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The Cypriot Agent: A Cold War Novel of Foreign Intrigue

1974 – Charged by the Justice Department and the FBI with espionage and facing arrest in Washington, D.C., the CIA intervenes and allows the Soviets to recall Marina Kovalev known as Brenda Farber, a Soviet mole in order to avoid the embarrassment of revealing to the world that the U.S. had been duped. Now the CIA sets in motion a covert action to board the vessel returning her to the Soviet Union at its final port of call in Famagusta, Cyprus and there deal with her once and for all.

As the Agency plots the slow progress of the freighter across the Atlantic and into the Eastern Mediterranean the ouzo flows and the cigarette smoke swirls in the Constantia Taverna in Famagusta. There the Agency’s hired Cypriot assassin Georgios Spyrou and his former sidekick, Manos Pavlou, who wants in on the action, debate the risks of the assignment and how best to carry it out.

On the ground for the CIA is Orville Middleton, an officer under non official cover who recruits Spyrou, a former British MI6 hit man .

However an hour away, in the capital city of Nicosia, and behind the closed doors of the Soviet Embassy, countermeasures are being put into play by the KGB Rezident. Suspecting the Americans intend to somehow double-cross them Kovalev is secreted off the freighter in Istanbul and flown home.

But when Spyrou and Pavlou finally board the Soviet bulk freighter Komsomolets Smolensk in Famagusta they are ambushed by the forewarned crew and overpowered. From Moscow to the KGB Rezidentura comes instructions the surviving Cypriot hit man is to be transported to the Soviet Union for interrogation.

Spyrou is jailed aboard the Nikolayev, an 8,500-ton Kara-class large anti-submarine warfare ship of the Soviet Navy’s Black Sea Fleet and brought to Novorossiysk. There, in the naval base town on the Black Sea, a KGB interrogator awaits. He has orders to break the Cypriot and learn about the plot while awaiting instructions from Moscow.

The Italian Couple: Intrigue, deception and sabotage in Mussolini's Italian Eritrea

J.R. Rogers

"This suspenseful combination romance and espionage thriller centers on a married couple in despair in Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini’s rule. The novel’s pacing is skillful and precise, leading ultimately to an unforeseen and terrifically satisfying ending.” Publisher's Weekly

Nazilager: Intrigue, romance and murder at a Nazi POW camp on a Georgia coastal island.

J.R. Rogers

1943— Obersturmbannführer Lt. Colonel Carl von Glasow and his fellow battle-weary officers of Rommel’s 15th Panzer Division, Afrika Corps, have endured the humiliation of surrendering to the Allies in Tunisia. Resigned to riding out the war in a North African prisoner of war camp they are surprised to learn they are being shipped instead to a U.S. Army POW camp in America. Nothing prepares them for the vivid contrast between the burning sands of the Tunisian desert and the murderous tank wars they waged there and the small, peaceful and idyllic Georgia coastal island town of Sorrel Island.

During the summer the population swells as mainlanders from nearby Savannah alight from the daily Central of Georgia trains or drive over the causeway in their Ford Deluxe Fordors and Chrysler 66s. Vacationers flock to the pristine beaches, revel in the cool saltwater breezes, and enjoy the amusement pier with its Ferris wheel and the music pavilion that host traveling big band tours.
Referred to as the “Nazi camp” by the locals, and Nazilager by the inmates who still proudly wear their sand-colored desert fighting uniforms their presence incites disturbing emotions. The coastal islanders are nervous about sharing their idyllic community with prisoners of war. Though they couldn’t feel further away from the ravages of the far away war they are not immune from it. The persistent chatter on the beaches and in the hotels and rooming houses is now the likelihood of a prisoner escape.

When on the first day a German escapee is shot in broad daylight a groundswell of opposition and fear from vacationers and year-around residents erupts. Young first-term town council president and mayor Connie Hopkins does her best to assuage their fears all the while confronting her own feelings when Major Bill Ferguson, the camp’s assistant commandant, launches a campaign to seduce her.

Meanwhile behind the fences and guard towers, and inside their wooden barracks and mess halls, several renegade Nazi officers embark on a plan to escape to neutral Argentina. And when Lt. Colonel von Glasow learns of the plan his mettle is tested as he makes the most fateful decision of his life.

Mission to Morocco: A World War II Spy Novel

J.R. Rogers

1944 – Colonel Ferdinand Hecht, who poses as a consular diplomat stationed in Casablanca, French Morocco, is in reality an SS officer with the Gestapo’s SD Afrika Intelligence Group. He directs a network of French spies reporting on American navy blimps operating from their Port Lyautey base against U-boats prowling the Straits of Gibraltar and coastal French Morocco.
America’s wartime intelligence agency the OSS is handed the task of dismantling the network and Lieutenant Sam Bradford arrives aboard a blimp of the Navy’s Africa Squadron to kidnap its suspected leader and transport him to London for interrogation. Under cover as a war correspondent, Bradford’s dogged investigation reveals a trail of local townspeople whose counterfeit demeanor masks their true allegiance to the Nazi spymaster. Intrigue, deception, and willful betrayal plunges the American lieutenant into a vortex of lies as the tentacles of the spy ring are uncovered, while embarking on a brief love affair with one of the suspects in the depraved Moroccan paradise.
Rich with atmosphere and period detail, the intrigue is played out against the northwest coastal town of Port Lyautey on the Sebou River where, in the dusty streets and alleys and in the byzantine Medina of this small colonial seaside town, the French influence is evident, but the compelling force is Arabic and overwhelming.

