RUTHFULLY YOURS

This book provides compelling insight into ISIS on the basis of interviews with the group’s defectors, but ultimately fails to substantiate its thesis that ISIS lacks Islamic legitimacy.

“Islam according to ISIS has no basis in the actual scriptures” of Islam. So wrote the authors of the new book ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate. While the many interviews with Islamic State defectors – including their brutal eyewitness accounts of the group’s atrocities – do provide compelling reading, this volume often suggests a more agnostic assessment of the militant group’s Islamic legitimacy than the authors may have intended.

Terrorism researcher Anne Speckhard and former Turkish police detective Ahmet S. Yayla wrote the book while leading the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, an “action-based, interdisciplinary research center working on psychosocial, cultural, political, economic, ideological and technological topics impacting global peace and security.” The book’s translator-assisted interviews demonstrated the authors’ belief that “disillusioned ISIS defectors who tell their authentic stories about life inside the Islamic State are the most influential tool to counter ISIS’ robust propaganda.” Deserters – who spoke to Yayla in southeastern Turkey and to Speckhard from Istanbul and Washington, D.C. via Skype – said that ISIS (or Ad-Dawlah, which in Arabic means “the state”) “does not represent Islam. Ad-Dawlah are kafirs [unbelievers].”

According to the book’s authors, their view of the Islamic State’s “perfect young candidate” as a naïve, believing Muslim who is unfamiliar with his or her religion, is contradicted by what they are often told about the ISIS fighter sharia indoctrination. Yayla said that he was surprised to find that a certain well-educated law school student’s critical thinking and training did not keep him from admiring his ISIS mentor, a Jordanian sheikh and former university English professor. That student and his fellow ISIS recruits actually admired the militant who taught them. “Ad-Dawlah chooses very high-level teachers who are well educated in shariah,” Yayla said, adding that those in the militant group are often looked at as having “very good characters.”

Similar admiration came from a former high school teacher and senior Islamic State commander in Raqqa, Syria the de facto capital of the group’s caliphate. Commenting on the group’s foreign fighters, he said, “I looked at the mujahideen and saw them as heroes – like the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. [They] always talk about Allah, Prophet Muhammad and jihad … the life hereafter and more divine things, [while] alcohol, gambling – vices were all banned.”

Daniel Silva is among the finest and most compelling writers in the suspense/intrigue/espionage/thriller genre in modern fiction, which has its share of brilliant or engaging practitioners—Ian Fleming (of course), John LeCarré, David Baldacci, Jo Nesbo, James Rollins, Kathy Reichs, Steve Berry, Donna Leon, Tom Clancy, Jonathan Kellerman, Mons Kallentoft, Louise Penny, P.D. James, Michael Gruber, John Burdett, Trevor Ferguson (aka John Farrow) and, yes, Dan Brown, to name a few of the most prominent. Silva is a charter member of this elect fraternity, one of the genre’s best-selling authors, whose area of expertise is the Middle East, the Palestinian terror machine, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Russian involvement in the region, the ambitions of Islamic jihad around the globe, and, of course, the efforts of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, to counter these manifold threats.

Indeed, Silva’s knowledge of the Middle East imbroglio is second to none and his plots are invariably timely, impinging on the cultural, political, and military realities of the present day. His most recent offering, The Black Widow, may well be his most topical and profoundly analytical work. All the salient elements of the international arena, real and imagined, are there: ISIS and the caliphate; drone warfare; the dissolving border between Iraq and Syria; the disintegration of Lebanon; the collusion of Turkey; a succession of catastrophic attacks in Paris, Amsterdam, and Washington, the latter on the scale of 9/11; a feckless and narcissistic American president plainly inadequate to the burden of high office; the dysfunctional character of American and European national security; and the comparative effectiveness of the Mossad. The book and the world intersect at every point.

