The Spies of Warsaw
By Alan Furst
Random House, 2008

Moscow Rules
By Daniel Silva
Putnam, 2008

Reviews By Ronald Goldfarb

Alan Furst is the master of moody, undercover intrigue that defines the period leading up to the start of World War II. This was a time of fear and desperation, when Rick and Ilsa fell in love but had to flee Paris, when “smart people understood that their first loyalty was to themselves,” and when the national borders and interests of Eastern Europe were in dangerous play as a long and deadly night fell over the continent.

The Spies of Warsaw is the 10th of a series of historical novels by Furst set in this tense and dramatic era. Furst, describing his literary objective, said he intends for his political adventure stories to be a wedding of the spy novel and “the European existential novel … It’s all about victims, or people who are going to be victims, as well as people who are going to be heroes, and people who will turn out to be the worst villains imaginable.”

The Spies of Warsaw concerns a French diplomat, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, who is in love with Anna Szarbek, a French lawyer of Polish parentage, who is finding sanctuary for Russian spies about to be arrested and recruiting patriotic anti-Nazi German officials to go undercover. As with many of Furst’s novels, plot often is secondary, and the literary qualities of mood and setting and character and dialogue take precedence.

This story moves between Warsaw, where the hero is an attaché, and Paris, where his intelligence superiors work. There are intermittent public and clandestine visits in automobiles and trains to a myriad of towns throughout Czechoslovakia, Germany, Russia, and Switzerland. A secret agent, Herr Edvard Uhl, travels in private compartments and elegant dining cars, but stays in grimy, nondescript hotels, reading professional journals and Stendahl.

One sees and feels the foreboding locales: “Schramberg—town after town with signs forbidding Jews, swastika flags, uniformed men on every street. The symbols of power, raw power, the state transcendent.” Furst captures the ominous rise of the Nazis—thugs, not patriotic Germans—whose movement reflected “the raising up of a defeated nation, the return of pride, the end of poverty … a dreadful business … a bitter thing … the misery … that’s the proper word.” Furst has developed a reputation in his novels of drastically conveying a story of a confused, complex, dark, and dramatic time in European history.

The countries are in flux as a result of changing empires, changing allies, wars, and marriages “as the centuries slid[e] past.” Furst’s characters reflect the realpolitik of those times when Hitler’s philosophy was “the world wants to be deceived; therefore, let it be deceived.”

Sides change. Diplomats gather, dine gentlemanly, operate in “the formality of sworn enemies,” and exchange information in arch conversations. “We spend our lives waiting,” one colleague tells the diplomat who is drawn into bringing away intelligence sources and protecting friends who have fallen out of favor. Mercier, a decorated World War I veteran, tells Anna about his work: “Sip the wine, taste the food, find everyone fascinating—a good motto for diplomacy.” She replies, “I guess that’s one way to save the world.” Mercier counters, “Yes, one way. After the fish.” Amidst the tedium and dangers, their affair is furtive, sexy, adult, and existential, another hallmark of a Furst novel.

During this period, the European cauldron bubbles. The war in Spain goes the fascist way against the Republicans. Austria joins Germany in the Anschluss. Poland and Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, are in flux. As the Germans prepare to overrun the continent, they worry about the Russians. The Soviets are undergoing Stalin’s political upheaval, and the wartime preparations of France and Germany are playing out. The characters can only hope.

Furst’s stark characters have lived in a bad time and place, and they have developed compromised insights. “He’d grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding and prayed for those he’d lost, for those he loved, and for an end to evil in the world.”

Another book that follows this theme of intrigue and skullduggery between heroes and villains is Daniel Silva’s Moscow Rules, the eighth installment of his international spy series.

Silva, a District of Columbia-based writer, again shines in this masterful storytelling of intelligence and espionage reintroducing us to the series’ romantic and stolid hero, Gabriel Allon, as he embarks on yet another mission.

An art restorer who also is a reluctant but effective Israeli spy, Allon is regularly recruited by the Israeli undercover intelligence apparatus for various adventures. Each novel takes the reader through European cities where the plots play out. Each story includes remarkable descriptions of post-Holocaust history involving real subjects—the assassination of Israeli Olympic stars, art looted by Nazis during Word War II, the Vatican’s role in international intrigues, and Swiss banking schemes. Interestingly, these stories often touch on Allon’s special skills and first professional love, art restoration.

