The Charm School (2 page)

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.

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.

In retrospect, we can all be experts now and say we saw a wave of freedom sweeping the globe in the late 1980s—a new era of global information and communication and economic codependence, an unacceptable spiraling of weapons costs and an unwillingness of the people on both sides of the Iron Curtain to die in a needless war.

We can spend the next decade analyzing the reasons for the sudden collapse of the Soviet empire, but that may not be as important as trying to figure out where we’re all going from here.

Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, I’d written only two Cold War novels—
The Charm School
and
The Talbot Odyssey
—and my career and reputation weren’t tied closely to the continuance of the Cold War. Yet among some writers and some Cold Warriors, there is a certain nostalgia for the good old days when their services were needed and appreciated.

And maybe, on a certain level, the old Us versus Them thrillers can be enjoyed and appreciated as nostalgia. On another more important level, a book like
The Charm School
can be read and appreciated as a warning that the past is often prologue to the future—because if we forget what we all went through between 1945 and 1989, we are likely to repeat it some time in the not-too-distant future.

In any case, there must be something about this book that appeals to the reader because it’s been in continuous print since its publication and its sales have remained strong long past the demise of the system it portrays.

I’ve taken the opportunity to replace some material that was deleted in the original hardcover edition and also deleted in earlier paperback editions. Most of this material can be found in Chapters 3 and 23.

In Chapter 3, the deleted and replaced material is at the beginning of the chapter and was originally removed because it was felt that the scene gave away too much, too soon. I don’t think it does, and the reader can be the judge.

The material in Chapter 23 is an exchange between Colonel Sam Hollis and Lisa Rhodes, both of the American Embassy, and two American tourists, a man and his wife, both Brown University professors favorably disposed toward the Soviet system. Hollis and Rhodes, on the other hand, are on the run from the KGB. The dialogue among these four is amusing in that the American tourists are totally clueless about the predicament that their compatriots are in, and while the tourists are praising life in Russia, Hollis and Rhodes are expecting the KGB to show up and whisk them away. The original editor of
The Charm School
found something about this scene that she didn’t like—too political, I think she said. We argued; she won. But I’ve replaced the scene and again, the reader can be the judge.

When speaking of the old Soviet Union, it seems always appropriate to quote George Orwell’s
1984
, and as he said so brilliantly in that book, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” What I did
not
do, however, is to
change
anything I’d written in the past in order to make me look more clever about predicting what was to come in 1989. Other than replacing what had been deleted, and making a few grammatical and technical corrections, and the addition of this Author’s Foreword, the book in your hands is what I wrote in 1987–88.

I have heard from college instructors that they offer
The Charm School
as optional or required reading in English or Contemporary History classes, and in fact, an English teacher in my local high school assigns it every spring semester. This has caused my son and daughter, who’ve both taken the class, the extreme embarrassment of having one of their father’s books discussed aloud by their peers. They survived the experience and are both now in college where they can avoid a repeat of this trauma by carefully reading the course catalogue for any references to
The Charm School.

In 1994, I published
Spencerville
, which I describe as a post-Cold War novel. My purpose was to examine the life of a former Cold Warrior, Keith Landry, the book’s hero. Landry was a fairly typical product of his age—drafted into the army in the 1960s, fought in Vietnam, stayed in the service, and eventually wound up in the Pentagon doing intelligence work. As the book opens, Landry has been pushed into early retirement because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. His unique occupation is no longer relevant and he finds himself in his Saab on the road to his hometown, Spencerville, in rural Ohio. He’s going home, but home has changed and so has he and so has his country. This is a sort of nostalgic, bittersweet story of love lost and love found, of trying to rediscover roots, and trying to make sense of the past three decades, especially the turbulence of the 1960s.

The book worked the way most good postwar stories work, and I suppose I meant it to be a companion to
The Charm School
the way
The Odyssey
is a companion to
The Iliad.
The story of a returning soldier is obviously not new, but most novelists will tell you honestly that the war story is more interesting than the coming home story.
The Charm School
, then, written in the waning days of the Cold War, may have predicted the end of that era, but for all that any of us knew at the time, history could easily have gone the other way.

But enough about the present and the future—put yourself back in about 1988, pretend that the nuclear missiles are still targeting Moscow and Washington, New York and Leningrad, Peoria and Smolensk, and think about what James Kirkwood, author of
Good Times/Bad Times
and
Some Kind of Hero
, said: “
The Charm School
grabs hold of you, drags you off to the scariest Russia imaginable . . . and doesn’t let you out until the last page.”

Welcome to
The Charm School.

Nelson DeMille
Long Island, New York