A wave of gruesome executions in Shanghai cripples a top secret CIA operation in China and points to an informant who has been selling secrets in Hong Kong. Two American agents are deployed, the stage set for a riveting international spy thriller penned by well-known port executive, Peter Levesque.
Levesque, who spent more than 25 years years in Hong Kong before returning to the US at the start of the pandemic, originally intended his new book, Two if by Sea, to be a business book about the issues surrounding supply chain security in the United States after the September 11 attacks.
“Many years later,” he tells Maritime CEO, “it occurred to me that I could highlight America’s supply chain security issues as part of a broader fictional story that would make it much more tangible to the reader.”
In 2018 a former CIA agent living in Hong Kong was arrested for selling secrets to China, a story Levesque found fascinating and provided a plot genesis for his foray into fiction.
I wanted to shed light on the complexity and enormity of our industry
“I wanted to shed light on the complexity and enormity of our industry, without causing the reader to become lost in the technical aspects of the business. Telling a story was a much better way to make it work as opposed to a business book with lots of facts and figures,” Levesque says.
The American started writing Two if by Sea in 2019 and then left it alone several times over the following three years.
When covid hit Levesque hired a professional editor, working on the book chapter by chapter for about five months.
“It gave the process the kind of discipline I needed to get to the finish line,” Levesque recounts.
This is Levesque’s first work of fiction, and follows on from his 2011-published tome, The Shipping Point: The Rise of China and the Future of Retail Supply Chain Management.
Up next, is a spy sequel to Two if By Sea called Edgartown, located on Martha’s Vineyard, a small island off of Massachusetts. The story revolves around China’s quest for American grade micro-chip technology.
Splash readers keen to buy Two if By Sea can do so by clicking here.
On the subject of spies, traitors et al, if you’re as interested as we are in the Secrets of Spies you are going to love this non-promotional anecdote. Real spies are our daily bread: Aldrich Ames, John le Carré, Kim Philby’s Cambridge Five or Six (Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross and Roger Hollis), Oleg Gordievsky, Oleg Penkovsky, Pemberton’s People, the Portland Spy Ring et al. So whether you’re a le Carré connoisseur, a Deighton disciple, a Fleming fanatic, a Herron or Hastings hireling or a Macintyre marauder you should love this anecdote and if not you might learn something so read on! It’s a must read for espionage cognoscenti.
As Kim Philby (codename Stanley) and KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky (codename Sunbeam) would have told you in their heyday, there is one category of secret agent that is often overlooked … namely those who don’t know they have been recruited. For more on that topic we suggest you read Beyond Enkription (explained below) and a recent article on that topic by the ex-spook Bill Fairclough (codename JJ). The article can be found at TheBurlingtonFiles website in the News Section. The article (dated July 21, 2021) is about “Russian Interference”; it’s been read well over 30,000 times and is very current: just ask people you have heard of like Boris, Dominic and even Donald.
Now talking of Gordievsky, John le Carré described Ben Macintyre’s fact based novel, The Spy and The Traitor, as “the best true spy story I have ever read”. It was of course about Kim Philby’s Russian counterpart, a KGB Colonel named Oleg Gordievsky, codename Sunbeam. In 1974 Gordievsky became a double agent working for MI6 in Copenhagen which was when Bill Fairclough aka Edward Burlington unwittingly launched his career as a secret agent for MI6. Fairclough and le Carré knew of each other: le Carré had even rejected Fairclough’s suggestion in 2014 that they collaborate on a book. As le Carré said at the time, “Why should I? I’ve got by so far without collaboration so why bother now?” A realistic response from a famous expert in fiction in his eighties but maybe there was a deeper hidden reason. Maybe because Pemberton’s People in MI6 even included Roy Astley Richards OBE (Winston Churchill’s bodyguard) and an eccentric British Brigadier (Peter ‘Scrubber’ Stewart-Richardson) who was once refused permission to join the Afghan Mujahideen.
Philby and Gordievsky never met Fairclough, but they did know Fairclough’s handler, Colonel Alan McKenzie aka Colonel Alan Pemberton CVO MBE in real life. It is little wonder therefore that in Beyond Enkription, the first fact based novel in The Burlington Files espionage series, genuine double agents, disinformation and deception weave wondrously within the relentless twists and turns of evolving events. Beyond Enkription is set in 1974 in London, Nassau and Port au Prince. Edward Burlington, a far from boring accountant, unwittingly started working for Alan McKenzie in MI6 and later worked eyes wide open for the CIA.
What happens is so exhilarating and bone chilling it makes one wonder why bother reading espionage fiction when facts are so much more breathtaking. The fact based novel begs the question, were his covert activities in Haiti a prelude to the abortion of a CIA sponsored Haitian equivalent to the Cuban Bay of Pigs? Why was his father Dr Richard Fairclough, ex MI1, involved? Richard was of course a confidant of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who became a chief adviser to JFK during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. So how did Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky fit in? You may well want to ask John Profumo but it’s a tad late now. Nevertheless, Max Hastings’ Abyss The Cuban Missile Crisis is worth a read but do bear in mind at the time that Philby was advising the KGB while Penkovsky was advising MI6 and the CIA!.
By the way, the maverick Bill Fairclough had quite a lot in common with Greville Wynne (famous for his part in helping to reveal Russian missile deployment in Cuba in 1962) and has even been called “a posh Harry Palmer”. As already noted, Bill Fairclough and John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) knew of each other but only long after Cornwell’s MI6 career ended thanks to Kim Philby shopping all Cornwell’s supposedly secret agents in Europe. Coincidentally, the novelist Graham Greene used to work in MI6 reporting to Philby and Bill Fairclough actually stayed in Hôtel Oloffson during a covert op in Haiti (explained in Beyond Enkription) which was at the heart of Graham Greene’s spy novel The Comedians. Funny it’s such a small world!
Do look up the authors or books mentioned on Amazon, Google The Burlington Files or visit https://theburlingtonfiles.org and read Beyond Enkription.