It is interesting to note that Silva’s novels are tailor-made for the Hollywood film industry, yet not one has appeared in the theaters. It is not difficult to see why. As in real life, his terrorists are Muslims, members of a socially protected species. When it comes to the entertainment industry, a toxic amalgam of abject pusillanimity and leftist sympathies, along with dark infusions of Arab cash, has had its predictable effect on filmic integrity and patriotic sentiment. One recalls that the movie version of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears transforms the novel’s villains, a sect of actual Palestinian terrorists known as the PFLP, into a collection of Austrian fascists—safe, acceptable bad guys. Given their inseparable interweavings with geopolitical reality, Silva’s plots are thankfully immune to such deceptive meddling. Timorous and morally compromised, Hollywood will not violate the shibboleths of the day or offend its twin masters: progressivist culture and Islamic money. As usual, the iron grip of political correctness is, well, iron.

The same wariness is true of our literary critics who are often careful to hedge their bets. Robert Fulford, for example, a belvedere eminence for the National Post, penned a laudatory review of The Black Widow, but could not help pressing the right virtue-signaling buttons. Silva’s fascinating hero, Israeli operative and future head of the Mossad Gabriel Allon, may be “the James Bond of Israel.” Nevertheless, though sympathetic with Allon’s fight “for his country’s future existence,” Fulford considers it necessary to comment in passing that we “see everything from the standpoint of the Israelis,” as if we didn’t see everything from the standpoint of the British in the Bond novels, or from the perspective of the Americans in Berry’s works, or of the Thai in Burdett’s Sonchai Jitpleecheep series, and so on. He plainly would not have felt obliged to qualify his approval had there been any other national polity in play.

In December 2000 Steven Carr, a special agent in the FBI’s counterintelligence unit in Washington, D.C., received a parcel from the bureau’s New York City office. It contained stolen American military secrets that had been passed on to the New York FBI by an informant in the Libyan consulate. The secrets had been mailed to the consulate along with encrypted cover letters from an individual who, the bureau would conclude, clearly worked in an American intelligence organization. The letter-writer offered to supply Libya with more secrets in exchange for money. Carr was assigned the job of finding the anonymous renegade. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s “The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets” is an excellent, highly engrossing account of the search for a man who was cunning, avaricious—and a dreadful speller.

The FBI’s target turned out to be Brian Patrick Regan, a most improbable traitor: He was a former Air Force master sergeant whose last assignment before retiring from the military was at the National Reconnaissance Office, a secretive agency “responsible for managing the nation’s spy satellites.” Regan was born in 1962 and raised on Long Island by strict Irish Catholic parents. His life was troubled from an early age because he was dyslexic. His behavior and speech were peculiar, and even his “friends” mocked and harassed him. But he had a gift for “spatial intelligence” and a “knack for stealth” (as a teenager he burglarized a neighbor’s house). He also cultivated a desire to overcome his problems and make something of himself. When he was a high-school senior, he cheated on a military aptitude test and scored high enough to allow him to enlist in the Air Force. After basic training he was assigned to study signals intelligence and analysis, and notwithstanding his past shoddy schoolwork, he succeeded, working harder than he ever had to master his lessons. As an intelligence analyst, Mr. Bhattacharjee writes, he discovered that his disability was actually an advantage: Dyslexics’ “global view helps them make connections between disparate pieces of information and recognize patterns in data that might elude more linear thinkers.”

The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell

By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
New American Library, 292 pages, $27

Over the next two decades, Regan married, had children and earned modest promotions in the Air Force while being educated in modern spycraft. He participated—from the Pentagon—in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. In 1993 he received his last promotion, to master sergeant, and won a medal for “outstanding leadership.” The following year, he started work at the National Reconnaissance Office. It seemed, to his family and childhood acquaintances, as if Regan had made a success of his life.

