A Spy's Guide to Spy Thrillers: The Parsifal Mosaic
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In 1982, Robert Ludlum published a spy novel. A week later, it was at the top of the bestseller list.
Hollywood has tried to film it for years. In 2009, Ron Howard was attached to direct. The film never got made.
This September, Hulu put a series into development.
The novel is The Parsifal Mosaic.
It’s a novel about a hard question in Source Analysis:
What do you do with new data that says the opposite of old data?
Michael Havelock works for a covert branch of the U.S. State Department.
His partner in the field is Jenna Karas. She’s also the woman he loves.
Then the evidence comes in. Jenna is a double agent. She works for the KGB.
He finds a key in her purse himself. The CIA verifies copies of everything in a suitcase. Her fingerprints are inside.
The data convinces him: she’s a double agent.
On a moonlit beach on Spain’s Costa Brava, Havelock watches a blond woman gunned down. She screams in Czech. He’s sure it’s Jenna.
He quits.
He travels.
He tries to forget.
In Athens, a senior KGB officer named Pyotr Rostov forces a meeting.
Rostov tells him Jenna never worked for the Soviets.
An enemy, telling a spy he’d been wrong about the woman he loved. Easy to dismiss.
Then, on a crowded railway platform in Rome, Havelock sees Jenna.
Alive.
She sees him, too.
And she runs.
Source Analysis asks questions.
Where did the source’s data come from?
How close was the source to what they described?
Then, the data goes into the DADA Chain.
And the analysis part of that does one more thing: It combines new data with what you already know.
Usually, the new data can be blended in with the old data.
Usually, the new data adds a little to the picture.
But sometimes, the new data doesn’t fit what you knew already.
Sometimes, the new data tells you the opposite of what you already know.
What do you do then?
Fortunately, Source Analysis gives you a way to decide.
You ask the same questions of both the old and the new data.
Where did each source’s data come from?
How close was each source to what they described?
What Havelock already knew about Jenna came from the closest source there was. Him. He worked beside her. He loved her.
The new data was a key, a suitcase and her fingerprints. He found the key himself.
Where did it all come from? Later, even the Secretary of State could only say it was “channeled to me.”
Havelock had seen all of that data. But he didn’t know where any of it came from.
Then Havelock tells his old agency what he saw in Rome. Which means they face a similar choice of Source Analysis.
Their old data is a report that says Jenna Karas died on the Costa Brava.
Their new data is a man who worked for them for years who says he saw her alive.
They let the old data win. Whoever the woman in Rome is, she can’t be Jenna. So she must be a Soviet plant, sent to drive Havelock out of his head.
And they decide it worked. Havelock is crazy. They mark him beyond salvage. A man to be killed.
And Jenna? She saw it the other way around. Havelock had sold out. He was the one trying to kill her.
Which is why she ran.
Two spies. Each was the closest source on the other. Each believed a story built by someone farther away.
When Havelock finally finds her, she’s being held in a cell on a farm in Pennsylvania. She attacks him. He tells her what was done to both of them.
Finally, she believes him.
Then she says: “I couldn’t believe them, yet I had to believe. It was there!”
The case against Jenna leads to the top of their own government. It was built by Havelock’s old mentor, the Secretary of State. And the trail runs on, to a man known only as Parsifal.
Source Analysis asks how close the source was to what they described.
The question is easy to ask about a stranger. It’s harder when the closest source is you.
Havelock knew Jenna better than anyone in his agency.
But he let a key and a suitcase overrule what he already knew.
Maybe someone brings you new data about a person you know well. A partner. A colleague of twenty years. An old friend.
It says the opposite of everything you’ve seen yourself.
Before the new data wins, you ask the questions of Source Analysis about both.
Where did each source’s data come from?
How close was each source to what they described?
Eighteen years before The Parsifal Mosaic came out, the CIA lived its own version.
In 1964, a KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko defected to the U.S.
Years before, an earlier KGB defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, had warned that the KGB would send false defectors. James Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, believed him.
What Nosenko said contradicted or played down what Golitsyn had already told the CIA.
There was a decision to make: Trust the old data (Golitsyn) or the new data (Nosenko)?
The old data won.
Nosenko spent more than three years in CIA confinement, much of it alone in a small cell. His story never changed.
The CIA later concluded he was exactly who he said he was.
But they had trusted the wrong data.
The Parsifal Mosaic is here.
The DADA Chain and Source Analysis are in A Spy’s Guide to Thinking.
-John Braddock
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