Review: Defending The Realm – MI5 and The Shayler Affair – by Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding

This is just another one of the many books I’ve read on the security services / spies / intelligence agencies in general. I guess I have a morbid fascination. Non-fiction throws up some pretty weird stuff – Life itself is a lot stranger than fiction. This tale from a turncoat ex MI5 employee David Shayler, comes from a time of great change in the world, Security Services in general and it interests me in particular as I was living down in London at that specific time and had what I believe to be my own brush with Shayler’s employers. It was at a time (in history) when people still bought and read daily newspapers and not just get all their news information off Donald Trump’s twitter feed. I can distinctly remember all the controversial headlines about the whole affair.

The book is written by some Daily Mail journalists, a sort of hive for some of the smelliest sort of flies that the tabloid journalist industry attracts so automatically I was on my guard as to the agenda and the sort of bias, provocation, and fascist ideology of the book. Also, let’s get one thing straight. David Shayler is not a hero like they might try to portray him as, he’s not even an anti-hero. He’s just a sort of bo standard below-average MI5 officer, a disgruntled employee, a whistleblower. He knows what he’s signed up to by applying for the job in the first place, by successfully passing the vetting and by being offered a position. I think the Official Secrets Act as much as anyone may find it repulsive and disagree with it is pretty clear and explicit in what it states. Basically Shayler is a criminal and this book is evidence of his crime. He’s broken the Official Secrets Act, he’s also clearly committed treason and although he perhaps lacks the glamour of those that have gone before him such a Kim Philby, he’s certainly nothing more than traitor scum acting against the interests of this country which is exactly what MI5 or their employees are not supposed to be doing. Mi5 is their to protect the nation and yes, the job is difficult but I think the outset that Shayler has failed totally to appreciate the patriotic element of the work. It may have changed since the cold War and be [perhaps a little more boring, but it will adapt like many other industries and indeed since the time of publication MI5 has adapted, facing a new enemy is Islamic terror and the end of the Cold War has proven only really to be a brief ceasefire as the Russians are now back on the scene added to which a growing threat from China makes MI5 an even more critiical organization in the contemporary (and future) world.

I hold the whole message that Shayler and the writers are trying to present as completely invalid and very easy to discount. Zero sympathy for him. Nobody should be reading his revelations. Yes maybe a private letter to the MI5 boss would have been OK. But selling your story to the Daily Mail and anyone else with a chequebook? At least Kim Philby was sort of driven by ideology and is therefore it’s much more easy to identify with him. Shayler just basically wanted a nice comfy hug payout so he didn’t have to worry about his mortgage. Selfish capitalist. Thatcherist, blinkered self-aggrandisement and totally free of ethics and morality. About as close as we get to James Bond his little escape to France where his greed catches up with him and he eventually gets raided and arrested by the French authorities He was probably given a nice comfie bed and a constant supply of fresh croissants out there, just in case and It wasn’t corruption or anything like injustice. He was a serious wanted criminal and that is what INTERPOL etc is set up to sort out. Cheered me up when he finally got to Belmarsh. I’m tempted to look up his wiki but to see where he is now but it will just annoy me further.

He’s an anonymous dot in a big blob and the secrecy of the work, yes it’s underpaid, difficult and the whole system and organization is frankly sh*t but so is everything else in #brokenbritain and has been for a long time. It’s reality. You don’t get to cut corners in life. Just a buy a lottery ticket like anyone else – I’m glad the sort of celebrity tabloid culture has removed a lot of power from the redtops with their lottery payout bribes to corrupt people and deliver huge sales. The British Press is by far the biggest threat to National Security we have. Greed and capitalism has turned them into the most sinister devious body of enemies ever produced on this island. They will stop at nothing to subvert Britain, the Commonwealth or the Empire. Just examining a tiny of fraction of Prince Harry’s valiant quest against them seeking justice is total proof of their treachery. Shame Murdoch didn’t holiday with Maxwell and the rest really as Davy Jones’ locker seems the best place for them all.

Well, looking directly at the book, Shayler claims MI5 cocked up IRA city of London attacks, He claims through word-of-mouth secondary information about an assassination plot by the British government on Colonel Gaddafi – Yes, well, Mr Shayler, Gadaffi (now dead of course), may have certain human rights etc but after Lockerbie he’s pretty much clear as an enemy of the British people and State. That’s who MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ are supposed to be targeting really. I was gutted that you didn’t take the offer by the Libyan intelligence service to clear off to Tripoli, would have made a much more exciting tale, one way or the other.

