By
Neal ThompsonAs a long-time denizen of the nation's capital and a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, David Ignatius has, for a quarter of a century, had a front-row view of US politics and the cloak-and-dagger machinations of assorted spy agencies. That insider knowledge has fueled his brainy and all-too-believeable novels, the most recent of which, The Director, is an Amazon Best of the Month pick in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense for June. The book went on sale Tuesday, and already a movie is in the works, with Paul Greengrass (United 93, Captain Phillips, two Bourne films) set to direct.
We asked Ignatius about his top spy cities--where should an intrepid spy tourist venture?--and here he describes why Beirut, Hong Kong, Berlin and Moscow are his favorites.
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As a journalist and novelist, I've traveled the world for decades. Strangely, perhaps, I never carried a camera, so the images are stored in my head--harder to access than photographs, perhaps, but still vivid. Here's a list of my favorite spy cities. Like espionage itself, most of them are places between two worlds, where people can hide in the ambiguity and shadow between cultures.
Spying is often described as a world drawn in shades of gray, but these spy capitals are anything but colorless. One of the pleasures of writing spy fiction is that I get to revisit these places in my memory and, I hope, take readers along in my imaginary suitcase.
Beirut
Beirut was the setting of my first spy novel, Agents of Innocence, published in 1987, and it's the city that gave my baptism as a foreign correspondent. It's a place that haunts me still.
The center of today's Beirut is a stunningly modern city that straddles the curve of Beirut Bay, with the often snow-capped peaks of Mt. Lebanon visible in the distance on a clear day. A visitor wouldn't guess that this sparking downtown is built on the ruins of what was the chief battleground of the Lebanese civil war. An informal boundary known as the "green line" divided the Christian eastern half of the city from the Muslim west. It was guarded by snipers, and I still remember the terrified exhilaration of slumping down low in a taxi as it sped across this no-man's land.
Today, this central area--cleared of its rubble and brilliantly restored--houses the chicest boutiques and restaurants in town. But if I close my eyes at night, I can remember the electricity of sneaking along the quays of the port at city center, reporting a story about the piratical characters who kept commerce operating back then in what was sometimes a free-fire zone.
To the west of the downtown, along a bend in the Corniche, there's another ghost: The site of what was once the American Embassy. It was destroyed by a truck bomb in April 1983, in what I think of as the beginning of the war of terrorism that still envelops us. I left the embassy about 30 minutes before the bomb arrived. It's residential housing now, no trace of the dead bodies or the brave embassy staff. But when I close my eyes, I can see the ruins of the building, like a body stripped of its flesh.
Perhaps the greatest spy haunt in Beirut was the St. Georges Hotel. The British double agent Kim Philby propped up the bar there many a night before he defected to Moscow. So did legions of spies and journalists (and probably a lot back then who were both).You can imagine Philby, slight stutter in his voice, chatting with his mates as he maintained what was until his flight the most audacious lie in the history of intelligence.
The St. Georges still occupies the best piece of real estate in the city, but it's still in ruins from the civil war--a property dispute, evidenly, but it remains in its eerie rubble a bombed-out postcard of a Levantine playboy world that was obliterated by the civil war.
My Beirut will always have as its ground zero the Commodore Hotel off Hamra Street in the city's western district. Journalists stayed at the Commodore, and most especially, we drank there. George and Younis and the other barmen filled up the glasses at a bar ringed (it was always whispered) with intelligence officers from Syria, the PLO, Iraq, Iran and every other nation that preyed on the ruin of Beirut. Near the bar was the infamous parrot who could imitate the sound of incoming artillery shells, which were all too frequent until the civil finally ended in 1989. The telex machines were in the lobby, and I can remember the sound of my Martini glass as it rattled atop the metal frame of the machine as I punched my telex tape to send a story back home.
To the east in Qarantina was the headquarters of Bashir Gemayel's "Phalangist" Militia, known as the "Lebanese Forces. One of my Phalangist sources confided that he was secretly carrying on a love affair with a girl in West Beirut, sneaking her across the Green Line. A taste of Romeo and Juliet in Beirut. In a southern suburb, known as Fakhani, was the PLO's headquarters, a place where the Fedayeen's main activity, beyond suspicious quizzing of journalists, seemed to be smoking cigarettes.
Hezbollah now makes its headquarters a little further south; every time I go there to interview a Hezbollah official now, I remember what life feels like in a permanent war zone. And every time I travel to the modern, antiseptic airport, I remember the checkpoint on the way, where the Lebanese journalist Salim al-Lowzi was kidnapped, by Syrian secret police it was always rumored. He was found dead with his typing fingers cut off.
It may sound grim, but Beirut even in its worst days was a hauntingly beautiful city. I'd put it at the top of my itinerary for any adventurous traveler.
Hong Kong
Like Beirut, Hong Kong is a city between two worlds. For decades, it was the West's listening post on the vast, unknown interior of communist "Red China." A generation of CIA officers made their names running operations there. One of my favorites was a scheme to import cargo from the interior of China to Hong Kong, with the packages wrapped in newspapers from China's cities. That was how little we knew in those days: We even had to smuggle the newspapers.
Hong Kong is visually so stunning that its commercial frenzy is tolerable. Victoria Peak, densely packed with elegant residences for wealthy Chinese and expats, seems made for a spy movie; so do the frantic streets of Kowloon across the bay on toward mainland China; over the Peak is la dolce vita of the expat's colony in Repulse Bay. Though Hong Kong lost its status as a British colony in 1997, it maintains its own distinct flavor; the gaudy new skyscrapers of Shanghai don't have the intense and mysterious feel of Hong Kong. It's a city on the margins, where everyone is hustling something. It seemed weirdly appropriate that when Edward Snowden fled with his digital treasure chest of NSA secrets, he went first to Hong Kong.