Silva says he tries “to catch history in the act,” and that he tried to duplicate that effort in Moscow Rules. “When Aleksander Litvinenko was murdered in London in 2006 with a lethal dose of polonium-210, I knew it was time for Gabriel Allon to go to Russia.” Silva also made it his mission to send his international leading man on adventures throughout the South of France, London, Israel, as well as to secret meetings with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and comparable intelligence managers for the United Kingdom and France.

Moscow Rules deals with Russia’s shadowy world of arms sales to terrorist organizations. Allon attempts to halt the sale of shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles to al-Qaeda by Russian business magnate Ivan Kharkov, a former KGB official who is now part of the new and deadly Russian ruling class of well-connected bandit-businessmen. When Russian journalists are killed attempting to warn Allon of the imminent illegal sales of deadly arms, the adventure begins.

Moscow Rules deals with a larger-than-life villain, similar to those who appear in Ian Fleming’s 007 stories. In this case, Silva’s villain is the creation of the modern era of Russian businessmen whose government-protected debauchery has led them to international scheming. His sale of superweapons to terrorist groups that endanger world powers and Israel is at the center of this story. A parallel story deals with the suppression of the press. Both plots mimic international events and crises that are relevant today.

Silva is a master of detail—names of places, people, wines—and his expertise about art and art restoration lend a distinctive flavor to all of his stories. One senses, too, that the author has taken pains to master the realpolitik operations of international intelligence, its workings and national idiosyncrasies. For example, at one point in the book, the United States CIA chief says to Allon:

Longtime fans of Silva’s series will enjoy Allon’s dealings with some of the favorite characters in this series: his mentor, the curmudgeonly legend of Israeli intelligence operations, Ari Shamron, along with the CIA’s cool and dapper veteran, Adrian Carter, and his conventional British counterpart, Graham Seymour. Other familiar specialty players from Israeli intelligence make an appearance as well. Although references are made to incidents and characters from prior books in the series, particularly Allon’s love interests and family, first-time readers of Silva should have an easy time grasping the story. For those longtime fans who can’t get enough of Silva’s novels, the ending, in a typical Perils-of-Pauline fashion, suggests there will be further adventures.

Although this is not the best book in the Allon series, the international espionage and intrigue make for a compelling story, drawing in the reader. Luckily for the longtime fans, Silva has included most of the charm they have come to expect and enjoy over the years. In short, Moscow Rules doesn’t disappoint.

Ronald Goldfarb is a Washington, D.C., attorney, author, and literary agent whose reviews appear regularly in Washington Lawyer. Reach him at rglawlit@aol.com.

Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America
By Jennifer J. Baker
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005

Review By James Srodes

There seems to be a pervasive feeling that something has gone wrong with the American economy, and that its most visible reflection, the once almighty dollar, is suddenly suspect.

Consider that December 2002 was the last time the dollar and the euro shared an equal parity in the exchange markets. The price of a barrel of oil at that time was about $25. Since then, the price of oil in Europe has risen past 75 euros per barrel, while the dollar price approaches twice that. When a seller demands five or six times what was once charged for a product, it means the buyer’s medium of payment is in real trouble.

In Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America, University of Pennsylvania scholar Jennifer J. Baker makes the point that all money is a matter of trust. Gold and silver, which often mistakenly are referred to as “hard money” or “specie,” are just as subject to the vagaries of reputation, speculation, and devaluation as paper, or “fiat,” currency. Instead of the cumbersome system of bartering corn for candles, money enables us all to exchange today’s labor for tomorrow’s consumption—provided we trust the medium that makes the exchange possible.

In Securing the Commonwealth, Baker’s lesson is that America would never have become more than a collection of failed colonial ventures battened onto the shores of the Atlantic had it not been for the willingness—no, eagerness—of the colonists to go into debt and then issue paper currency to service that debt almost from the get-go.