It’s no recruitment manual for MI5, further justification that the actual job is absolutely nothing at all like a James Bond film. The appendix 2 of Shayler’s recommendations for organizational change, probably the most boring tract of text I’ve ever read, but is great in clarifying just what a hideous corporate body of bureaucratic bungling the MI5 security service is. I can see why MI5 officers can be so deadly effective and dangerous if they are spending 23 and half hours chained up to a desk under a pile of paperwork and government forms then I guess that for the half hour allocated break where they get to do the glamorous work in high speed car chases, staking the State’s budget on roulette spins and copping off with foreign birds etc, they are going to be so angry and wound up and pissed off that they’ll pretty much take out all their frustrations on any target and cause serious destructive damage.

Some of the revelations were significant like how much financial wastage there is. An example is the £25 million spent on an amateur computer system that didn’t work and that they had to go out and buy an off the shelf version of Microsoft Windows 95 to sort out the IT in this critical department of National Security shows clearly that mismanagement is very possible and real.

I think that it does clarify the need for change and that there are serious inadequacies and probably worse than a standard government civil service department I think that we could maybe look to other countries and the way they handle their intelligence services. The CIA and Mossad, for example, are vastly different. In many ways they have more liberty and power and more open and more effective. Our secrecy laws are a bit archaic. There is most certainly a lack of balances and checks in place for our intelligence services that would limit abuses, enable necessary change and improve efficiency and productivity and better achieve the desired goal of national security. I think that for this country James Bond is quite a double-edged sword. Whereas on the one hand it is a very positive and successful (fictional) brand, I would argue it is the very epitome of global espionage propaganda achievement, par excellence. Equally it is quite old now and it must entangle the intelligence services in manacles really and be very frustrating. Deception works to a point but needs to be balanced a bit with reality, openness and honesty.

I think looking back that even though it was pretty damned boring, that Dame Stella Rimington, as head of MI5 who released a boo, that this book was actually a watershed moment and an historic change in methodology for MI5. Yes, Ok we end up with the sort of Shayler trash a s a result. But is signals that change is happening.

I feel like a nosey idiot myself for contributing to the obvious treason of Shayler et all by purchasing the book. But it is an interesting read and I think might, if used properly, be useful to enact change. It must be a very popular text out in the Kremlin in Moscow or Pyongyang or Beijing or the Afghan Cave complex. It demonstrates weakness to our enemies, possible exploits and perhaps encourages hostile attacks on out nation. But it’s subject an idiot who I highly doubt had much access at all to any form of high-level security information. Vetting system is broken obviously. What to do about it aside from the recommended changes – well, really push the death penalty for treason to properly discourage future Shaylers – Hanging, drawing and quartering must have a value aside from public entertainment. I discount most of the so-called scandal and I’m pretty confident that although there have been mishaps and errors that MI5 in fact do actually run an effective security service with regard to domestic issues. The lack of serious security incidents on British soil is testament to their work being efficient.

Review: Rights of Man – by Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine is an important writer at an important time that bequeaths us in his ‘Rights of Man’ a fundamental shakeup of what our democratic rights as citizens should be, drawing especially on the French Revolution and also American Revolution and the fundamental rights that their new revolutionary societies produced for their citizens. Paine delivers during the Enlightenment a wake up call to those in countries that are yet to adapt to revolutions, where traditional Royal power and political representation in not so clear democratic institutions abide. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his ‘Social Contract’ fanned the flames of the French Revolution of 1789 and his words rang in the ears of revolutionaries right down the the last blood spilt buy the Guillotine. It was a period of political pamphleteering and Paine was no stranger to this. He was in essence the Rousseau of the English-speaking world. The thinking behind his work and through other similar political philosophers of the Enlightenment was that the American and French revolutions were no anomalies and that they were just the precursor of more to come and that like dominoes, the Monarchies of Europe were destined to topple and follow suit, paving the way for more liberty and Bills of Rights and written constitutions that would empower the masses across the globe in the dawn of a new age. It is indeed quite bizarre that the predictions of Paine et al never actually materialised. Indeed one of his main target audiences, here in the U.K., has remained almost identical politically to the present with a dual chamber of elected representatives and hereditary peers behind an historical monarch as head of state. Paine explores the rights for citizens as laid out by the French and also details the new American constitution and what it means to the general citizen. The points he makes and the evidence truly is eye-opening and remarkable and it does seem appealing. He directly contrasts the new legal rights in these revolutionary societies with the lack of actual rights we have in places like Britain. Paine elucidates a very powerful argument against hereditary political empowerment, reaching up to the King or Queen themselves. He often attacks his rival Edmund Burke who in his own literary offerings, is critical of both revolutions and defends the merits of the British system. Indeed his obsession with Mr Burke somewhat detracts from some of the points about the Rights of Man that Paine is attempting to transmit. When weighed up it isn’t as crystal clear as an obviously biased Pain might suggest and indeed he, is his complete acceptance and as

