The Human FundBooks
"Money for People"
Heather Augustyn, Ska: An Oral History
Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Past
Ben Macintyre, A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal*
Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War*
Earl Swift, Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings
Motion Pictures
Top Gun (1986)
Behind Enemy Lines (2001)
Hail Columbia! (1982)
The Dream Is Alive (1985)
Destiny in Space (1994)
Commentary: Hail Columbia, The Dream Is Alive, & Destiny in Space are all IMAX documentaries, about STS-1; the heady days of 1983-1985, before the Challenger disaster; & a repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, respectively.
Miscellany
narwhal statue*
Pillow Cube pillow
N.A.S.A. baseball cap*
Catholic Balm Co. Holy Smokes beard balm
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan movie poster*
ThunderCats Thunder Tank*
Soylent Green keychain*
false Barbasol can*
genuine Barbasol can*
Commentary: The false Barasol can is empty & has a detachable bottom. It is meant to be evocative of the false Barbasol can used to smuggle dinosaur D.N.A. samples in the film Jurassic Park, though without the rack & the cooling system needed to preserve biological samples. The genuine can of Barasol shaving cream alongside the false can? That's my dad's sense of humor.
*Off-list, meaning not requested on my birthday gift wish list. I am thankful for all the presents I was given, but I am also persnickety enough to raise a quizzical eyebrow when I receive a gift that was not on my wish list without having received all the gifts that were on my wish list. Among my immediate kin, the wish list has always been a courtesy to the gift-givers, to make their choosing of gifts simpler.
1 comment:
If you enjoyed this piece re Philby you are going to love this non-promotional anecdote about real spies and authors from the espionage genre whether you’re a le Carré connoisseur, a Deighton disciple, a Fleming fanatic, a Herron hireling or a Macintyre marauder. If you don't love all such things 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. 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 20,000 times.
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.
Philby and Gordievsky never met Fairclough, but they did know Fairclough’s handler, Colonel Alan McKenzie aka Colonel Alan Pemberton CVO MBE. 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 chief adviser to JFK during the Cuban missile crisis. So how did Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky fit in? You may well ask!
Len Deighton and Mick Herron could be forgiven for thinking they co-wrote the raw noir anti-Bond narrative, Beyond Enkription. Atmospherically it’s reminiscent of Ted Lewis’ Get Carter of Michael Caine fame. If anyone ever makes a film based on Beyond Enkription they’ll only have themselves to blame if it doesn’t go down in history as a classic espionage thriller.
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 also 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!
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