The Blackford Oakes Novels by William F. Buckley, Jr, pt. 2

Let's finish up this two-part overview of the Blackford Oakes novlels with my six favorites.

6.

(1986)

The year is 1954, and Joseph Stalin is dead. Laurenti Beria, ruthless head of the KGB, plots to succeed him. Meanwhile, Oakes trains with a squad of US and British commandos for a doomed (jinxed by a traitor) mission to Albania. Oakes's determination to find the traitor takes him from London to a KGB hideout in Stockholm, while the power struggle playing out in the Kremlin reverberates around the world. 

"I don't often drink when doing business. On the other hand, I don't often have a meal with a fascist imperialist."

This is the closest any of the Oakes books comes to a James Bond novel. Mainly on account of its two villains, Heath (the enforcer) and Fleetwood, deep cover Soviet agent slash mad scientist, whose invention, the Zirca, is the ultimate surveillance state weapon. He also has a genuine supervillain lair in Herstmonceux Castle, where his Zirca lies like Herbet Lom's superweapon in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. 

Remember a few years back when that collection of number stations was making the rounds? What? You didn't have that in your CD changer? I used to listen to it in the mornings at the bar I used to run, after I had to fire my janitor. Whenever I think of all the sweeping, mopping, and spraying I did at that place, it's to the mental soundtrack of "Kholov, kholov... eleven... eleven... eleven." There's a bit of that in here, as well - a very effective way to communicate in code to your agents around the globe. 

One last quote: Anthony Trust (Black's recruiter and oldest friend) on the curious (to a Catholic anyway) fact of Hitler and Stalin having been baptized. "Perhaps, baptized, there would be less theological red tape in dropping them into the inferno." 

5. 

(1976)

It is 1952. Truman is nearing the end of his term, Great Britain has a new queen, the Cold War is beginning to heat up, and vital Western secrets are falling into Soviet hands. The CIA is faced with a delicate dilemma when they discover the source of the leaks to the KGB has been traced directly to the Queen's chambers. Thus young Blackford Oakes - handsome, connected, and newly recruited to the CIA - is sent to London to penetrate the Royal circle, win the Queen's confidence, and plug the leak. The action leads to an explosive showdown in the skies over London.

The first book of any series is always an interesting case. Sort of like the pilot for a TV show. Will it connect with an audience? Will it get picked up? You're pretty much assured the main character isn't going to die, though, so accordingly having 'Will Oakes die?' be part of the drama might seem a misstep. It's certainly a credit to Buckley's writing: even though I was in doubt on that score, I felt Blackford's anxiety keenly. Keeping these spoiler-free means I can't talk about how cool the ending is, except to say hey, I thought it was very cool. 

All the characters here are memorable (the Queen, Viscount Kirk, Blackford's parents and stepfather, the jets i.e. the Hunter and the Sabre) and we get a clear sense of who the main characters (Blackford obviously, but also Rufus, Sally, Anthony Trust, and of course whichever President, CIA director(s), or KGB head is for the year in question) are. Buckley wanted Oakes to be as quintessentially American as Bugs Bunny or Indiana Jones (my examples, not his) and he mostly succeeds, although it's helpful to remember an upper class American of Blackford's time seems fairly British to modern eyes. What distinguishes Oakes as a Yank is an insouciance in the face of hierarchy. We see it often in the series, and we get our first glimpse(s) here. My favorite example is when he straightfaces a Senator's wife that there's a button behind a curtain in the Oval Office that when pressed lowers all of Washington, DC into a nukeproof bunker. 

4.

(1980)

The year is 1956, the cold war is hot, and the US is locked in a do-or-die space race with the Russians. Who will get there first? Once more, the decision is made to send in Oakes. His assignment is to kidnap from Vienna two Russian missile scientists who can help put the Americans out front for good. To succeed, he must dodge a lethal combination of murderous KGB agents and vengeful Hungarian freedom fighters - fresh from defeat in the bloody streets of Budapest - who have mistaken - at a double agent's urging - Oakes as their enemy. Who will be the winner in this cloak and dagger race to space?

“You’re saying I set up the old lady to get tortured and shot? Fuck you, Nady. If the revolution was made up of types like you, I'm glad you lost.”

I wasn’t sure which quote to lead with, as there are more than a few good ones. (At one point, Dean Acheson’s mustache “pointed skeptically at the menu.” That cracks me up.) This one takes place in that exciting few months while the US and USSR were competing to launch the first satellite. We all know how that one ended. All the Russians needed was a Van Der Graaf generator and didn’t even realize they could just order one from the U.S., whereas all the Americans needed was the right ozone formula, which the Soviets had but, of course, was not for sale.

I hope you won’t consider this a spoiler, but this has my favorite last line/ title tie-in of the series. It’s just a code for who gets the satellite in orbit first. Years later on the occasion of the moon landing, Blackford returns from a mission to a message from Anthony Trust: “Blackford, re: your communication of October 4th, 1957, don’t give it another thought. What’s on second.” 