 a disciple of the new systems, almost suffered some of the more bloodies and brutal aspects of the new revolutionary societies as he only escaped being guillotined in Paris by the skin of his teeth during the height of The Terror. I am surprised that Paine managed to write this in the first place at such a tumultuous period of history. Indeed in his native Britain his work must have been viewed by the authorities with treasonous contempt.  It is a controversial and powerful book to readers today and I can see why it is celebrated as a cornerstone work for human rights and politics. I dread to think just how controversial and revolutionary it must have been to the many readers of the ‘Rights of Man’ during the period from whence it sprung.

Review: The Origins of Totalitariansm – by Hannah Arendt

This book is quite old, first published in 1951, it dates from a period when the totalitarian reality of Hitler and Stalin were very much fresh in the mind. Hannah Arendt was a German Jew and this work is both philosophical, enlightening and gives a valuable educated insight into the dark political reality of totalitarianism. It’s a relatively modern political phenomenon and the in depth analysis of the German Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler in addition to the Communist Soviet regime under Josef Stalin demonstrates how totalitarianism can come from the political extreme of either side of the left-right axis of politics.

The first part of the book looks at the origins of anti-semitism. This was a focus of the rise of the totalitarianist states under both Hitler and Stalin, with both leaders showing similar anti-Jew tendencies, Hitler going to the extreme measures of the Holocauust which killed 6 million Jews during World War 2 and indeed his whole philiosophy, rooted in Mein Kempf was aimed at the total destruction of the Jewish Race. Arendt as a Jew   does not give a based one way account of anti-semitism. It is such a controversial thing, a bête-noire to this day with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot just recent examples of modern British politicians flagged for it. Arendt, surprisingly, gives a 50-50 reasoned account of its origins, blaming not just the extreme racist political drives to promote it, but looking at the Jews themselves and allocating some of the blame for anti-semitism with them. The failure to adapt to mainstream societies and to remain a state within a state and also very markedly she decries the role of court Jew that was so prominent in European aristocratic circles to have been a major factor in provoking the anger of the likes of Hitler who in Mein Kampf made a targeted attack on the Jews of Vienna.  

The second part of the book looks at Imperialism and the rise of nationalism in the European Nation States and a general shift in politics. This paves the way for the later emergence of Hitler and Stalin to live out the realities of the inevitable totalitarian extremism that all along was at the end of the pathway that was being carefully paved out for them to step into.

On to Part 3 where we have a detailed analysis of both Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Communist Soviet Union with Stalin as dictator. Totalitarianism transcends the mere extreme Fascist politics of other dictators that one might have thought would enter into the category. General Franco or Benito Mussolini were fascists aligned with the far right Nazis but there whole societies still maintained certain elements of democracy and therefore they do not slip into the category of totalitarianIsm proper. Also, Post Revolution Russia, under Lenin, was not as extreme and centred around a one man dictatorship that the extremes of Josef Stalin brought to the table in the Kremlin.

The characteristics of totalitarianism involve a deep web of deceit and propaganda and the truth is constantly subject to change. Control by the State of every aspect of the individual in private, public life is total. Any form of dissidence meets with the most brutal of punishment. All is at the whim of the absolute leader without whom the whole of the state and society cannot survive. It’s extreme insanity and it seems unbelievable how it manifested into reality but the truth is there for all to see in the history books. Indeed one could argue that since Arendt we have seen more totalitarianism in the Communist China and North Korea, one could argue that Boris Johnson’ Britain has many totalitarian characteristics.

