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.