Doomed Spy

J.R. Rogers

1960 – From Leopoldville, to Antwerp to the quiet South American capital of Montevideo, Uruguay, Doomed Spy is a psychological spy thriller set in an unconventional distant posting at the height of the Cold War.

At the center of the intrigue are three Cold War intelligence officers: Edgar Davies, a near retirement British MI6 officer posted to Montevideo under non-official cover to coordinate the defection of a determined Anastas Molotov a KGB officer who had befriended him last year in Africa. And across town operating from his secure attic command post in the Italianate mansion that is the Soviet Embassy is the KGB Rezident, Colonel Oleg Nadiensky.

Davies and Nadiensky are seasoned operatives in the opaque clandestine world of espionage. To the casual eye, and on the diplomatic cocktail circuit where the two are never seen together, the Britisher is not what he seems. He has close secret ties to the Rezident who recruited him years ago in Belgium as a double agent.

Nadiensky rules a disgruntled and unhappy team of intelligence officers with an iron fist but is considered an uncommonly successful spymaster by Moscow: he and Edgar Davies have been reunited, the mayor of Montevideo is a Soviet illegal, and Molotov has managed to ingratiate himself with the stewards of the Platte River Yacht Club, an important members-only purveyor of sailing, gastronomy, sports, and social events.

Davies, however, rather than continue to feed the Soviets British secrets as he had in the past has become disenchanted with his life’s work, and wants to defect to the Soviet Union. There, he tells the Rezident, he envisages a new life with new, important friends in a vibrant, beautiful capital city he has never even visited. He doesn’t dare whisper its name, or even utter its simple two-syllable name except to his wife and to his handler, though he claims he can often see clearly in his mind the many picture postcard views of its skyline he has so often admired.

The intricate chilling details of the eventual betrayal of the MI6 officer by Soviet intelligence ends climactically in faraway Moscow.

Leopold's Assassin

J.R. Rogers

1902 – It is a cold and rainy Saturday morning the 15th of November in Brussels, Belgium. Gennaro Cataldo, an Italian anarchist, has traveled incognito to Brussels from London and Paris. In the Belgian capital he plans to assassinate Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Positioning himself on a roof Rubino fires repeatedly at King Leopold’s carriage as the cortege, returning from a memorial service for the King’s deceased wife, passes below. Unable to determine whether or not he succeeded, Rubino escapes to France.

We find Cataldo hiding in Brittany, living with his sister in wooded Saint-Enogat, a hamlet adjoining Dinard, France, a then fashionable seaside resort of stunning cliff top villas, a fabulous casino and a burgeoning art colony favored by American and British aristocrats and European royalty. Descending on Dinard every summer, they occupy the only first class hotel in town rather than rent villas, give lavish parties for one another and, in the evenings, book every restaurant in town.

But when Cataldo learns that Leopold II, accompanied by his nineteen-year old mistress, will be arriving in Dinard aboard his yacht to gamble at the famous casino he jumps at the chance. He aims to finish what he failed to accomplish that day in Brussels.

The murderer flees first to Peru aboard The City of Bruges a transatlantic steamer sailing from the walled city of Saint Malo across the bay. Once aboard he attempts to fit in with a hoard of thieves and crooks and con men who, like him, are escaping to South America to find new adventures and to remake their lives.

But close behind comes George Remi, a well-funded and determined Belgian Secret Service detective who has set off from Brussels to bring Rubino to justice.

Unprepared for a life on the run Cataldo treks across Latin America in search of a refuge but in the end he makes the mistake of his life by deciding to settle in Kourou, French Guiana, the overseas capital of the French colonial penal system and infamous Devil’s Island.

The Counterfeit Consul

JR Rogers

1916 – Gerard Le Caillec, a French intelligence officer with the Foreign Intelligence Section is trying to rescue his moribund career. In a calculated move he applies, and is selected, for an assignment his superior warns could become a career enhancing proposition or quite possibly the end of his career.

It is April 1916 and Le Caillec is sailing to New York City to take over the position of overseas resident officer. His mission hatched in Paris is to set in motion a sabotage operation, the destruction of armament warehouses on a Hoboken, New Jersey pier.

Set against a portrait of prewar New York City, WWI is raging in Europe but America is still neutral. The spymasters in the French capital want to pressure the Americans to put an end to their highly profitable practice of manufacturing munitions for the Germans, which are in turn being used against them on the battlefields of Europe. Operating out of the Upper East Side French consulate on Fifth Avenue, Le Caillec has his sights set on recruiting a bankrupt young French-American investment banker named Armand Barsoum to place the explosives on the docks.

Recently immigrated to New York from Paris, Barsoum is an inveterate handicapper and crippled by a crushing debt owed to a notorious bookie known as the ‘meanest man in New York.’ Le Caillec extorts Barsoum’s help by agreeing to pay off his markers and to stand behind any further losses. But Barsoum balks. He wants to become an American citizen but worries his extorted cooperation by French intelligence will lead to his discovery as a saboteur and jeopardize both his immigration application and his employment in the ‘white shoe’ firm that employs him.

But just as the plot is finally taking shape the Military Attaché at the Imperial German Consulate learns of it from a romantic interest of Barsoum’s, and makes immediate plans to deal with it.

Chapters on Country Banking ...: Part one, Volume 9

J. R. Rogers

Chapters on Country Banking ... Part one. Third edition

J. R. ROGERS (of New Cross, Surrey.)