August 31, 2002

Clancy revisits '80s Cold War with 'Red Rabbit'

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

"Red Rabbit", the newest novel by Tom Clancy, is the best-selling author's answer to a question that has plagued many spy-thriller authors since the end of the Cold War in 1989.

How can you come up with juicy fiction about spies without the Soviet Union as the world's leading gang of bad guys?

Just roll back the clock is Clancy's answer, and with the story we get a fascinating view of his fictional inside take on a real event, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981.

"Red Rabbit" is 618 pages by Putnam of Clancy's best, easily up to and even above the caliber of his many other page-turners.

In chronology, Clancy takes his familiar characters back to the days when Jack Ryan was a young analyst for the CIA, shortly after his heroics as a tourist in England in "Patriot Games."

Now he's back in England working at the CIA office there, trying to get used to being called Sir John after he was knighted for helping to save a member of the royalty earlier.

We also revisit three other familiar characters, Clancy's CIA boss, Admiral James Greer, and the husband-and-wife team of Ed Foley, CIA station chief in Moscow, and his agent-wife, Mary Pat. Their fancy footwork with the "Rabbit" is the story's heart.

Oleg Zaitzev (code-named Rabbit) is a mid-level employee in the KGB communications department who for conscience's sake decides to defect to America when he's asked to encrypt messages that reveal a plot to kill the Pope by the Kremlin.

Then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who later became the Kremlin boss, is another of the real-life characters in the tale.

Andropov, in Clancy's version of history, decides to kill the pope in response to the pontiff's secret letter threatening to resign the papacy and to return to Poland to resist Soviet domination.

In real life, the pope did write such a letter, and analysts have long speculated that the Soviets, via Bulgarian controllers, dispatched a Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, to kill him.

Agca did shoot the pope in 1981 as Clancy relates it, wounding him severely, but he survived and is still is in office.

Clancy may well be telling us the real story behind that attempt, but regardless, it's a great read, whether true or not.

Our British cousins in the spy world are also prominently featured as the plot alternates between Ryan in England, the intrigue in Moscow and the attempts at CIA headquarters in Langley to stay abreast of the fast-moving action in Europe.

It all culminates on that fateful day in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican in Rome where Agca stepped out of the crowd firing.

But knowing ahead of time what happened there doesn't harm the plot at all. The fun is wondering what was really going on behind the scenes. Maybe Clancy has filled in all the gaps.