3.

(1982)

When a shadowy Russian mole threatens to undermine the Free World's defenses by infiltrating Eisenhower's National Security Council, Oakes is called in to unmask the imposter. He turns the tables on the Communists by piloting a U-2 spy plane on a Gary Powers-style one-way mission behind the Iron Curtain. Sentenced to death and trapped in the depths of Lubyanka prison, Oakes may have turned his last trick. Or has he? 

I learned a lot of things I didn’t know from this book. (Did you know the marbled remains of the former Reichstag were used to make the Soviet memorial in Berlin? I sure didn’t. “The Soviet gift for cannibalization.” 

My Dad took me there when we went to Berlin in 1983. 

This is a good little mystery with agreeable symmetry, beginning with Oakes’s show-trial behind the Iron Curtain and ending with the (near) trial of the mole, once uncovered, in the USA. Both parties, Russian and American, are guilty of course of the crimes they’ve been captured for, but unlike the Russians, the CIA just can’t call up their attorney-friend in Moscow and send him down to Lubyanka. Not so with the Soviets, who specialized in using the freedoms of the West against itself:

"J. Daniel Umin's name made judges with cast-iron stomachs and nerves of steel moan. For twenty-five year he had defended Communists, crypto-Communists, saboteurs, seditionists, terrorists. His intrusion into a  case meant a volcanic tremor, felt up and down the judicial vertebrae from Jail guards to Supreme Court Justices. He was inevitably insolent, studiedly impolite, routinely obscene. That his contempt for the courts, his abuse of process, his outrageous personal behavior, would objectively justify (disbarring) him was not doubted by anyone (but) J. Daniel Umin had acquired a perverse immunity. He had industriously advertised himself as a friend of political liberty, the prime mover in the anti-McCarthy movement in America, and as such he regularly worked the college circuit. He delighted in taking a judge - whoever had most recently ruled against him - and devoting an entire lecture to the judge's background, making sexual insinuations, accusations of outright incompetence, innuendoes about the judge's drinking habits, about scandals involving his brothers, sisters, mother, father, children, godchildren. He did this with such utter, righteous, communicable high-mindedness that he succeeded in causing several distinguished men of the bar to have nervous breakdowns and two to retire; one died of apoplexy, right in the courtroom.

Umin never appeared anywhere without a) a cigar, b) a poetic tribute to the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, c) warning against the ideologization of justice by the military-industrial complex, and d) the suggestion that behind it all was: the Central Intelligence Agency, primeval enemy of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Lillian Hellman. Notwithstanding that he was a traveling spectacular - the indigenous equivalent of Moscow's May Day Parade - he was a careful scholar and brilliant legal parliamentarian. At Yale as an undergraduate he had a distinguished career, during which he had shown no racial tendencies. But in his junior year accepted election to the senior society Scroll and Key. More than one biographer of J. Daniel Umin had suggested that his rejection by the LEADING senior society at Yale was the root cause of his anti-American resentments. Soon after graduating from Yale Law School he came out for abolishing all private colleges as "citadels of privilege." He had a speech on just that subject which he delivered at least once to every college at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and NYU, regularly receiving standing ovations."

During a five minute recess while the US attorney merely pauses to verify something, he goes outside to deliver “an impromptu press conferences to the reporters on creeping American fascism, the revival of McCarthyism, the senility of Eisenhower, and the repeated rejection by the US of peaceable initiatives by the Soviet Union."

Sound familiar? I submit that the character and tactics of JDU have been institutionalized in American life throughout the media-academe. Which is bad enough but it's led to a sort of kneejerk response from the proverbial man in the street who passes through either of those institutions. (A sort of snort - then "Capitalism, maaaan.")

2.

(1984)

President Kennedy has been in office for less than a year, and the Berlin Wall is about to slam shut the last escape route of communist Eastern Europe. Uncertain about the Soviets' intentions, Kennedy sends Blackford Oakes into the chaos of East Berlin to plumb the depths of the crisis. Oakes' contact is Henri Tod, leader of a secret group of German dissidents, who has a price on his head and an ingenious plan that might just save Eastern Bloc domination. When Tod mysteriously vanishes, Oakes locks horns with the ultimate opponent, East Germany's unscrupulous party boss Walter Ulbricht. 

"Remember, Blackford, our friends in Moscow enjoy advantages we don't enjoy, in this case the fiction that East Germany is an independent country. And they are closing in. They have been talking now for months and months, laying the background 'Peace treaty... peace treaty... peace treaty.' That itself has an impact like the repeated use of 'disarmament.'" 

