Charles McCarry, The Mulberry Bush
Mysterious Press
Charles McCarry’s well regarded spy
fiction is noted for the clarity and assurance with which he depicts not only
the spy trade but also the them-or-us oppositions of historical and cold-war espionage (not
for him the gray areas of LeCarre’s maze of spies and counter-spies). But his
new stand-alone The Mulberry Bush
(not a part of the multi-generational saga of must of his spy fiction) starts in full post-Cold-War
mode, with the unnamed narrator and central character cultivating a spy in
Argentina who is providing useless information about long-retired
revolutionaries. But almost immediately the story shifts into another mode, one
that has less in common with the range of current spy fiction and more in common
with one of the classics of American intelligence, Roger Hall’s World
War II era memoir You’re Stepping on My
Cloak and Dagger. McCarry
has drawn a portrait of the training of intelligence agents that I recognize
from my own very brief and totally undistinguished experience in counterintelligence:
not since You’re Stepping on My Cloak and
Dagger has anyone so deftly portrahed the blend of the ridiculous, the
momentous, and the self-obsessed that characterize the training and conduct of
spycraft.
Hall’s 1957 memoir covers the final
years of the World War II era OSS. The book, out of print for a number of years
but brought back into the light of day a few years ago by the Naval Institute Press,
has been widely read among CIA employees and was (when I was there) the
most-circulated book in the library of the Army intelligence school. McCarry’s
book shares with Hall’s a smart-ass narrative voice that is frequently comic
but self-centered to an extent that the reader is wise not to take anything he
says totally at face value. The narrators also share an ostentatious false
modesty about their athletic abilities as well as a less than total dedication to the intelligence agency for
which each works. Hall is simply not a professional spy. He ended up in the OSS
for the same reason I ended up in Army Intelligence: it was a less unattractive
option than alternatives like infantry. McCarry's unnamed narrator, though, has
a more serious motive for becoming a spy. He wants to destroy the (also
unnamed) agency that humiliated and expelled his father, who discredited
himself as a spy by indulging in pranks that are very like the ones that Roger
Hall gleefully remembers from his own career.
After his recruitment and training, the narrator spends five
years in the field, as a special operations agent (that is to say, he's
arranging assasinations rather than cultivating spies), but when it becomes
obvious that his cover has been compromised he returns to Washington. Once
there, he has little to do, beyond studying Russian (with an eye toward future
assignments) and look for his estranged father. After a single encounter,
before his father's death, he begins to plot a revenge on the unnamed
institution that had betrayed him, in particular the Agency’s Headquarters staff.
He finds the ammunition for his revenge plot in the very attractive Argentinian
spy that we met in the opening pages, Luz Aguilar, who he thinks will lead
him to the radical associates of her “disappeared” parents who may still be in
contact with Russian intelligence agencies that, in the days of the Soviet
Union, were the major support of left-wing movements throughout Latin America.
Having accomplished his goal of insinuating himself first
with the Argentine left and thene with the Russians, the narrator shuttles back
and forth among clandestine meetings in the major cities of Europe and South
America, including Buenos Aires, Helsinki, Berlin, Bogotá, and Bucharest, but
the city hs evokes most concretely is Washington DC (one of his clandestine
meetings occurs outside a café I can see from my office window). This is not
the Washington of high politics, but of the mundane life that can be so easily
exploited as cover for the movements and actions of spies of all stripes.
If the story of The
Mulberry Bush sounds complicated, it is. The narrator needs the assistance
of Luz (who burns with her own heat of revenge), his handlers at the Agency
(Tom Terhune and Amzi Strange, old hands implicated in his father’s failure), Luz's
foster father Diego, a Russian spy named Boris (among other agents on all sides
of the post-Cold-War map), and others. All in aid of a complex effort to
discredit the Agency by means of the false defection of Boris (who may already
in fact be an American “asset”). The book's plot is circular, rather than
linear (as the title’s reference to a child’s song/game suggests: both the spy
trade and the narrator’s revenge plot are enlessly circling games with no end
point. Second, there's no such thing as a mulberry "bush," the
mulberry is a tree; nothing here is what it claims to be. The narrator continues
chasing the ghosts of his own father’s life in a tightening spiral that leads
to a violent ending, echoing the fate of Luz’s parents and offering a final
glimpse of what the narrator calls a “worldwide fellowship” of trators lying
behind everything that has happened. All of the complexities leading up to this
ending are deftly kept under control by the narrator’s clever and personable
voice (not unlike Roger Hall’s), as if he were sitting next to you relating
over dinner his jaundiced but entertaining vision of the world we live in and
the intelligence agencies that use their intricate tradecraft to exploit our
hopes and fears.
