Toby Harnden

Tuesday

Toby Harnden

Cold War spying had much in common with the colonial era

From our UK edition

The CIA, this fascinating new history notes, is ‘possibly the most infamous organisation on the planet’. Its hidden hand is often presumed to be everywhere, pulling the strings. That’s pretty impressive, given that it only has, by most estimates, around 20,000 employees. (The exact number is, naturally, classified.) At the same time, it’s routinely portrayed as comically inept – a bunch of ‘clowns’ and ‘a refuge for Ivy League intellectuals’, as Richard Nixon put it. This has led to a dichotomy in CIA histories. On the one hand it is depicted as an all-powerful evil force, responsible for many of the world’s ills since its foundation in 1947.

Saturday

Toby Harnden

The spy’s spy

Sitting beneath the pergola of the historic Roycroft Inn, J.R. Seeger looks the part of a successful thriller writer. He is wearing an immaculate white shirt, blue jeans and boat shoes, his blue-green eyes peering over a camouflage-style face mask. The western New York hotel, some 20 miles from the city of Buffalo and the Peace Bridge crossing into Canada, was a centerpiece of the American Arts and Crafts movement when it opened in 1905. It is also the setting for one of the most gripping scenes in Seeger’s debut novel, Mike 4, in which a Russian double agent tries to lure an American protégé into a life of treason. The rendezvous involves a splintered oak door, a Colt Python .

seeger

Saturday

Toby Harnden

Pulped by the MoD

From our UK edition

Even at the time, I knew it was a deal with the devil. Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, commanding officer of the Welsh Guards and a friend of mine from the late 1990s, had just been killed in Afghanistan. He was the first battalion commander to die in action since the Falklands. Colleagues of his were encouraging me to consider writing a book about him and his beloved Welsh Guardsmen, who were still engaged in ferocious fighting. I had spent time with the Welsh Guards in Northern Ireland and Iraq. It seemed like an opportunity presented by fate. To explore the idea, I had to go to Helmand to be with the Welsh Guards. Three years earlier, I had been driven there from Kandahar (albeit clad in a shalwar kameez and lying on the back seat). By now, however, it was the summer of 2009.

Saturday

Toby Harnden

Bill Clinton on Tony and Gordon

From our UK edition

Little Rock, Arkansas What can be done to bring order to a fractious Labour party? Inside Little Rock’s Alltel Arena, home of the Arkansas Twisters football team and filled with local Democrats greedily consuming mounds of deep-fried frogs’ legs washed down with vats of iced tea, the question was hardly a burning one. It was a balmy evening and no one seemed much exercised by the travails of Tony Blair or the overweening ambition of Gordon Brown. Indeed, there was talk of nothing much beyond the borders of a Southern state still viewed by most of the rest of the union as a poor, illiterate cousin. Except from one man.

Wednesday

Toby Harnden

‘World Trade Center’ is insulting

From our UK edition

Toby Harnden says that ‘World Trade Center’ ditches Oliver Stone’s left-wing conspiracy theories, but dishonours one of the heroes of 11 September by caricaturing his faith New York Staff Sergeant David Karnes was working as an accountant at DeLoitte & Touche in Wilton, Connecticut, on 11 September 2001 when the first plane flew into the World Trade Center. He and his colleagues watched it on television. Karnes announced that America was ‘at war’ and drove home in his Porsche 911 (he saw this as an omen from above) to don his old marine uniform. He got a buzz cut at the barbers, picked up equipment at a storage facility that he rented and went to a church to pray before driving to Manhattan, stopping for a McDonald’s on the way.

Wednesday

Toby Harnden

Gays have the right to be miserable too

From our UK edition

Lubbock, Texas The candidate is clad in a black Stetson, dark pearl-buttoned shirt and blue jeans, like a shambolic outlaw in some spaghetti western. But if he is inhibited by the audience of corpulent, stony-faced sheriffs glaring out from beneath their ten-gallon hats, he does not show it. Within the first two minutes of his stump speech, the ageing cowboy with Frank Zappa facial hair and a history of substance abuse proudly confesses to lewd conduct and breaking a state law. ‘I’m a member of the Mile High Club,’ declares Kinky Friedman, the former country and western singer, to delegates at the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas conference, where stalls advertise professional ‘tragedy clean-up’ services and a commemorative handgun auction.

Saturday

Toby Harnden

Waiting for the British

From our UK edition

Lashkar Gar, Afghanistan In a dusty clearing on the outskirts of Helmand’s capital, the US army’s Provincial Reconstruction Team had set up a mobile aid station. As we approached, a Humvee gunner swung his machine-gun towards us and shouted angrily, ‘Get back, get back!’ We were clad in shalwar-kameez and sporting scrubby beards. We may not have fooled many locals but to the American soldier, viewing the world through his wraparound sunglasses, we looked like Afghans. Moments later, Captain Alan Dollison strode over to welcome us.

Saturday

Toby Harnden

A cat ate the face of the corpse

From our UK edition

Toby Harnden accompanies American troops as they fight the insurgents with everything they’ve got Fallujah Slumped in a corner, his face drawn and smeared with grime after five days’ fighting through the city, Specialist Lance Ohle of the US army’s Task Force 2-2 surveyed the room. ‘Can you imagine coming into your house and finding it like this?’ he mused. ‘Oh, man.’ Every window in the cinder-block house was shattered. A 155mm shell had blown a large hole through the roof. The front gate had been crushed by a Bradley fighting vehicle and every door kicked in.