealment? He Who Wants to Hide a Leaf should put it in a forest.
No. Our differences are irreconcilable, if Irina P is to be believed,
(The Custodian-Marshall gave Irina P licence to explore the stacks at Stoneburgh’s extensive library.) On the shelves labelled ‘Anthropometry’ she found an early monograph on Slavonians. ‘The tribe of Slavons is characterised by darker hair and eyes than the Saxon.’ There was an engraving of a house set far apart from others. ‘An Anglo-Saxon, if possible, always stands detached.’
Even a well intentioned olive branch can be misconstrued. Irina P laconically once noted a passage in her copy of Varieties of Topical Interpretation by I. S. Slovenko (Moscow 1993): ‘A false transcription by an interpreter rendered President Carter’s words on his arrival in Poland, in 1978, as “I desire the Poles carnally.” ’
As the exhortation on Maxie’s bar check reminds us: Come Again Soon. So maybe, if we remain vigilant at this intriguing watering-hole – who knows? – before very long we’ll encounter these femmes fatales once more. If not, be assured, the cocktails are delightfully inventive.
For Part 2 of the Stoneburgh Files (the instructive text for probationer agents, Turnaround) see http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and for Part 3, which reacquaints us with the criminological theories of Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html
Perhaps the most instructive introduction to Stoneburgh may be read in the section, Red Coffee, in Sister Morphine, which acquaints us with the young Russian legation interpreter Irina P., seconded to T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security – to assist in the drafting of the Redistribution Plan under the direction of Brigadier Wingfield, chief of the FFES, the Forum for Federated European Security. Here are Irina’s first impressions (note: Irina does not disclose her difficulties in locating the academy since for security reasons the approach roads are unsignposted).
••••••••••••
The approach to Stoneburgh Military Academy was through the garrison’s camps, on a concrete road flanked by gorse thickets and wild heathland churned by tank tracks.
‘The English soil,’ she thought fondly.
For she could not deny that in her long-dreamt-of assignment to the foreign fields of England, after all those oppressive years of diligent study in Moscow, her soul had recognised what her masters would condemn as the delusions of a spiritual home-coming.
When she arrived at the guardpost she saw a soldier remove a black disc from a hook and hang an orange disc in its place on the message-board.
‘Security state raised to Condition Orange,’ Irina thought, suppressing an impulse to laugh, ‘but surely I alone can’t be the cause of their heightened threat alert!’
The Ministry of Defence guards inspected her Cyrillic passport, unsmiling. Not until Colonel Rees-Sholter rang the gate-house was the barrier raised.
Irina drove the hired car cautiously; nerving herself to remember the rule of the left hand lane.
Where two broad avenues met she halted before a huge, black eighteenth century mortar with a mouth wide enough to fire a Landseer lion.
The Palladian façade, she observed with a pang of disappointment, was disfigured where the portico pilasters were parcelled up in green plastic for restoration. She felt deprived of her proper due.
The guards had directed her to ‘K’ section. The college blocks for the gentlemen cadets and the great park of over six hundred acres had been laid out in tribute to beleaguered forts, border disputes and skirmishes in the Indian and Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century. An entire square mile was divided alphabetically into twenty-six sectors, ranging from Alipur and Berar, through Charasia to Zulfikar. Irina was detailed to ‘K’ sector (the siege of Kotah, 1858) which adjoined the Residency of the Lieutenant Governor.
A cadet platoon, selected from the New Intake Group of that momentous year, jogged by with war-whoops, thighs sweating like champion gladiators.
As she parked her car, a soldier-cyclist rode up and blew the midday lunch recess on his buglet.
••••••••••••
Entente uncordiale.
In the light of current political commentary (21.04.15) on the crisis of Europe’s frontline nations under Nato, and doubts – for example – as to the defence of a former Soviet republic with a border only 100 miles from St Petersburg, Irina’s hush-hush project at Stoneburgh (her account to me was written in 1997) now seems astonishingly far-sighted. Her presence at Stoneburgh at the time reflected Nato’s accommodations with Russia in so far that the signing with Russia of a ‘Founding Act’ (1997) promised no combat units would be permanently deployed on the territory of any new members of the alliance.Today, instead of answering demands within the alliance to deter Russia by permanently stationing at least a brigade in the Baltic states, Nato is reliant on its strategy of the provision of a very high-readiness task force of 5,000 troops for rapid deployment to the Russian border. (See Irina’s reference in 1997 to rapid MSRs below.)
••••••••••••
From Day One of her induction, Irina had been determined to honour the supreme trust the Academy had invested in her. In those early weeks she could scarcely believe her good fortune. The six historic cannon evenly spaced along the South Terrace, the great Park, the ornamental Lake, the Piranesian vaulted library, all conspired to create a classically golden atmosphere of privilege and distinction in which she basked.
The day was warm; the month was March; Shirt Sleeve Order was five weeks away. She sat at the lakeside and wrote an airmail to her sister.
Irina described Stoneburgh as a ‘time capsule’. In her own country Time and Change raced like the clouds reflected on the water. She could not conceal her yearning to ‘remain always in ancestral gardens, seated on soft grass, without thinking’.