The same applies to our later struggle for independence from the British home country’s rapacious mercantilism. Had we not borrowed way beyond the bounds of prudence to finance the American Revolutionary War, we still would have the silhouette of Queen Elizabeth II on our stamps.

What is so timely about this book is its reminder that when successive presidents and congressional leaders spend more than they collect in taxes, and when the central bank cranks out more paper money to cover the shortfall, the real victims are the people who must raise the question, Can we still trust in our economic system and the broader relations of a society? Credibility is what suffers, and devalued money is a surtax we pay for our doubts.

Baker’s story starts with the entire colonial relationship between North America and Mother Britain, and how it is something of a sucker’s game. The colonies were founded to supply the raw materials needed by English manufacturers. However, those commodities almost always commanded less revenue than the English charged for the luxury and necessary products that were sold back to the colonists. To add to that burden, Britain demanded that this trade imbalance, plus other tax levies, be paid in hard money to the point there often was no gold or silver coinage to be had at all in some colonies. Virginia, for example, was so strapped for coins that it was reduced to using bills of credit denominated in tobacco—a retreat into a kind of barter.

America’s experiment with public debt began in 1690 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony found itself owing more to soldiers and military suppliers for several failed campaigns against French and Indian raiders than its tax revenues could cover. Paper currency in the form of bills of credit was issued directly to the soldiers and suppliers, but immediately there were doubts that this medium of payment would be accepted as legal tender in dealings with other citizens.

William Phipps was a semiliterate adventurer who had discovered a sunken Spanish ship with more than 40,000 pounds in newly struck gold and silver coinage, worth the unheard of sum of 300,000 pounds sterling in London. While the share accorded Phipps was a fraction of that, he boldly stepped up and bought a large enough batch of the paper currency to guarantee its acceptance by the general public. He was made governor of the colony as his reward.

The injection of new liquidity into the colony’s economy had an instant effect and was applauded by even the most Puritanical of leaders. Cotton Mather, a noted Puritan minister and pamphleteer, praised paper money and the debt it relied upon as a vehicle for bringing citizens together in a community interest that rested, after all, on its faith in one another.

The real father of American paper currency and public debt has to be Benjamin Franklin. In 1729, at the age of 23, Franklin penned A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, an essay that rivals the works of prolific economist John Maynard Keynes for the clarity of its argument in favor of carefully managed public debt as a wholesome way of expanding economic growth. So persuasive was the piece it overcame the opposition of the colony’s proprietors and the Quaker elite, and it led to the issuance of bills of credit tied to mortgages that were owed to the colony for land grants in the amount of 35,000 pounds over two years. The expanded liquidity not only boosted the value of the land involved, it sparked an immediate surge in Pennsylvania’s overall economy.

Although Franklin used the voice of Poor Richard to advise colonists, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” he also was an active borrower himself from an early age. In his tome, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, he recounts the difficult lessons that come from not being able to repay debts in a timely manner.

In the long run, Franklin did learn those lessons and became a model of credit probity as an individual. Baker underscores this by arguing that, as with Phipps, it was Franklin’s later credibility as a public citizen that made the early debt issues acceptable as currency. This was due, in part, to the fact Franklin produced on his presses the currency, which was so cleverly designed to be virtually counterfeit-proof, for several of the colonies.

In every public utterance he made in favor of debt issues, Franklin stressed that such public borrowings had to be carefully managed and ultimately rooted in a sense of security that those who accepted the currency would ultimately see it redeemed at full value.

Franklin’s real test came during the War of Independence when Congress and the 13 separate states made public borrowings worth a staggering $340 million to pay suppliers and soldiers with certificates that might, or might not, be worthless when they came due. While in Paris where he was trying to borrow millions more from the French, Dutch, and Spanish, Franklin constantly hectored Congress, back in Philadelphia, against devaluing both the currency and the reputation of the new nation.

And so it has gone. Many of the greatest crises in our history happened when our money became suspect. In 1786 Shays’ Rebellion saw veterans take up arms to prevent being taxed on the very pay certificates they had been forced to sell at cut-rate prices, but which were later to be redeemed at full value for the speculators (such as Abigail Adams) who had bought them on the cheap. The early battles over national banking, Abraham Lincoln’s greenback dollars, William Jennings Bryan and bimetallism, and, indeed, the creation of the Federal Reserve System itself focused on the question of citizens trusting their money.

