Nelson DeMille
The Charm School
To the memory of
Joanna Sindel
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my half-blooded and full-blooded Russian friends, Nicholas Ellison, Nanscy Neiman-Legette, Nicholai Popoff, and Svetlana, my spiritual guides through the labyrinth of the Russian soul. And thanks, too, to Bob Whiting, who taught me to swear in Russian. And special gratitude to Ginny Witte for her devotion to this work and this writer.
MAP
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
On occasion, I find myself agreeing with the Washington Post. About The Charm School, they wrote, “Contemporary Cold War fiction doesn’t get much better than this.”
But the Cold War is over, so is The Charm School still relevant? That would be like asking if any war novel or historical fiction is relevant. One of the first war novels ever written, The Iliad, is still read almost 3,000 years after it first appeared, yet some recent novels about the Vietnam War and the Cold War have passed into oblivion, while others are still read and enjoyed. Obviously the question of relevance is not the right question. The question is, What makes for a good, timeless read? The answer, as we all know, is good writing, believable plot, interesting characters, realistic dialogue, suspense, mystery, romance, the battle between good and evil, and sometimes even a happy ending.
We also know that war spawns hundreds of novels, most of them written after the last shot is fired. But the Cold War, for some reason, has not inspired any major retrospective novels since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. It’s as though whatever was written contemporaneously, such as The Charm School, or Le Carré’s novels and Tom Clancy’s earlier books, or the thousands of other East versus West spy novels and nuclear Armageddon thrillers published between 1945 and 1989 are, and will be, the sum total of Cold War literature. The same can be said of motion pictures; with very few exceptions, Hollywood has not touched the subject in any significant way.
To be sure, tomes of nonfiction books, school texts, and film documentaries have been written and produced about the Cold War since it ended, but as an art form, the subject seems dead.
In any case, even if novelists don’t want to write about the Cold War, and movie producers don’t want to deal with the subject, what was written and filmed still has the ability to entertain and to educate.
The Charm School is set in the old Soviet Union. The time period is about 1988, and the premise, in a nutshell, is this: American Embassy personnel in Moscow learn of the existence of a Soviet spy school (the Charm School) that trains KGB agents to talk, act, look, and think like Americans. The reluctant instructors at the school are Americans — military pilots shot down and captured over North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. These pilots have all been listed as missing in action and their fate has been unknown for over a decade when the story opens.
I won’t give any more of the plot away, but I will say how I came upon this premise. I was an infantry officer in Vietnam in 1968. In April of that year, I was passing through Hue-Phu Bai Air Base and stopped in the Officer’s Club for a cold beer. The jet jockeys in the bar had rarely seen an infantry officer and I had rarely seen fighter-bomber pilots up close. They were interested in the life of a ground soldier, and I was interested in the life of jet pilots who dodged surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft fire between beers. Ironically, they thought my job was more dangerous than theirs, and I thought they must be suicidal to fly through Missile Alley on the way to Hanoi and Haiphong. In any event, during the conversation, one of the pilots remarked offhandedly about “the guys who were winding up in Moscow.” When I asked him what he meant, he explained, saying something like, “You know, the pilots who were seen bailing out safely and not showing up on POW lists or in Hanoi’s propaganda films.”
I replied, “The North Vietnamese aren’t necessarily giving out all the names of the guys they capture.”
This pilot replied, “No, because they’re sending some of them to Moscow. That’s the payoff for the Soviets giving them the SAM missiles.”
I recall being somewhat amazed by this statement.
The pilot continued, “The Red Air Force is using these guys to train their pilots in American tactics and in equipment capabilities.”
It made sense and I nodded.
Another pilot added, “Those guys will never come home.” He made a cutting motion across his throat.
This exchange stayed with me and when the controversy concerning American missing in action grew throughout the 1970s and ’80s, I made a point of watching for anything that resembled what I’d heard at Hue-Phu Bai in 1968. But I never saw anything written and never heard anything said about this possibility. Still, it haunted me, and this idea became the central premise of The Charm School.
The book was well received when it was published in 1988, and became a bestseller. The publication of the book also added some fuel to the fire of the MIA controversy, raising this new possibility of the Soviets being part of a conspiracy.
I received hundreds of letters asking me where I’d gotten this idea, what further information I had, and if I had any solid proof of what I’d written. Some of these letters were from families of MIAs and they were heartbreaking to read.
I worked for a while with some POW/MIA groups, and without going into agonizing detail, we made little headway in discovering anything concerning the fate of the MIAs. But I, like others, was convinced that there were at least some MIAs being held in the Soviet Union.
Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in the aftermath, there were some hints that Americans — not only from Vietnam, but from Korea as well — had been kept prisoner in the Soviet Union. But these sketchy reports from the former Soviet Union did not seem to pan out.
I would have to say that after all this time since the collapse of Russian communism, and the relatively open society that now exists, that if a significant number of U.S. servicemen had been imprisoned or are still imprisoned in the former Soviet Republic, we would have known about it by now. Or would we?
So, once again, is The Charm School relevant? I think, yes, if only because it accurately reflects those dark times when we all thought we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation. It is an insight into how we thought about the Evil Empire and how paranoid both sides were about the intentions of the other.
In 1986, I went to the Soviet Union to do research for The Charm School. After spending all my life living under this real or imagined threat — air raid drills in grade school, Civil Defense shelters, Dr. Strangelove-type movies, and so forth — I had no idea what to expect.
The reception at Moscow Airport was every bit as bad as I’d expected — too many questions, bag searches, bureaucracy, and general unpleasantness. I felt like I was in a Grade B Cold War movie.
But after about a week in Moscow, I realized that the people and the system were more to be pitied than hated. I remembered an expression I’d heard or read that went something like, “Russia is a Third World country with first-class weapons.” The theoretical danger of a world war was real, but the actual possibility that the Russians were willing to roll the dice seemed somehow remote.
By week two, in Leningrad, I became an instant expert on the Soviet Union and decided — either presciently as my reviewers would later say, or optimistically — that the Soviet Union had about ten years left before it imploded. I even made references to this in my novel, and without giving any page numbers where I said so, you can read for yourself where some of my characters make this prediction. As it turned out, the Soviet Union in 1986 had less than three years left to live. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Republics and eastern Europe sort of surprised me, but I wasn’t shocked.