My promised follow-up mailing on Simone Weil and Camille Paglia having already been posted on Friday last, this is just something that has been at the back of my mind for a while . . .
With all this talk of enhanced airport security and new ways of smuggling bombs aboard planes, it is surprising that nobody has dredged up the name of Charles McCarry.
McCarry was a former CIA operative who turned to writing spy novels back in the ‘seventies. His main character was one called Paul Christopher. They were very, very good reading—slightly sub-Le Carre—but still very good. They were also amazingly farseeing.
They envisaged the rise of the suicide bomber—in fact, McCarry has more recently claimed that he ‘invented the suicide bomber’—and, allowing for the ongoing dialectic of development between offensive measure and defensive counter-measure, he saw the ultimate bomber as being one in whom explosives were surgically implanted as a way of bypassing increased security.
He also wrote a slightly futuristic novel (I think this would have been back in the early ‘eighties) that involved the manipulation of a system of e-voting as a means of fixing an American presidential election.
I have not come across anything by him for a great many years, but, as far as I know, he is still alive and writing.
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