The ultimate tool of the totalitarian dictators was the concentration camps under Hitler and the Gulag under Stalin. These are discussed and are obviously horrific. Also, both dictators weren’t averse top meting out capital punishment to any sign of internal or external enemies. Purges and liquidations feature as a core part of totalitarian societies.

Orwell has been one of the most significant authors to have famously demonstrated totalitarianism. The likes of “Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ are cornerstones of modern  literature. But they are works of fiction. What Arendt achieves is an academic study of the realities of totalitarianism as it has manifested in recent twentieth century history. She looks at the facts on the ground, the reality, rather than a dystopia from the imagination. The stark reality of totalitarianism is far worse than any  author can imagine.

I’ve had a 26 year war against the British State, being a victim of the Mental Health Act 1983 and a revolving door patient within State Psychiatric hospitals with the local NHS being totally backed up by an excessively violent local police force. I feel that none of my democratic rights have been upheld. For years I have wondered about whether or not a text exists that can explain the deep feelings that I have, knowing the extreme feeling of injustice, absolute helplessness and an often invasive imprisonment in horrific surroundings. Having discovered Arendt, I have now found this book – she puts into words that which I have experienced and her shocking academic study of totalitarianism is indeed a factual reality in the U.K. even if it is well hidden and may seem like a delusional claim.

“Their real secret, the concentration camps, those laboratories in the experiment of total domination, is shielded by the totalitarian regimes from the eyes of their own people as well as from all others.

            For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes. ‘Normal men don’t know that everything is possible’, refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the face of the monstruous, just as the mass men did not trust theirs in the face of a normal reality in which no place was left for them. The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far forward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the normal world. This common-sense disinclination to believe the monstruous is constantly strengthened by the totalitarian ruler himself, who makes sure that no reliable statistics, no controllable facts and figures are ever published, so that there are only subjective, uncontrollable, and unreliable reports about the places of the living dead.” (Arendt, H. 1951:571-2)

This book is genuinely one of the best literary works that I have ever studied and I will refer back to it. It is a dark subject but equally an important one and it is an important work and should be read widely as it provides the necessary warnings about the dangers that extreme politics can produce in our world.

Review: Red Horizons – The True Story of Nicolae & Elena Ceausescus’ Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption – by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa

I was just chatting away to Ionutz a security nurse in the local mental hospital and he’s Romanian. I passed through Bucharest a few years ago en route to Istanbul on a train journey traversing Eastern Europe. Romania seemed quite rural, poor and quite different to the Europe with which I am more acquainted. Curiosity and a quick Amazon search later and  I’ve got this rare gem of a book in my hands documenting the life of former Communist Dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena.

General Pacepa was the most high-ranking Eastern Bloc Communist official ever to defect during the Cold War so is an enigma in himself. From his final destination, in hiding in the USA, he delivered this brutal revelatory biographic diary of his life serving Romanian Communist Dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu. Ceausescu, with his equally flamboyant wife, Elena, had succeeded in setting up a hereditary Communist dictatorship in the Soviet satellite start of Romania. As a geographic outlier on the borders of the Iron Curtain with the democratic West, Ceausescu used his country’s position to ‘bridge the gap’ between East and West. He resisted domination from the Kremlin, while parading Romania as a model Communist economy that was open to doing business with the West, thus gaining favoured status as an economic trade partner with powerful Western technological superpowers such as the USA. His regime though, was very brutal and oppressive. Propaganda allowed for a portrayal of high living standards and decent human rights, but this was just a falsified portrait for Western consumption. The reality was that to the extent of comparability with the GDR East German Stasi,  Ceausescu succeeded in implementing a secret police directorate-driven paranoid surveillance state where every form of monitoring of almost the entire population in the form of bugged phone calls, informant networks, sexual blackmail, really left the Romanian people in a state of absolute totalitarianism. As head of the DIE, Romanian Foreign Intelligence, General Pacepa was an integral core potentate within the inner circle of the regime, acting pretty much as Ceausescu’s personal valet and being asked to do some pretty extreme and very weird things on behalf of the tyrannical, quite frankly insane, dictator despot and his even more eccentric excessive, out-of-control wife. I wonder about the actual bias inherent in such a task as this project due to the obvious political ramifications of such a scandalous publication. On the one hand the whistle-blower Pacepa is bound to have his own personal political agenda and let’s face it, his professional role made him very suitable for the dissemination of propaganda. Yet, on the other hand, the frank and ludicrous absurdity of the revelations about Ceausescu’s life within the text make sense as truth. Fact is often more deranged than fiction and some of these stories just lie outside the realm of the most fantasy-orientated author of fiction. Therefore I find most of what is written to be true, with a lack of other readily available information to counter the claims that have been made.

