Dover Publications 2017 reprint of 1980 original
© Estate of Ted Allebury
ISBN 978-0-486-81922-8
I decided to purchase and read this book largely because of
the back cover copy:
Seemingly out of
nowhere, wealthy businessman Logan Powell has become President-elect and is
weeks away from assuming the most powerful position in the world…British
intelligence agent James MacKay uncovers shocking evidence that suggests
something might be terribly wrong with the election. With the help of a reluctant CIA, MacKay sets
out…to discover if the unthinkable has occurred: Is President-elect Powell actually a puppet
of the Soviet Union?
It’s almost as if Allebury had a pipeline to the future.
MacKay, as it turns out, is not the major figure in the
investigation; a senior CIA official, Peter Nolan, is. Allebury (whose best book, in my opinion, is The Other Side of Silence, about the Kim
Philby fiasco) has written a readable thriller with an all-too-plausible
scenario. Logan Powell is not, exactly,
a puppet of the Soviet Union, but, as we quickly learn, so this does not, I
think, reveal anything important, his campaign manager (and Chief-of-Staff
designee) Andrew Dempsey is a long-term Soviet agent (dating back to the
upheavals in France in 1968).
In the course of finding actual evidence of what has
happened, several people die and the CIA uses what many of us might regard as
somewhat dodgy investigative (break-ins) and interrogation (potent and
dangerous drugs) techniques. This is a
quick (218 pages), generally satisfying read.
As is often the case when an English author undertakes to
write a story set in and mostly populated by Americans, there are occasional
mis-hits with language. In this case, he
has Americans consistently saying “I shall” do something, when anyone I know
would say “I will,” or “I’ll.” And there
are some minor mistakes with Congressional positions. Those slips do not detract from the overall
excellence of the work.
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