This tactic – advancing one agenda while promoting another, until it is too late to escape – works well, doesn’t it? I also liked this one: “'Worry only in part about the enemy's capabilities. Worry about the enemy's intentions.' Who first said that? Was it Julius Caesar? Cato? Alexander? It could have been Abel, who knew the power of Cain, but did not know his intentions and then suddenly it was too late.”

This one walks some of the same ground that Stained Glass did. I liked it much more, though; the whole German-dissident-threatens-Soviet-hegemony-in-East-Germany thing is utilized more effectively. There are also well-written interludes with JFK that are presented as monologues breaking up the action so often.

More than most of the other Oakes books, this one exploits the layers of irony in the Cold War struggle. The sticky points, or the “b.o.” (the initials of the main character, which used to evoke “body odor” but not sure if that would be the case any longer, but in the 80s/ to someone of Buckley’s generation? Absolutely. Subtle commentary on the stench of intelligence work, or the lack of olfactory residue to a successful operation). Just one of many examples: Caspar Ultricht, the nephew of the East German leader, whose father was shot by the communists (on the uncle's go-ahead) for “building railcars that were used to transport people to death camps.” Which, of course, they were, but his father was not exclusively or purposefully designing them for such. He designed railroad cars, period, including the one built for the fuhrer, which Casper and Claudia appropriate for their own use. But this was just the official reason for shooting him; he was shot because he secretly contacted the Americas to let them know how they could seize four key checkpoints and obstruct the flow of traffic eastwards. "That was when the Russians and Eastern European refugees were beginning to be shipped back to Russia to be killed. What Father didn't know was that the whole operation had an American stamp of approval."

"Your thoughts, comrade, as I warned you as a student in the university, are sometimes hampered by a bourgeois affinity for reason."

This one has some real punch to it. I wish there were movies of some of these; the last ten or twenty pages of this one, especially. 

1. 

(1985)

The year is 1961. President Kennedy, who has selected Oakes to meet with Che Guevera inside Castro's Cuba, has contrived a daring plan - dubbed Operation Alligator - that will hopefully bring about an era of detente in East/West relations. The communists, however, have another agenda: a double-cross with terrifying consequences. Soon Oakes is trapped in Cuba along with his partner on the mission, former KGB agent long since defected to the West Cecilio Vellasco, and the heat is on. Warming the climate greatly is the sultry beauty Catalina, Che's adjutant, an American fellow traveler who finds herself growing disillusioned with Castro's revolution. The forecast calls for betrayal, power politics, and sudden death. 

I love when people employ that "the forecast calls for..." conceit. Always entertains me. Same as when a character whips off a disguise to the shock of those assembled, who cry out his or her real name, and they respond "At your service!" These are my confessions, planet Earth.

"He sat and drank daiquiris as though he were Ernest Hemingway."

Is this the best or my personal favorite? Usually I make a point of such a distinction, but here I'll make an exception. It is both my personal favorite and it is the best of the series. “Buckley’s most successful attempt to shade his fanciful thriller-comedy into more serious matters of love, loyalty, and honor" says one of the blurbs on the back cover. Agreed 100%.

Not to repeat myself, but part of its power lies in how each character is so memorable. Of all Black's allies in the series, I like Vellasco the best, and of all the real-world villains animated from Buckley's POV, he perhaps handles Che the best. (Fidel and Raul, too.) Much more than caricature or fodder for Black's occasional quips about the tyranny of Castro vs. the tyranny of Chase Manhattan, I walked away from this book with a deeper understanding of both Che and of the Cuban Revolution.

The last fifty to one hundred pages are fantastic stuff. Spoiler-free, so you'll get nothing out of me! What a great movie it'd all make, though. I've mentioned that a few times, and it's a shame no one has ever tried to adapt these. Hope that changes someday. 

Two last quotes, friends: (1) On hearing that Batista's former head of suppressing communist activities was hired by the government to weed out potential subversives in the Cuban immigrants to the U.S. Black exclaims "Some Americans can be so goddamn dumb. You would think that anyone who had been in charge of suppressing communism in Cuba would have a hard time establishing his credentials as competent to do anything." And (2) Buckley has many a fine turn of phrase throughout, and this is by no means the best, but it''ll work as a representative example of his style: “He fastened the bunk straps around her. She would not now be tossed onto the cabin sole * if one of those rolls coming now every few minutes tilted the vessel into an angle that overcame the serene gravitational inertia of a body lying on a level surface.”

* Sole just means cabin floor, I guess. I had no idea.

One last word re: the title, which refers to the name of the Operation Kennedy gave it as well as Che's always saying it as his farewell. (Is he teasing Black about knowing the name of the operation? Probably.) Just once throughout the book I wanted to hear Oakes respond - particularly in their last scene together, when it would be very cinematic - 'In awhile, crocodile.'

~

All the Blackford Oakes books are still in print and are highly recommended to the Cold War spy genre reader or just fans of political history of the mid-to-late-twentieth-century in general.

(1925 - 2008)