Ceausescu’s politics are pretty odd. Content with absolute power within his own communist party he is extremely ignorant and rude with regard to the advice of his ministers and even Pacepa. Power is totally concentrated at his own whim and he is left to explore his own paranoid idiosyncrasies with zero resistance. He loves getting stuck into foreign affairs and has a tendency of association with some pretty odd bedfellows: Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gadaffi, Carlos the Jackal are a few characters that appear in the book. He sees himself as a potential saviour of the Middle East and whereas he tries his best to avoid all oversight from Moscow centre, he is most capable in representing the Soviet Bloc in dealings with the West, providing a lot of really useful intelligence for the Warsaw Pact bloc. Indeed technical intelligence is a particular focus of the DIE, with a lot of Romanian espionage efforts focussed on the procuring of industrial and military technology secrets from the West that can be emulated in cheap Romanian manufactures. A lot of success is achieved in military equipment stolen from NATO such as tanks and also state of the art surveillance equipment. Ceaucescu travels a lot and his adventures in Washington on a state visit to Jimmy Carter is perhaps the highlight of the book. Ceausescu is so paranoid he will only eat his own food, prepared by his own chef with vast amounts of money spent on importing all his own food and expensive wine on any excursion at home or abroad. He is totally shocked by democratic protests in New York City against his regime and cannot seem to grasp how on earth these protests can take place. He really isn’t used to hearing dissident voices against his tyranny and it deeply traumatises him. Indeed one of his personal bugbears that runs throughout the book are the attacks made upon his rule by Radio Free Europe and he devotes a lot of time in attempting to eradicate this voice of democracy, an irritant to many Communist regimes. He is not afraid to order assassinations and the very fact he doles out work to the most notorious terrorist assassin, Carlos the Jackal, says it all. Elena’s story is one unto itself and whole book could really be devoted to her peccadillos which when it comes to diamonds and expensive Paris fashion would make even Marie-Antoinette seem normal. Pacepa is tasked with funnelling large amounts of Romanian foreign reserve into the hands of expensive boutique to stock up Elena’s extensive wardrobes. She also has a rather unhealthy fetish for watching pornographic movies, made by the security services, of illicit affairs of important Romanian government ministers, in order to create blackmail dossiers to either purge or totally control their loyalty to the dictator. The Ceausescu’s family are odd in the extreme. Preferred son, Nicu, really just an out and out drunken yob who, secure in his future inheritance is already planning ahead and Pacepa is often the mediator who has to dig him out of some pretty horrendous violent scrapes.

Unfortunately the book stops after Pacepa defects and there are a good few years of the regime left until its bitter end in 1989. It would have been nice to have seen this period documented in full also. Pacepa has a dreadful personal sacrifice to make in leaving his home nation as he cannot take his daughter with him. Ultimately we know the story of Ceausescu and his wife’s end. They were rare victims of violence in an otherwise surprisingly peaceful transition to democracy as the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s. Ceausescu and Elena were captured by an angry mob and after a brief show trial, were summarily executed by firing squad at Christmas in 1989. I think that this book would have fuelled the anger of the Romanian people towards their dictator and would have certainly served as kindling for the fire that destroyed them. Nicolae and Elena were more extreme than the most despotic Royal families of history and it is no real surprise that their lives were so brutally exterminated.   