This interesting book is Ben Franklin’s exhortation to Federal Reserve Board chair Ben Bernanke: when money is devalued, everyone loses.

James Srodes is the former Washington bureau chief of both Forbes and Financial World magazines. His latest book is Franklin: The Essential Founding Father (Regnery).

In the Ring: The Trials of A Washington Lawyer
By Robert S. Bennett
Crown, 2008

Review By Steven J. Stauffer

As I read In the Ring: The Trials of A Washington Lawyer on the train, bus, and subway, a number of people asked about it, and all but one confused Robert Bennett with his brother, William, a man The New York Times calls the “leading spokesman of the Traditional Values wing of the Republican Party.”

Even the author mentions the tendency many people have to confuse him with his famous brother, relating a tale about a lady who approached him in an airport, saying “Mr. Bennett, I love you; I think you’re a great American, but tell me, how can your brother represent President Clinton?”

Bob Bennett’s sense of humor, one of the high points of this book, is on display in his answer: “Ma’am, you really have to get to know Bob. He’s really a great guy!”

Younger brother Bill, a conservative icon who has held several posts in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations (head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, secretary of Education, and drug czar), is probably best known as an author himself. For those readers seeking amusing anecdotes about growing up as the big brother of the author of such ponderous, pompously titled tomes as The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories and The Moral Compass: Stories For A Life’s Journey, there are a few morsels in this book that should titillate. There’s the startling revelation that, in the 1960s, the future right-wing radio host had to be talked out of joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a leftist activist movement whose leadership included renowned social and political advocate Tom Hayden. And how about the fact that Drug Czar Bennett briefly dated Janis Joplin?

Famous brother aside, while Bob Bennett owes most of his name recognition to his defense of Clinton in the Paula Jones case, he also has been involved in several other high-profile legal proceedings. He was appointed special counsel in the Senate Ethics Committee investigation of the Keating Five, where five U.S. senators were accused of corruption; assisted the government of the Republic of Georgia in its diplomatic immunity dispute with the United States; and served on the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People, assisting the Catholic Church in its sexual abuse scandal. Bennett has defended former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the Iran-Contra affair; Washington legal legend Clark Clifford in the Bank of Credit and Commercial International scandal; former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, who was accused of making inappropriate personnel moves regarding his “girlfriend;” and the controversial owner of the Cincinnati Reds, Marge Schott, to name just a few.

In the Ring has its share of insider tidbits and celebrity gossip that drive the sales of these sorts of books. Bennett tells us how insiders worried that Kenneth Starr, who had been passed over for the Supreme Court, saw the Clinton investigation as a way to bolster his chances for a future nomination. Bennett also details how, at a posh Georgetown dinner party early in the current administration, he joked with Dick Cheney that the administration was bad for the defense lawyer’s business because it had, up to that point, been scandal free. “It’s just a matter of time,” Cheney told him.

Another example of Bennett’s sense of humor comes in an anecdote about the time he and Greta Van Susteren shared a car from the airport—a car so small the Fox News Channel commentator had to sit on his lap. When reporters spotted them disentangling, Bennett quipped, “Honey, do you have the toothpaste?”

Although Bennett’s decision to represent Clinton, despite the latter’s vilification by brother Bill and his political bedfellows, could be seen as an act of political courage, the book suggests it would probably be a mistake to take that as a statement of his political sympathies. Among the figures who come in for high praise are Weinberger, Wolfowitz, Arizona Senator John McCain, Enron chair and Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lay, and former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who Bennett lauds as “a straight arrow” who scrupulously put the interests of the Senate above his own and those of his fellow Republicans.

