For the record, I am aware that the headquarters of Israel’s secret intelligence service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. My fictitious service continues to reside there, in part because I like the name better than that of the current location, which I will not mention in print. Also, I have been asked many times whether Don Anton Orsati is based on a real individual. He is not. The don, his valley, and his unique business enterprise were all invented by the author.

The English Spy is the fourth Gabriel Allon adventure to feature the don’s best assassin: former SAS commando Christopher Keller. The novel ends in the place where Keller’s story began, in the dangerous green hills of South Armagh. During the worst of the long and bloody war for Northern Ireland, the region truly was the most dangerous place in the world to wear the uniform of a soldier or police officer. The largest single loss of life occurred on August 27, 1979, when two large roadside bombs killed eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint. The attack occurred just hours after Lord Mountbatten, a British statesman and relative of Queen Elizabeth II, was killed by an IRA bomb concealed aboard his fishing boat—an incident that suggested the opening passages of The English Spy. Clearly, I borrowed much from the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, when constructing my fictitious princess, but in no way was it my intention to suggest Diana’s death was a murder. She died in a Paris tunnel because an intoxicated man was behind the wheel of her car, not as a result of an international conspiracy.

The Republic of Ireland’s long struggle against illegal narcotics has been well documented. Less well known, however, is the role played in the drug trade by elements of the Real IRA, the dissident republican terrorist group formed in 1997. The organization, which included several members of the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade, carried out a series of devastating bombings in the spring and summer of 1998, as Northern Ireland was moving tentatively toward peace. The deadliest was the bombing of the market town of Omagh on August 15 that killed twenty-nine people and left more than two hundred others wounded. Specific details of the attack that appear in the novel are accurate, though I granted myself license when portraying the actions of my fictitious British spymaster, Graham Seymour. Eamon Quinn and Liam Walsh were not in the bomb car that day, as they are inventions of the author.

At the time of this writing, the real bombers still have not been officially identified. Only they know why they parked the bomb car in the wrong place on Lower Market Street. And only they know why they allowed inaccurate warnings to be passed on to the media and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, thus creating the circumstances for a catastrophic loss of innocent life. Surely the police and intelligence services of Ireland and the United Kingdom know their names. Yet seventeen years after the bombing, no one has been convicted for the largest mass murder in British or Irish history. In June 2009 a judge in Northern Ireland ordered four men—Michael McKevitt, Liam Campbell, Colm Murphy, and Seamus Daly—to pay one and a half million pounds to the families of the Omagh victims. To date, no money has changed hands. In April 2014 Seamus Daly was arrested at a shopping center in South Armagh, where he was living openly, and charged with twenty-nine counts of murder. If past cases are any guide, the chances of a successful prosecution are remote. In 2002 Ireland’s Special Criminal Court convicted Colm Murphy of conspiracy in the bombing, only to see its verdict overturned on appeal. Murphy’s nephew faced trial in Northern Ireland in 2006 but was acquitted.

In the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, British intelligence learned that highly skilled IRA bomb makers were selling their expertise on the open market. Among the countries where former IRA terrorists plied their deadly trade was the Islamic Republic of Iran. Historian Gordon Thomas, in his history of MI6 entitled Secret Wars, wrote that a delegation of IRA terrorists traveled secretly to Tehran in 2006 to help Iran build an antitank weapon for its Lebanese client Hezbollah—a weapon that could create a fireball capable of traveling a thousand feet per second. Hezbollah used the weapon against Israeli tanks and armored vehicles, but British soldiers serving in Iraq also found themselves the targets of IRA-developed technology. In 2005 eight British soldiers were killed in Basra by a sophisticated roadside bomb that was identical to devices used by the IRA in South Armagh. Counterterrorism experts speculated that the blueprints for the weapon reached Iraq as a result of the IRA’s long association with the PLO. Both organizations enjoyed the patronage of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and trained at his infamous desert camps, where they shared knowledge and resources. Libya did indeed supply virtually all of the Semtex used by the IRA during the war for Northern Ireland.

But Libya was not the only state sponsor of the IRA. The KGB also provided material support to the terrorists in an attempt to create mayhem in Great Britain and thus weaken the Atlantic alliance. Much has changed in the quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but fomenting discord within the Western alliance remains a primary goal of Russia under Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Putin would like nothing more than to see the complete collapse of NATO so he can reconstitute Russia’s lost empire without the meddlesome West standing in his way. Under his leadership, Russia is once again quietly funneling money to extreme political parties in Western Europe on both the left and the right. It seems Putin doesn’t care much about his friends’ politics, so long as they are opposed to the United States and see the world roughly as he does. Besides, Putin has no real politics of his own. He is a kleptocrat and has no philosophy other than the cynical exercise of power.

Gabriel Allon first matched wits with Russia in Moscow Rules, which was published in the summer of 2008, when Moscow was awash in oil revenues and critics of the Kremlin were being killed in the streets. Unfortunately, the novel proved to be prescient. Consider the Kremlin’s behavior of late. It has stood by a murderous client regime in Syria. It has agreed to sell sophisticated antiaircraft missiles to Iran. Crimea and eastern Ukraine are under Russian control. Nuclear-armed Russian bombers are buzzing NATO allies. Indeed, a pair of Russian bombers recently took a joyride down the English Channel with their transponders switched off, disrupting civil aviation for hours. As the West takes a budget ax to its defenses, the Red Army is modernizing at a furious pace. Putin has spoken openly about the use of tactical nuclear weapons to preserve his gains.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond is rightfully alarmed by what he sees. In March 2015, he described Russia as “the single greatest threat” to Britain’s security. A month later, however, President Obama offered a sharply different view, dismissing Russia as a “regional power” that was acting out of weakness rather than strength. The implication is that, by invading Ukraine and snatching Crimea, Vladimir Putin is actually losing. If only it were so. Putin is winning, which means Ukraine is but a preview of coming attractions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM INDEBTED TO MY WIFE, Jamie Gangel, who listened patiently while I worked through the twists and turns of The English Spy and expertly trimmed one hundred pages from the pile of paper I euphemistically referred to as my first draft. Without her constant support and remarkable attention to detail, my manuscript could not have been finished before its deadline. My debt to her is immeasurable, as is my love. Also, my children, Lily and Nicholas, were a constant source of inspiration throughout the writing year. I am in awe of their accomplishments.