Beirut Station

"Paul Vidich is so good. That’s what I enjoy most about doing the Spybrary podcast. People write to me and say, ‘I would never have discovered Paul Vidich if it wasn’t for you and now I can’t get enough of it.’ I picked this book up at Heathrow airport. I had been planning to watch movies on the flight but I inhaled this book instead. I just couldn’t put it down. It’s a thought-provoking and intense spy novel and I just wanted to finish it. The book is set during the Israeli-Hezbollah war in 2006. The events depicted are fictional but revolve around historical incidents, including the tragic murder of the CIA station chief, William Buckley, in Lebanon in 1985. They’re hunting for the assassin. The surveillance is run jointly by CIA and Mossad and Paul comes up with different characters for the different agencies. Condoleezza Rice is visiting and there is a lot of worry that she is going to be assassinated by Hezbollah. There’s a lot of tension around her visit. A bit like IS Berry, Vidich is very good at weaving real-life events and geopolitics into the backdrop of the story. It makes the book educational as well as entertaining. The main protagonist is Analise Assad, a Lebanese-American CIA agent. She’s not the usual downtrodden woman that you often see in spy novels. She’s a ‘NOC’ (non-official cover), which means she’s totally undercover and works for the UN Refugee Agency as a teacher. Her job is to befriend the grandson of the terrorist chief and get to him through the boy. As you can imagine, in a lot of these books there are moral dilemmas. You can ask, ‘Is that the right thing to be doing—to be using a kid to try and murder the grandfather?’ Vidich does this very well. Analise is a very strong woman, but not in the same way as Artemis Proctor in Moscow X or Shirley Dander in Mick Herron’s books. Analise is a very thoughtful, intelligent officer who’s used to getting information that others may miss. For instance, when they’re tracking the villain, she notices that the one thing that’s constant with the driver is that he wears the same gloves. It’s a vanity thing. Everything else changes, but the gloves are the same. I don’t want to go into why that’s important, but she’s able to go in and pick out this information that’s crucial for them in their mission."