Intercept, Titan Rain and Jack Ryan Jnr

I read a very interesting book entitled 'Intercept' by Gordon Corera over the weekend that tells the previously untold - and previously highly classified - story of the melding of technology and espionage. The story as such starts with Bletchley Park at the beginning of the second world war; this material is hardly 'previously untold' but it's always interesting to read it from a different source. This chapter also serves as background to the Cryptonomicon¹. From there, one reads about the various codebreaking developments over the years and how the world changed from using morse broadcast over the radio (even though the morse was encrypted) to the internet.

In doing so, author Corera makes a huge mistake that he would correct in a later book, entitled The Illegal: The Hunt for a Russian Spy in Post-War London. This book is about the Russian illegal, Gordon Lonsdale aka Konon Molody and how he, along with several of the spies that he was serving, was caught. A Russian defector codenamed Sniper informed the CIA who informed MI5 that the Russians had two very important spies in Britain; one in British intelligence, the other somewhere in the Navy. Furthermore, the navy spy had a name that sounded something like Huppkner - this turned out to be one Harry Houghton. He was followed and seen meeting with another man and transferring to him a carrier bag; this other man was followed as well. Later on, Lonsdale prior to going on holiday deposited various items in a bank vault; while he was away, MI5 got permission to access his items and found 'a complete spy kit' including a miniature camera, film and one time pads. In other words, the passage in chapter 5 that I am about to quote is wrong: The correlation of fragments of information with signals was the work of the real-life George Smileys, John le Carré’s fictional spy-hunter. These techniques would lead to Gordon Lonsdale, a Canadian jukebox salesman who was really Konon Molody, a KGB ‘illegal’ working under deep cover, and his contacts Peter and Helen Kroger, posing as antiquarian booksellers while they sent back to Moscow secrets provided by British traitors. John le Carré gets mentioned several times in this book.

Later chapters revealed to me the existance of an operation named Titan Rain about which I had never previously heard. This was the single most significant cyber espionage campaign in history [that] is thought to have stolen ‘terabytes’ of data from Sandia Labs, NASA and US defence contractors by 2004 (ten to twenty terabytes by 2007). These attacks originated in Guangdong, China. At this point I stopped and said to myself that this sounds familiar.

And indeed it does: it was basically the back story for the novel "Threat vector"² by Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney that even locates the Chinese 'Ghost Ship' in Guangdong. As this book was basically written by Greaney, it is taught and exciting. This put caused me to remember an earlier book of Clancy's called "The teeth of the tiger" that is the first Jack Ryan Jnr book. As this was written by Clancy alone, it is sorely in need of editing; I used to reckon that his books could be reduced in size by 30% and in doing so would improve them; this one needs to be reduced in size by at least 50% and then there might be something left that is worth reading.

I had never noticed this before, but the bad writing includes one of the worst or inane sentences that I have ever read in a book. The first sentence in chapter 11 is [t]he sun rose promptly at dawn. Excuse me?? What is the definition of 'dawn' if not when the sun rises? Of course it rose promptly! I cannot understand how an author could write such a sentence and why it was not edited out.

Another thing about this book that annoys me: characters are forever "lighting up" their computers (e.g. chapter 18, "Jack had lit up his computer". In real life, people turn on or reboot their computers. "Lit up" is also used in connection with cigarettes and even once someone's face "lit up". This shows a poverty of verbs. Actually, in connection with cigarettes, the correct form (at least in British English) is to light a cigarette or to light up (without the object, cigarette). But not to "light up a cigarette".

Internal links
[1] 368
[2] 1710

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This day in blog history:

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260	09/07/2010	The in-basket 2	Programming, In-basket, MDI
261	09/07/2010	The in-basket 2/A	In-basket, Robert Silverberg, MDI
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380	09/07/2011	Locarno log (6)	Holiday, Switzerland
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