Review: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Under the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev there was a post-Stalin easing of oppression emerging from the Kremlin and a Cold War ‘Victorian’ Ice Age thaw for writers allowed this remarkable, unique, little tale to unbelievably evade the censor and make it into the real world, even traversing the fixed barriers of the Iron Curtain. It was common, particularly during the purges of Uncle Joe, to send the masses off to gulags in Siberia. It didn’t take much of an excuse for the NKVD to send any form of dissident or suspected dissident on a long holiday to pretty much a concentration camp where forced labour and a strict military-controlled regime was used to assist in the growth and development of the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn openly admitted he had spent a long time out in the harsh icy Siberian environment, a gulag survivor, with a story to tell. ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ is the product of this internment. Although strictly a work of fiction, the book would not be possible without direct experience of life in the gulag. It’s tale which isn’t particularly long in length but in its minute detail of a day in the life of our political prisoner, Ivan, we get a real rare and accurate and quite disturbing account of the gulag, a system which was notorious in its terror propaganda value and this is a story which literally affected many many Russian citizens and their families as such vast numbers of people ended up being relocated to gulags, whether justly or more likely as innocent victims of the regime.

I read a lot of literature about sadistic internments and prison camps etc in wacky political extreme environments as I totally empathise with the stories of condemned political prisoners after my own 25 year career as an incarcerated mental patient in Wales, a prisoner of the government here in the United Kingdom. It’s dark material and often sad and disturbing but I find that I can relate a lot more in my daily life to Ivan Denisovich than I can perhaps relate to stories on the BBC News or in newspapers or chats in pub or coffee shop etc. Try a bit of gulag-living and it sure changes your outlook on life. The drudgery of Solzhenitsyn’s tale is only set over the course of a day. Most prisoners had at least ten years of day like this, some as many as 25 or more. The what, where and why you got there is immaterial really. The fact is you aren’t getting out. You are forced to live within your community and have to accept you fellow inmates and you are set against the strict discipline of quite brutal guards and are totally powerless to resist them, to think of escape or top hope for some miraculous form of justice arriving to end your misery. It’s keep your nose down, take joy in the littlest of pleasures available, don’t dream of hope, and crack on with your work. Yes, Ivan may have to stitch stale bread crusts into his dirty mattress but this treasure of nutrition will keep him alive in the dark winter days of permafrost. If one can scrounge and extra helping of watery cabbage soup through a bit of corruption and skulduggery then it is a bonus. The joy of seeing a bird or the emergence of a single sprig of a spring flower amidst the snow. Take pride in your work, work as a team, improvise and focus on anything that eases the slow, painful passing of incomprehensible time. The psychology of fellow inmates and the psychology of the omnipotent guard detail. Harsh punishments and death awaiting in every nook and cranny and corner of your existence. To survive the day is to survive the year and to survive the whole sentence.

This book is a unique story and one that must be told and it documents one of the darker elements of twentieth century history and the Cold War. It is testament to the author that it is in our hands in the West and in the modern world. Life is a struggle and sometimes in our decadent comfort we can fail to recognise that some people on this planet really do have a tough time of it and for all material niceties and life essentials we take for guaranteed it would do us no harm to learn from Ivan and to appreciate the simplest of things and joys in life and this is evolution and natural selection in its most brutal form.