But all was not well. His posting to the NRO was like a return to his dismal past: Regan’s new colleagues, smarter and better educated than he was, quickly noticed his intellectual idiosyncrasies and treated him with disdain. Moreover, “with a take-home income of less than $40,000 a year, he was . . . in dire financial straits.” His marriage was also eroding. And so early in 1999, a year from retirement, seething with resentments and bitterness, he decided to prove, at least to himself, that he was smarter and more proficient than the world ever imagined: He would sell military secrets to enemy states, earn millions of dollars—and get away with it.

As it turned out, stealing classified material was shockingly simple. Since Regan had the proper clearances at the NRO, he had access to Intelink, a supposedly highly secure network restricted to intelligence agencies. With “ridiculous ease . . . [Regan] was able to print and copy a vast number of classified documents,” Mr. Bhattacharjee writes—over 20,000 pages (including duplicates), as well as CD-ROMs and videotapes—though he repeatedly misspelled search terms (“Libia,” “Lybia”). He “walked out of the NRO building, day after day, with classified materials hidden in his gym bag.” Ironically, Regan’s reputation as something of an oaf meant that his fellow workers paid no attention to what he was doing. After he retired from the Air Force in August 2000, he was hired by the defense contractor TRW—which sent him back to work at the NRO in what was essentially his old job. And so he continued to steal documents from Intelink.

Regan’s goal was to acquire classified material that would be of great interest to certain enemy states—Libya initially and eventually Iraq and China. (He thought that Russia leaked too much information about American traitors.) He stored some of his cache in a credenza at work and in public lockers. But the most sensitive secrets were buried in 19 packages in two parks in Virginia and Maryland. If the authorities discovered what he was up to, these hidden stockpiles would, he believed, serve as bargaining chips for leniency.

In mid-November 2000 Regan mailed the Libyan consulate three packages containing examples of the kind of material he was willing to provide for the price of $13 million. His cover letters and instructions were in code, but he provided decoding advice in the same package. This is puzzling. Regan didn’t seem to consider that if the authorities obtained the parcels they would have clues to trace the traitor. Which is exactly what happened. A few weeks after Regan sent his packages, a mole in the consulate conveyed them to the FBI, and they ended up on the desk of Special Agent Carr. CONTINUE AT SITE

In the 20 years or so since the term “public intellectual” became current, the members of this self-appointed club seem to have learned nothing from their failure to predict the collapse of communism or make sense of its aftermath. They didn’t see 9/11 coming, nor the 2008 financial crash, nor the Arab Spring. In the past two years they missed the emergence of Islamic State, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and, most recently, Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump.

Not all public intellectuals have been wrong about all these events, of course, but their consensus has been so misguided so often that the public they claim to enlighten might recall the biblical image of the blind leading the blind.

Frank Johnson, the late editor of the London Spectator, once asked: “What exactly is a public intellectual?” His answer was mischievous: “Is it the same principle as a public convenience? Excuse me, officer, I’ve been caught short conceptually. Could you direct me to the nearest public intellectual?”

The volume of essays “Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits?” makes only tentative stabs at an answer. Michael C. Desch, the editor, quotes a number of definitions of which the best seems to me to predate the concept. Some 70 years ago, Lionel Trilling—one of the greatest examples of the species—lauded “the impulse to insist that the activity of politics be united with the imagination under the aspect of the mind.”

Alas, such an impulse is not much in evidence here. Rather, what we have is a collection of conference papers animated less by any concern for the commonweal than by the self-importance of the modern academy. The subtitle of the book indicates the narrowly institutionalized limits of the authors’ conception of the intellectual life. For them, a public intellectual is either a professor or a pundit, and very often a professorial pundit.

Yet most of the intellectuals in the history of Western civilization who would have met Trilling’s definition have been neither professors nor pundits. Many have been poets: From Dante to Goethe, from Homer to T.S. Eliot, poets have exercised a profound influence on political thought. That, after all, is why Plato sought to ban them in his “Republic.” Yet poets, and indeed men and women of letters in general, are conspicuous by their absence from this book.