Privately, the colonel had told her she had ‘made a hit’ in K section; Duncan had referred to her as ‘the lady of the regiment’.
She had almost completed the blue features on her map. The scheme was classified ‘Most Secret’.
Under the auspices of the IRP – the International Redistribution Plan – the conversion of military bases was proposed on a vast Central European demilitarised zone where three state frontiers met. This forested land-mass cradled more lakes than Finland.
The trade-off was two-fold: admission of the former satellite states to an Entente with the Powers, and development of the infrastructure for new rapid MSRs – Main Supply Routes – to their borders, in return for cutbacks in front-line military establishments.
The MSRs had been carefully assessed for vehicle choke points
••••••••••••
The Report’s centre-fold map summarised the Industrial Reclamation Plan with a legend keyed to Irina’s own symbols.
Lakes containing sapropel were marked with a gold leaf.
Formed by broadleaf and coniferous forests, sapropel organic matter is an aquatic carbonaceous nutrient lying in ooze on the lakebeds.
••••••••••••
But Irina’s earnest desire to be an instrument of European rapprochement is thwarted by a powerful puppet-master emerging, still active, from the crucible of a dismembered USSR transmuted by its desperate ideological reconstitution. Very soon not-so-subtle pressure to betray her new comrades is exerted on Irina by dark forces from her Soviet past.
Irina’s boss, General Yegor Bolkashin was the former Chief of Intelligence in the republic where she was born. They had met in the state capital where he chaired the powerful, post-separatist Land Utilisation Policy Commission whose delegates pulled the strings of puppet states still in thrall to Soviet centralism.
The general zeroed in and expertly squeezed Irina’s well-shaped knee.
‘Irinka. Your knees are the property of the republic. So is sapropel. You should think carefully about what you are doing.’
••••••••••••
However, Colonel Rees-Sholter at Stoneburgh is more gallant in his appreciation of Irina’s zeal.
Irina’s efficient progress with her Report for T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security – pleased Colonel Rees-Sholter.
‘Don’t think for that I am all horseflesh!’ she sparked up.
‘Nor you are, my dear,’ brayed the colonel amiably.
••••••••••••
The emergence of ex-Soviet ‘placemen’ in the West, identified in Red Coffee, is highlighted in a more recent Stoneburgh instalment, Turnaround, in which my anonymous correspondent – a novice codebreaker in Stoneburgh’s exclusive cryptanalysis sorority – makes clear the continuing threat.
Hans-Jürgen Weissener, a former agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, taught politico-criminalistics at Stoneburgh.
Klara Weissener was the only daughter of this eminent spy-catcher and master intelligence analyst whose lectures had been a memorable feature of our first year’s cadetship at Stoneburgh.
I remember so clearly his visionary conspectus of the Anno Jericho emergency – the collapse of the Berlin wall – and how, in his own words, ‘surveillance of Tumbleweeds from the Badlands’ should be classified as an immediate Heightened Alert Condition. By the label, ‘The Badlands’, he denounced the entire Eastern Bloc.
Attendance at his acclaimed lecture on Soviet Sleepers was compulsory.
He spoke English correctly but slowly. ‘Do not doubt,’ he cautioned, ‘when I tell you that any number of placemen in the West are still in position feeding secrets to the Soviets. Beware of Latebloomers!’ A disarming smile had flickered for a moment. ‘I speak horticulturally. My subject is Badlands fauna but my metaphor is drawn from flora. (There had been a scattering of knowing laughter.)
••••••••••••
This continuing global threat shapes the academy’s strategies for spycraft that must answer to constant vigilance, the watchword of the Stoneburgh cadre. Of course, the academy’s more colourful personnel will become known to you in time, but a résumé is not out of place in this brief introduction, together with one or two directions as to where principal characters may be encountered in these occasional chronicles.
Dramatis Personae
Current notable Stoneburghians(From Red Coffee and Turnaround and Lovesong in Invisible Ink
and In Search of the Fourth Man)
Brigadier Wingfield: chief of the FFES, the Forum for Federated European Security.
Colonel Rees-Sholter: director of T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security, with special responsibility for the IRP – the International Redistribution Plan.
Major Roland ‘Rollo’ Poultney: a ‘Green Fly’ from Intelligence seconded to the Task-Force as the colonel’s ADC.
Lieutenant Duncan Pym: administers the Surreptitious Entry Unit and Special Surveillance Teams for his mentor, the colonel. (Poultney’s opinion of Duncan? ‘Mission creep? He was Mission Creep!’)
Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener: former agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, lecturer on politico-criminalistics.
Klara ‘Flags’ Weissener: brilliant daughter of the professor and leader of Stoneburgh’s Cryptocomms, an exclusive cryptanalysis sorority.
Hilary Challis: youngest daughter of Stoneburgh’s Custodian-Marshall, on non-regular assignment to Klara’s Decrypt section. A mathematical prodigy, a fixated numerologist, she is a hyper-systemised teenage savant with eidetic recall.
