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Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.steamshovelpress.com/fromeditor.html">Con
Fiction</A>
-----
Con Fiction
by Kenn Thomas
Jim Hougan certainly has written the fiction novel of the season for
conspiracy readers. "A novel of conspiracy", Kingdom Come (Ballantine)
chronicles the predicament of Jack Dunphy, who sets up front companies and
laundering operations for the CIA until the brutal, ritualistic slaying of
one of his charges. Thereafter, the agency calls him back to the US from his
operation in England, yanking him from his babe of a girlfriend among other
indignities, does first-degree interrogation on him and reassigns him to far
less glamorous work.
"Determined to learn why," the press release offers--without ruining
the plot for potential readers--"[Dunphy] turns his veteran CIA spying
expertise on the agency that has turned against him. Gaining access to the
murdered man's life, he uncovers a trail of cryptic clues leading to
revelations of a CIA conspiracy too shocking to be true - and backed by
evidence too damning to be denied. But when someone close to him is killed,
Dunphy must run for his life, from Washington to Paris, Prague to London.
Pursued by CIA agents out for blood and a ruthless former client out for
vengeance, Dunphy uncovers the existence of a secret society whose origins
are ancient...and whose connections are global.
It's a page-turner alright, but works on levels far deeper than the
typical Robert Ludlum pot-boiler fantasy. Hougan has the same attention to
detail about international espionage, down to off-hand reference to Silk Cut
cigarettes from duty free shops, but also a background in the history of
parapolitics that gives the book an added dimension.
Names that should be known well to Steamshovel readers, such as Kerry
Thornley, Roscoe White, "Mr. Torbitt", even Fred Crisman, of Maury Island UFO
infamy, proliferate in Kingdom Come. They are the names of characters, not
the actual characters playing the roles, but evocative enough to draw on
parapolitical memory of the last thirty years.
The book opens, for instance, with the unlikely scenario of Major James
Jesus Angleton improbably parachuting in on Ezra Pound. It is perhaps the
best way to discuss this world, as fiction. Danny Casolaro had the same goal
in writing about The Octopus, a real transnational espionage cabal whose
activities he planned to fictionalize.In addition to a great work of spy
fiction, readers must decide how much actual truth Hougan has dropped into
the plot and character.
Hougan is an extraordinarily knowledgeable and accomplished
investigative researcher and writer. He wrote the definitive work on the
privatization of spookery--the Wackenhut phenom that also so fascinated
Casolaro--a book called Spooks. He also beat the Richard Nixon revisionists
to the punch with his 1984 book Secret Agenda, the first to disclose the
Watergate call-girl ring that figured so prominently in later scholarship and
discussion.
Hougan was among the earliest to suggest Alexander Haig as one part of
the "Deep Throat" character composite in the Watergate scandal. (Steamshovel
debris: In a recent TV tribute to Ronald Reagan, Haig concluded that
Ayatollah Khomeini released the American hostages in 1980 out of fear of the
administration replacing Carter. Not a word or reference to the October
Surprise deal that Reagan probably had with Khomeini.) Moreover, Hougan
planted the seeds of suspicion about Bob Woodward's military background and
other aspects of Watergate suggestive of military espionage and manipulation
in the scandal, a pattern that repeated in Bill Clinton's Lewinsky scandal.
So add Woodward to the list with Casolaro, Hougan, E. Howard Hunt and
some others, writing in genre that interfaces between fiction and reality. W.
B. Yeats called it "half-perceived/half created. " Kingdom Come, in fact,
opens with a quote from America's greatest writer of "fiction", Thomas
Pynchon: "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It is a genre
that follows various agendas, like keeping writers out of the courtroom and
the morgue.
Remember, in 1974 the CIA took Victor Marchetti to court for his
non-fiction expose of the agency, Cult of Intelligence, and got it censored.
The following year, Philip Agee got his passport revoked for publishing his
non-fiction book, Inside The Company. The Supreme Court allowed the CIA to
confiscate hundreds of thousands of royalty dollars from Frank Snepp for his
book, Decent Interval in 1977. So no wonder, the fictionalizing. It's not a
fool-proof method, though. Didn't work for Casolaro at all.
Kenn Thomas
Steamshovel Press
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