Stories From the Cold War’s Landscape

In 1969, Joseph Kanon visited some buddies from Cambridge University who were working at the British Embassy in Prague. He found one of Europe’s most elegant cities covered in soot. But the mood among people was even more glum. Just the year before, Soviet tanks had rolled into the country and crushed Czechoslovakia’s effort to create “socialism with a human face.” People walked outside for private conversations to escape the reach of listening devices.

“There was an infinite sadness of dashed illusions,” Kanon recalls. “My God, it’s the true face of communism. It was a real Cold War landscape. Guard towers. Barbed wire. Lines for carrots. And yet side by side there was a real intense, vibrant cultural life. The layers of richness were fascinating.”

Thirty years later, Kanon has gone back to Prague, revisiting the same political-social landscape as the setting for much of his latest novel, “The Prodigal Spy” (Broadway Books, 1998). The story opens during the height of the postwar Red scare in Washington. Ten-year-old Nick Kotlar’s father, Walter, is a State Department official accused of being a spy--the big fish on the line of an ambitious Communist-catcher senator. But, unlike most of the literary and cinematic hagiography on the McCarthy era, Kotlar turns out to be guilty--defecting to the Soviets on the same day that the star witness against him falls to her mysterious death.

Jumping to 1969, Nick Kotlar is still trying to make sense of his past when he gets a summons to visit his father in Prague, where Walter Kotlar tells him that he wants to come home--and is prepared to give up the name of a high-ranking American still spying for the Soviet Union. The plan goes horribly awry.

“It began as a sort of crime story,” Kanon says. “I wanted to take it a step further when history itself is a crime. What fascinated me was the lives of those caught up. What happens after he defects? What happens to their families? What happens if this spy wanted to come back?”

Like Prague, the book is richly layered. On the surface it’s a Cold War thriller, a spy story with the requisite romantic interest and a chase on a train. It also expertly mines the historical territory, evoking McCarthyite Washington and Communist Prague, suggesting how the warping influence of the Cold War caused both sides to crack down on dissent while realizing the moral difference between publicly hectoring witnesses at congressional hearings and murdering enemies of the state.

And then there are the personal dilemmas that transcend geopolitics: the tangle of loyalties between a father and son--the conflicting tugs of patriotism, parental fidelity and fealty to one’s own ideas--that ultimately leave the reader unsure of just who the bad guys are.

In short, it has the same mix of ingredients that made Kanon’s first novel, “Los Alamos” (Broadway Books, 1997), a monster hit that won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best first novel and a good run on the New York Times bestseller list with 850,000 copies in print.

From Coal Country to Cambridge

Not bad for a guy who didn’t even know he wanted to be a writer until four years ago. Kanon, 52, grew up in the coal country of Pennsylvania, the son of a miner and a factory worker. He went to Harvard on a scholarship, graduating in 1968 and then spending two years at England’s Cambridge University before he landed a job at the Atlantic Monthly reading manuscripts from the slush pile. He worked his way into book publishing, winding up as president and CEO of Dutton and then becoming the executive vice president of Houghton Mifflin.

“I was not secretly always wanting to be a writer,” says Kanon, who still looks more like a businessman in a dapper (if tieless) suit than a writer type. “I didn’t have manuscripts in the drawer. I loved publishing.”

Then in 1995, Kanon found himself touring the town of Los Alamos, N.M., on the 50th anniversary of the birth of the atom bomb.

“Nothing remains from 1945,” he recalls. “You literally have to re-create what happened in your mind. There’s no physical evidence of what happened. What must that have been like? The average age of the scientists was 27. This was the Silicon Valley of 1945. What an interesting place. This was the most secret place in the world. This was a place that did not officially exist. What would happen if there were a crime?”

To the publishing veteran, it sounded like a good idea for a book.

“Who can I give the idea to?” he wondered. “Is there anyone I’m working with who needs an idea? But no one is as interested in it as I am.”

Publishing Exec Turns Author

Kanon decided to write the book himself. After leaving Houghton Mifflin, he had taken six months off before he was to start a job at another publisher. So every day Kanon took the subway from his Manhattan apartment to the New York Public Library, where he scratched out a novel on yellow legal pads.

The story starts with the discovery of a slain security officer from Los Alamos. Is it a common crime or a threat to the security of the Manhattan Project? An Army intelligence officer thrown into the investigation soon discovers that a Communist spy ring has infiltrated the mesa. But he also finds that the moral topography of the bomb-building effort is more complicated than he could have imagined.

