The late Daniel Cameron served as an undercover CIA officer at a remote post in Indonesia in the early 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, when Sukarno was playing off the Chinese, Soviets, and the Americans, leading to the fateful and tragic events of 1965.
Cameron describes these events, including his and a fellow Dutchman’s incredible espionage coup, stealing designs of Soviet missiles, saving hundreds if American pilots’ lives during the Vietnam War. Cameron’s memoir reads like a spy thriller, and he expertly captures the excitement, mood, authenticity, and sense of place, similar to the writings of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham in describing Asia.
Cameron writes beautfully, and his sense of realism makes one feel as if the reader is there, feeling the tension, humidity, heat, and smells of Surabaya and Jakarta.
In Red Weather tells the story of Dan Cameron, an ex-CIA agent and one of the last living insiders who witnessed the events that culminated in the alleged communist coup in Indonesia in 1965. The coup was the pecursor to the brutal transition that ended the advance of communisim in Southeast Asia and allowed the establishment of Suharto's New Order Government. Cameron landed as an idealistic but naive young spy in Surabaya in 1960. His greatest success was Operation Habrink in which, through hard work, persistence and sheer good luck, he was able to secure the top-secret opearting manuals for…
James Church is the pseudonym of a former intelligence officer, who specialized in North Korea.
His many mysteries (as well as articles published in 38 North), involving a laconic, solitary, but brilliant North Korean investigator (Inspector O), expertly capture North Korea’s sense of danger, menace, and survival – but also humanity – in a totalitarian world, where a wrong action or word can have devastating consequences.
In this, his first novel, the author explores a series of unusual events and cold cases, drawing Inspector O into investigations, espionage, and danger in a world where nothing is as it appears on the surface. In an early chapter, an intelligence officer interrogates Inspector O, telling him, “Just a nice narrative, a bedtime story.
Clean and simple. I don’t need anything too Oriental.” But Church’s novel is intricate and full of ambiguity – nothing is clean or simple.
Sit on a quiet hillside at dawn among the wildflowers; take a picture of a car coming up a deserted highway from the south. Simple orders for Inspector O, until he realizes they have led him far, far off his department's turf and into a maelstrom of betrayal and death. North Korea's leaders are desperate to hunt down and eliminate anyone who knows too much about a series of decades-old kidnappings and murders - and Inspector O discovers too late he has been sent into the chaos.This is a world where nothing works as it should, where the crimes of…
Brookes is an expert on China, who has written 3 marvelous spy thrillers set therein.
Turning his attention to non-fiction, he tells the amazing tale of how a handful of brave men, led by Mai Heng, saved – during the 30s and 40s – the most priceless artifacts and artworks of Chinese civilization from the ravages of war. It is a tale of dedication, pluck, heroism, and later, tragedy.
Brookes writes masterfully, and weaves a tale of Chinese history, culture, and politics into his larger narrative. He brings the drama, personalities, and context of his key characters to life, or more fairly, larger than life. Brookes’ book is like a version of China meets The Monuments Men. A really masterful achievement!
The gripping true story of the bold and determined museum curators who saved the priceless treasures of China’s Forbidden City in the years leading up to World War II and beyond.
Spring 1933: The silent courtyards and palaces of Peking’s Forbidden City, for centuries the home of Chinese emperors, are tense with fear and expectation. Japan’s aircrafts drone overhead, its troops and tanks are only hours away. All-out war between China and Japan is coming, and the curators of the Forbidden City are faced with an impossible question: how will they protect the vast imperial art collections in their charge?…
The protagonist of this novel is Jong-un, a gifted violinist from North Korea, whose talents, peripatetic wanderings, and life experiences take him from North Korea to the former Yugoslavia, Austria, Russia, America, India, and South Korea. His passionate love affairs – with a high-ranking North Korean diplomat’s wife, as well as with a Korean American CIA officer, draw him into a web of espionage, tragedy, and lastly, conversion, as he embraces his faith in God and discovers himself and where he truly belongs. He finds himself at the center of a web of betrayals, with North Korean, South Korean, Russian, and American intelligence agencies, involved in double-dealing, murder, art theft, a hostage trade, and finally, his own defection.