Among the things that detracted from my enjoyment of this book were a tendency toward almost child-like hero worship and an emphasis on physical appearance, which at times seems to be equated with an impressive mind and an immaculate soul. Time and again, the author launches into lavish praise of an individual, followed immediately by a description of his or her appearance, as though that were all the supporting data required. Rendered in breathless tabloid style, it can quickly become unpalatable, almost a parody of celebrity fawner Robin Leach. Examples at random are Bennett’s descriptions of both then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who subsequently became the pontiff, and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze. Bennett begins by saying “you knew you were in the presence of a very special person” upon meeting the future Pope, and he immediately follows that assertion with a gushing reference to the current pontiff’s “striking physical features,” including his “beautiful white hair.” He uses almost the exact same phrases to describe Shevardnadze.

When Bennett is discussing his defense of Reds owner Schott before Major League Baseball, he describes the members of baseball’s executive council as “powerful and mostly elegant,” as though that were an important point of the comparison to Schott, who comes off as a victim in this treatment, as does virtually every defendant Bennett represents.

Also of note are assertions rendered with the wide-eyed innocence of a schoolboy rather than the views of an experienced trial attorney, such as the suggestion that passing a polygraph should be accepted by a prosecutor as proof that someone is not guilty. When made to support the “fact” that Weinberger could not have been guilty of perjury, it comes off as not so much naïveté as naked political calculation, especially when he makes the admission the ploy was really about convincing a gullible public, rather than the special prosecutor, of Weinberger’s innocence.

Bennett seems to have an almost obsessive need to convince himself and, secondarily his readers, that his clients are not only not guilty and that their actions are in no way reprehensible, but that they are innocent victims, often sterling examples of morality and forthrightness. In so overreaching, his position seems disingenuous. One example is his suggestion that the federal guidelines that allow the prosecution of corporations for wrongdoing are unfair. In discussing his involvement in the Enron case, he suggests that corporations such as Arthur Andersen were victims “with fewer rights than most individuals,” and he somehow never manages to mention the obvious rejoinder—that corporations in recent decades have been accorded many “rights” that individuals do not have, while our Constitution actually assigns corporations none whatsoever.

At the end of chapter 12 titled “Marge the Scapegoat,” Bennett reveals in a telling passage that Schott “brought out in me the need to protect her,” going on to explain that “representing the underdog always satisfies some unexplained need that I have.”

What he fails to explain, however, is how Schott, in her “47-room mansion on a seventy-acre estate,” fits the description of underdog, much less a scapegoat. In defense of Schott, who was criticized for regularly making egregious racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic comments, some of them well documented, he dismisses concerns about the remarks as “political correctness” and paraphrases the “everybody does it” defense. He even digs out the tired old chestnut that she has “many African American and Jewish friends,” as if that were relevant.

Elsewhere, Bennett mentions his need to feel he is “wearing the white hat.”

In discussing his 9–0 defeat before the Supreme Court in an attempt to have Clinton’s trial put off until after the end of his presidential term, he also reveals a bit about what motivates him: “It is the personalization of the process, the total identification with the client—a client’s loss is your loss—that makes the best trial lawyers what they are,” he says. “If you ever hire a lawyer who doesn’t feel this way, go to someone else.” It’s good advice, but it only works for those with a lot of money to spend. The average client cannot afford a lawyer who has the leisure to devote that much time and emotional energy to every case.

Another thread woven throughout the book is a familiar, predictable carping of the sort indulged in by politicians who see value in media bashing. When discussing almost any case that garnered significant public attention, Bennett paints the media as out of control. In fact, the only deviation from this formula is for—you guessed it—his clients or friends. In the case of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, he seems to have decided that, as his client, she must be above reproach despite being a member of the press, which he accuses elsewhere of “insanity.” It’s an interesting place to change course, considering that Miller’s Iraq coverage generally was seen as an example of reporting only one side of a story based on demonstrably false information spoon-fed to her by the Bush administration, rather than old-fashioned unbiased investigative reporting.

Contradicting his constant admonition to all lawyers to “keep it simple” when defending a client, Bennett says, in an attempt to convince readers that Miller is being mistreated, that “facts are often complex and nuanced.”

Overall, while the book has a generous share of amusing anecdotes that make it an interesting read, it doesn’t rise to the level of the great memoirs by fellow trial attorneys such as Johnnie Cochran, William Kunstler, and Gerry Spence. Pity, it could have if Bennett had not been so addicted to the white hat.

Steven J. Stauffer is a D.C. Bar staff writer.