One of the book’s most intriguing characters is Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist leading the project. Kanon originally expected just to give Oppenheimer a walk-on role but soon found the scientist stealing the story.

“He embodied everything that interested me about the story,” Kanon says. “There’s ego and patriotism. Yet he’s one of the people who has the moral sensitivity to understand the consequences that we’re still dealing with.”

When the book was done, Kanon called up a literary agent friend and told her he had a manuscript he would like her to look at. He didn’t say who the writer was. Kanon dropped off the bundle on a Friday, and the following Monday the agent called to ask him if he wrote it.

“If you liked it, I did,” he said.

The pair submitted the book to publishers without giving the author’s real name.

“What could be more embarrassing than a publisher who can’t write?” asks Kanon, whose wife is literary agent Robin Straus (the couple has two teenagers). “I’d have been laughed out of parties from one side of town to the other.”

But the editor who eventually acquired the book guessed who had written it when he came across a telltale Kanon line: “No good deed goes unpunished.” Which wound up being something of a leitmotif for the novel: the story of nuclear scientists who create an awful weapon to end one war, only to see the bomb become the shadow of a different kind of global conflict.

Book Draws Wide Acclaim From Critics

Kanon’s evocation of time and place and his feel for ethical nuance were a hit with reviewers.

“A historical drama of excitement and high moral seriousness,” opined the New York Times. “The book is reminiscent of Lionel Trilling’s ‘The Middle of the Journey,’ only with a plot, action and color,” raved the San Francisco Chronicle. “Like Trilling’s book, written at the beginning of the Cold War, Kanon has crafted a story about the clash of political commitments and friendship, about utopian strivings and the messy means required to serve such an absolute master.”

The new book is a sequel of sorts. “Los Alamos” ends with Oppenheimer saying, “I’m going to hope for the best.”

“The best,” Kanon says, “didn’t happen.” The Cold War did. And Oppenheimer was one of its victims, a frequent target of arch anti-Communists who doubted his loyalty because of his radical past, and ultimately revoked his security clearance. The second novel starts in this milieu of McCarthyism.

“This was the most sustained assault on civil rights we’ve ever known,” he says. “Young people in particular are not aware of the scope and scale of this. McCarthy was just one player.”

Indeed, when “The Prodigal Spy” opens, Richard Nixon is a young congressman just making a name for himself by his energetic pursuit of Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of being a Soviet spy whom most historians now believe was guilty. When the book jumps to 1969, Nixon is president. And, in both periods, J. Edgar Hoover is head of the FBI. Early in the story, Hoover is one of Walter Kotlar’s persecutors; in the end, Nick Kotlar must go to the director for help.

Novel Includes Historical Figures

“I wanted a story that could have happened on a parallel line with the story we know,” Kanon says. Which is why the book is peppered with references to historical figures from the Cold War. People like Whittaker Chambers, the conscience-stricken ex-Communist spy runner whose charges of espionage against former State Department official Alger Hiss rocked America at mid-century. Or Elizabeth Bentley, the Vassar graduate who fell in love with a Russian agent in New York, became his helpmate and then took over the spy ring after his death.

“The real difficulty is making it plausible. Real-life accounts are often like bad spy novels. You couldn’t create a character like Whittaker Chambers.”

Like Richard Wright’s anti-Communist novel “The Outsider,” Kanon’s book has a blunt, ugly ending that mocks the dream of a better world that set the story in motion in the first place.

“How do you judge?” Kanon wonders. “How do good people do the right thing for the right reasons and create appalling legacies? The father is constantly torn. The man is a traitor. He loves his son. Both things are true. They don’t cancel each other out. The endless tragedy of this family was all put in place by trying to do the right thing.”

Kanon has plans for a third novel set again at the dawn of the Cold War, a period he is clearly fascinated with.

“It just seems to be the linchpin of the century,” he says of the early postwar years. “Everything had consequences. People’s lives had more gravitas.”

But he’s not trying to wax romantic about an era that is hotly debated by scholars even as a flood of archival evidence washes away the innocence of many former icons of the Left.

“The Cold War was not particularly fun or enjoyable,” says Kanon, although he can talk engagingly about it for hours, his expressive face and bright eyes alive with the subject. “No one should feel nostalgic about it. The wall may be down, but the stories are still there. The Cold War stories go on forever.”