Review: Red Notice – How I Became Putin’s No.1 Enemy – by Bill Browder

There is irony in this tale as Bill Browder was following in his grandfather’s footsteps in some ways but was also radically poles apart. Browder’s grandfather had stood for Presidential election in the USA on a Communist ticket. Bill Browder was drawn to business possibilities behind the Iron Curtain and in the post Cold War, post Soviet Union Russia, Browder’s Hermitage fund became the biggest foreign investor in Russia and also the fund, with at its peak over $1 billion in assets under its control, the best performing investment fund in the World. The start of his career was interesting. After good qualifications at Stanford University in the United States, Browder set himself up in the European financial capital of London, with a view to exploring trade in Eastern European markets, made possible by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Among early experience he worked for the notorious Robert Maxwell, shortly before his controversial yacht death just as a huge pension fraud Maxwell had been operating was being exposed and investigated. Despite this career blip, Browder went on to form his own fund, Hermitage Capital Management. He headed off to Moscow and with careful research began to take advantage of the huge available margins made in the wake of privatisation of former Soviet Industry. This was the age of emerging gangster oligarchs and widespread corruption. Browder, ever in a quest for justice and a moral code which rejects corruption began to flag the eyes of Russian potentates and in 2005 he was refused entry to Russia as Moscow airport and put back on the plane for repatriation in the U.K. Thus ends the high profit-yielding business honeymoon and the start of a quest to recover his money, keep his business afloat and expose the enemies and corruption that threatened his destruction. The whole saga spirals out of control and the Russian authorities launch a massively corrupt scheme involving police officers who tried stealing his businesses and ran a massive tax fraud amounting to about $230 million. The path led to the very top with Kremlin officials supporting every move against the Jewish American businessman. His Russian lawyer, an honest Russian gentleman by the name of Sergei Magnitsky becomes embroiled in situation and is thrown in jail and due to health complications, torture and refusal of necessary medical care, Magnitsky suffers a brutal early death in jail. Browder is deeply upset and affected by this and his role as venture capitalist businessman changes into human rights campaigner. Browder irks even the highest power in Russia and becomes the biggest public enemy of Vladimir Putin. The U.K. government were relatively unbothered in their assistance so Browder ends up campaigning with the US politicians and at the very highest level dealing with the likes of Senator John McCain, Senator John Kerry among other Washington players to take up the cause. Ultimately Browder flukes hi sway into getting President Obama to pass legislation called the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act which restricted and placed travel bans on all corrupt officials involved in the crimes and death of Browder’s lawyer and was part of a general move of sanctioning Russia and its excesses. In return Putin decided to punish sick Russian orphans by denying them access to adoptive American families. A bit sort of in tow with Vladimir’s current international reputation as a bit of an ogre…. The book is a whirlwind exploration of big business, exposes the realities of modern Russia and also in the wake of unbelievable corruption and human rights atrocities a sense of justice is achieved.

Review: In The Shadow of Papillon – Seven Years of Hell in Venezuela’s Prison System – by Frank Kane with John Tilsley

Frank Kane and his girlfriend, Sam, after their business was failing in the U.K. made the fateful decision to become cocaine drug couriers in Venezuela. Whilst attempting to fly out from the airport on Caribbean Island, Isla de Margarita, the airport authorities stopped and searched them and discovered the smuggled contraband which was a few kilos of locally-sourced cocaine. The story progresses on a downward spiral from here leading us on a gratuitous tour of depravity within the Venezuelan prison system, a place not known for its human rights record and this graphic description of the hell these two lovers face is an arduous journey of disturbing narrative. We meet a host of foreign prisoners and locals and come face to face with some quite unscrupulous prison officers and army soldiers. Initially unable to speak Spanish, Frank picks up the lingo and the book provides a lot of Spanish prison lang and an interesting glossary of jail terminology. Violence and murder is an almost daily occurrence and most prisoners are fully armed with knives, machetes, pistols, rifles, grenades and dynamite and the norm is out and out turf war between jail blocks. It’s hard getting a bed and dodgy dealing whether it be for crack cocaine or a simple cigarette is endemic. The couple are initially lucky to be housed within the same San Antonio Prison on Isla Margarita, where there is a separate female annex. They are visited by the British consul and Frank becomes more politically active in addressing some of the worst liberties taken by the brutal prison authorities. As time wears on Sam and Frank’s relationship and health deteriorate. Ultimately they go their separate ways. Every morning begins with número. The prisoners leave their cells and run the gauntlet of bayonet–toting guards to line up outside and Frank is quick to pick up Spanish language numbers or he’ll get a right beating. Stripped, laid on the ground, it’s a common sight in the prison yard. When the cry of ‘AGUA VERDE’ rings out from the watchmen, it means there’s been an incident and the prison gets stormed by Venezuelan Army soldiers who, in what is termed a raqueta, dish out unrestrained physical weaponised beatings and shootings of all the prisoners. It’s a dog eat dog world and you have to make alliances and watch your back. The title of the book refers to famous French prisoner Henri Charrière aka Papillon. Frank follows in his famous footsteps when he transferred to the remote El Dorado prison in the Venezuelan jungle on the mainland. Here. conditions are even worse and the battle for survival in open prison warfare is very intense. Ultimately Frank serves about 7 years before his release and his grateful repatriation. Despite the dark scenes of the book, there are some great characters in the story and some close friendship bonds are formed. It is a moving, fluent tale of prison literature and to any reader it warns of the dangers of getting into trouble abroad.