John LeCarre set much of The Honourable Schoolboy in Hong Kong. It's not his best book, but the evocation of the garrulous inebriates of the Foreign Correspondents Club is on target. A spy tourist should visit, as well, the site of the old U.S. consulate on Garden Road, where a generation of China-watcher spies tried to make sense of China from those smuggled newspapers and other tidbits. British spies from the code-breaking GCHQ are said to have intercepted Chinese communications from a listening station at Little Sai Wan on the eastern edge of Hong Kong island. For a combination of neo-colonial elegance and the manic intensity of Chinese gamblers, it's hard to beat the racetrack of The Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, which legend has it MI6 used as a rendezvous point for its agents.
A last stop on the spy tour (for the hearty) is what's left of the "Walled City" in Kowloon, famously the home of Chinese Triad gangs. Robert Ludlum set part of The Bourne Supremacy there. He has a marvelous description of the place: "It is instantly sensed by the congested open market that runs along the street in front of the row of dark run-down flats-shacks haphazardly perched on top of one another giving the impression that at any moment the entire blighted complex will collapse under its own weight, leaving nothing but rubble where elevated rubble had stood." I was actually hired in the late 1980s by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer to write a treatment for a movie that would be set in the Walled City. Mercifully, I suspect, filmgoers were spared that one.
Berlin
No city embodied the stark divide of the Cold War like Berlin. It is unforgettably described in Le Carre's first great novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and the portrait of Le Carre's British agent Alec Leamas at the Berlin Wall in the final scene, betrayed on all sides, testified to Le Carre's belief that this was a struggle without heroes. His great Soviet spymaster, Karla, is said to have been based partly on Markus Wolf, the brilliant chief of the East German spy service.
Wolf wrote in his memoir, The Man without a Face, "The cynosure of our work was Berlin, where for most of the time the separation between the two systems was fixed in permafrost. Strategists and politicians on both sides assumed that if there was to be a third world war, Berlin was the most likely place it would begin."
If you visit Berlin today, you see none of the raw, post-1945 bleakness that made it the gray battlespace for the Cold War. As in Beirut, the center of the city has been transformed from a no-man's land into some of the finest architectural space in the world. On the terrace of the U.S. Embassy, next to Brandenburg Gate, I found myself in 2012 looking out at this jewel of the new, unified Germany and wondering if Le Carre's pessimism was warranted. Berlin today is so confident and free that you can't help thinking that long battle of the Cold War actually was worth it. It may have been a study in moral ambiguity, tactically, but the good guys won. In my office I have several fragments of the Berlin Wall. I look at them sometimes to remember the gash that was carved into the middle of what today is the most stylish city in Europe.
The spy tourist should visit the Brandenburg Gate, of course, and try to remember the world of "Checkpoint Charlie" that was the crossing point between east and west. An ambitious traveler could look for the former headquarters of the despised East German secret police, the Stasi, on Normannenstrasse in the eastern half of the city. I wouldn't know where to look for hints of the "Berlin Tunnel," the U.S.-led wiretapping operation that was blown by British spy George Blake. The Kurfürstendamm, the West Berlin thoroughfare that figured in so many spy stories, now looks a bit seedy. The fancy places have moved east. Finally, an espionage lover should surely stay at the Hotel Adlon, my favorite in Berlin and the scene of Philip Kerr's superb thriller novel, If the Dead Rise Not, featuring his hero Bernie Gunther, who worked as hotel dick at the Adlon during the Nazi era.
Moscow
Moscow is the epicenter of espionage, now and forever. The KGB and its predecessor, the NKVD, live on in the current Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR. In their patience and creativity, the Russians simply have no match in the spy world. Not for nothing are the world's greatest chess players also the world's best intelligence officers.
My memories of Soviet Moscow are of an unspeakably chilly Red Square, watching the guards at Lenin's Tomb breath vaporous icicles as they kept watch. Seeing the lavish boutiques now installed in the super-lux mall across the square, where the old pathetically dowdy GUM department store used to be, strikes me as sacrilege. But hey, what's wrong with capitalism and being filthy rich? From Red Square, I remember rushing back to my room at the National Hotel, then Moscow's showplace, wondering just how many bugs the KGB had planted in my room and those of other visiting journalists.
It's a delicious irony that the target-hungry CIA prepared the first reliable street maps of Moscow. I suspect some enterprising Russian could establish a lively business today showing off old CIA and MI6 dead drops used by agents like Oleg Penkovsky and Oleg Gordievsky, along with other spy sites. Visiting the sites of botched CIA meetings would probably take a day, in itself. The KGB's old headquarters at Lubyanka Prison, located at 2, Dzerzhinsky Square in the center of Moscow, is a chilling reminder of the past, but experts say that most of the real foreign spy work has been done for decades at Yasenevo, out toward the suburbs.
I've dined with pleasure at the Aragvi Restaurant, a Georgian spot said to be favored by Stalin, where Philby had dinner with Graham Greene, the British novelist, who had come to pay a visit (Since Greene was a former MI6 colleague of Philby's, this meeting gave rise to speculation that maybe, maybe Philby was really a triple agent). I'd love to see Philby's apartment, said to be located at 6, Trekhprudny Pereulok, but it probably belongs to an oligarch now, if it hasn't been torn down.
Today's Moscow is truly an oligarch's city. The swank hotels, led by the Baltschug Kempinski and the Ritz Carlton, are so far out of a novelist's price range that we're better off looking for a Russian version of AirBnB. Speaking of which, an Uber-like social media service for intelligence officers who need to find a dead drop or an accommodation address in a hurry might be a cracking good business!
--David Ignatius