Mrs Greenham: only representative of non-regular personnel at top-brass level. She is Colonel Rees-Sholter’s secretary. (‘Wretched name for the unfortunate woman,’ the colonel would often confide to newcomers.) She is sometimes retained as an innocuous-seeming ‘handler’ in sensitive cases involving compromised women.
‘Barbara Ely’: Establishment socialite and co-opted to work with Stoneburgh’s psychological operations unit as a psycho-scenarist of criminal rôle-play for lectures in state espionage.
Major Vivian X: Intelligence officer and undercover operative in ‘Paddyland’.
Off-site deep-cover operatives.
(From Inducement and A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men)
Edward Faucon: manages a ‘shop window’, the Faucon Detective Agency, a bureau for commercial surveillance operations under a cloak of legitimacy.
Verity Y: Successful divorce lawyer, working as a ‘talent spotter’ in the recruitment and vetting of potential intelligence operatives.
See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
Hostiles
(From Red Coffee)General Yegor Bolkashin: ex-Chief of Intelligence, semi-retired career intelligence officer in the Soviet military security service; chairs the powerful, post-separatist Land Utilisation Policy Commission whose delegates pull the strings of puppet states still in thrall to Soviet centralism; founder of his Institute for Security Affairs.
Konrad W: operates his own press agency in Warsaw – Biuro K – and exchanges communiqués with Yegor’s outfit in the neighbouring republic.
Stefan Mikhailovich Kazimirov: Intelligence officer with diplomatic cover as a geologist; sub-section chief at his trade mission attached to the Russian Embassy in London.
Classified Operatives – Access Denied (Highest Level SC accreditation required)
(From Red Coffee and Turnaround and A Room to the End of Fall and Inducement and The Cheated Eye and Listen Close to Me)
Irina P: Rôle classified.
Frieda Tace: Rôle classified.
Dr. Walther T. Reindorf: Rôle classified.
Anneliese Hildegard Wintermann: Rôle classified.
Constance Bryde: Rôle classified.
Nadezhda Stepanovna Cheremisovna: Rôle classified.
Professor ‘Pappi’ and his nephew Vernon: Associate Lecturer in Cognitive Robotics in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Applied Neural Computation, and wunderkind astrophysicist/roboticist, respectively; both non-regular Stoneburghians. Rôles classified.
Lost in Translation . . . the Desire for Union.
Irina P is not alone in permitting me to share a number of Stoneburgh’s intelligence insights revealed in despatches from prescient informants, often at great personal risk. As long ago as 2004 I related the conclusions of another Stoneburgh insider (see Elegy from a Locked Drawer): ‘Espionage specialists and security experts have known for almost a century that police bureaux in communist bloc countries have penetrated international academia by deploying suborned academics, awarded spurious honorifics and doctorates, to provide their political masters with local intelligence concerning the underground activities of émigrés around the world.’Any overtures to establish closer ties with the West are so often subverted by the ‘placemen’ and ‘placewomen’ Professor Weissener identifies in his seminal monograph, Red Whitewash. It’s pretty evident that Stefan Kazimirov (Inducement) was not the geologist he claimed to be. More than this, is it not curious that Stefan’s London address was Chesterfield House, Mayfair W1, just a stone’s throw from MI5 operatives’ quarters in South Audley Street? Did Stefan follow the first rule of concealment? He Who Wants to Hide a Leaf should put it in a forest.
No. Our differences are irreconcilable, if Irina P is to be believed,
(The Custodian-Marshall gave Irina P licence to explore the stacks at Stoneburgh’s extensive library.) On the shelves labelled ‘Anthropometry’ she found an early monograph on Slavonians. ‘The tribe of Slavons is characterised by darker hair and eyes than the Saxon.’ There was an engraving of a house set far apart from others. ‘An Anglo-Saxon, if possible, always stands detached.’
Even a well intentioned olive branch can be misconstrued. Irina P laconically once noted a passage in her copy of Varieties of Topical Interpretation by I. S. Slovenko (Moscow 1993): ‘A false transcription by an interpreter rendered President Carter’s words on his arrival in Poland, in 1978, as “I desire the Poles carnally.” ’
Maxie’s . . . Come Again Soon!
Yes. Our best diplomatic endeavours can be so very easily lost in translation. A thought not unconnected with the fact that those two Russian interpreters of my acquaintance, Irina P and Nadezhda Cheremisovna, may well have successfully deceived with ease their assigned intelligence targets but in their own amours they are as likely as any lovelorn temptress to deceive themselves. Curiously, I notice only now in these reflections that, significantly, the nexus of their assignations was Maxie’s cocktail bar, Knightsbridge – the works canteen for certain active hostiles – just a short constitutional stroll from the Russian embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens . . . and their love potion du jour? Fact. Honey Dew Screwdrivers. Vodka, Orange Juice and Melon Liqueur.As the exhortation on Maxie’s bar check reminds us: Come Again Soon. So maybe, if we remain vigilant at this intriguing watering-hole – who knows? – before very long we’ll encounter these femmes fatales once more. If not, be assured, the cocktails are delightfully inventive.
For Part 2 of the Stoneburgh Files (the instructive text for probationer agents, Turnaround) see http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and for Part 3, which reacquaints us with the criminological theories of Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes.
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
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