Review: Prison Writing of Latin America by Joey Whitfield

Joey is a teacher of mine at MLANG in Cardiff University. This is his first book. It explores prison writing in Latin America and looks at abolitionism of the penal system and draws on some really rather delicate themes that expose the dark brutality of prisons in a developing continent where sometimes human rights can be totally thrown out of the window. There is a schism in the penal code between political prisoners and criminals and Joey looks at how these two groups affect each other’s progress through the system. Often it is the poorest and racially discriminated against that suffer the worst fates in the prison system. Poor, indigenous women victims of Reagan’s War on Drugs when Latin American governments need to satisfy captivity quotas in order to get their dollar funding are the ones which are locked away as they are easy targets for a corrupt police force. The first chapter looks at political writing within the prison system. I was totally blown away by the imprisoned Costa Rican author José León Sánchez. This man was a true victim of the system and was wrongly given a life imprisonment term on the barren prison island colony of San Lucas, condemned to carrying a ball and chain around with him whilst manacled all day. In the face of adversity, Sánchez became literate and his work ‘La isla de los hombres solos’ catapulted him into national and international fame, his original work confounding all the critics. Chapter 2 of Whitfield is very dark and difficult to read. It explores homosexual love in the prison system, from rape through to desperate displays of machisimo. The men turn to each other in a way of confronting the system. This chapter looks mainly at imprisoned Cubans. Chapter 3 is brutal in the way it describes the prison massacres of Senderoso Luminosa captives who fight wars with the Peruvian authorities from behind the door, all in defence of their leftist communist ideologies. Some of the worst prison massacres in history occurred in Peru during the 1980s at the peak of the Senedero resistance guerrilla war with the state. Chapter 4 is about the War on Drugs where the Reagan administration turns its Southern hemisphere politics away from leftist insurgents and criminalises the narcotics industry, creating a new criminal class. Comando Vermelho (Red Command) is Brasil are a drug-trafficking criminal gang that originate in prisons and go on to seize control of the urban favelas in Brasil and based on resitance tactics and influence from political prisoners their command structure do a lot for prisoner rights within South America. There are interesting references to the decadent tourist industry in La Paz where the Bolivian prison system has been opened up by a UK prisoner’s book (Marching Powder) which glamourises the capitalist excesses of the jail there.
I found Whitfield’s book to be neat and compact, well-researched, with clear translations from the author when excerpts of Spanish or Portuguese texts were required. There is a shock element to the book and it is hard to imagine what life is really like for these prisoners. Through literature they have discovered a means of dealing with their suffering and I think that one of the main points that Joey makes is that this prison literature is important if we wish to develop more progressive ideas about how to deal with this marginalised element of society. There is sympathy there but also we see excesses of the banality of evil that lurks in these bins of society and this is often mirrored in real life in the criminal enterprises that originally give birth to the prison.

Review: Winter Is Coming – Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped – by Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion, is clearly an intelligent man. Having retired from the game he has entered the world of politics and is a key human rights activist. The book explores his frustrations with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. It is a study of Putin and the way in which he has eroded the democratic institutions bought about by Perestroika and the fall of communism in the Soviet Union. Kasparov tried to align a coalition of democratic oppositionists within Russia yet the force of the state and its poor human rights record left Kasparov no alternative but to fight as an exile from New York City. It is clear from the book that his chess success has made him different to the average Russian. His priveleged life as a global Soviet citizen has perhaps led him further to embrace Yeltsin’s opening up of Russia. I think he hearkens for a Western style democracy within Russia but perhaps Russia itself is not suited to such political freedoms and requires a degree of autocracy for it to effectively function on the international stage. Although I can identify many of the problems posed by Putin, I feel that he has successfully restored a great deal of lost power to Russia and will perhaps be remembered in posterity as a key figure in Russian history. Although he may be a dictator, he is no Stalin and his absolute rule has still brought about many benefits to the Russian State. Can the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine be equated to Hitler’s pre WW2 actions in Czechoslovakia and Poland? Kasparov sets out a case of why the appeasing Western democratic leaders have failed the Russian people in standing up to Putin and he spells out the dangers of the régime, crying out for help. I enjoyed the tactical surprises and clear prose of hearing one of the world’s great mind’s thinking process at work as I traversed the book although I feel that perhaps it is a little unfair on its target and fails to recognise some of the intricacies of superpower politics. It will be interesting to see where Kasparov takes his future life as indeed will it be interesting to see where exactly Putin steers Russia.