America's Favorite Israeli Spy Returns

The Defector By Daniel Silva Putnam 2009, $26.95, pp. 480

In the international spy thriller genre, the United Kingdom’s James Bond, 007, is the most famous. The United States has Paul Christopher of the CIA, the central figure in Charles McCarry’s excellent series. But Israel’s Gabriel Allon belongs with the best of them. The dark hero of the popular nine-novel series by the Washington, DC novelist Daniel Silva, Allon is an expert art restorer who is regularly and reluctantly brought back to risk his life as an assassin in the service of counter-espionage by the Mossad (aka the Office), Israel’s secret service. Silva’s works provide gravitas not usually found in thrillers, exploring Nazi looting of valuable fine art of Jewish collectors who perished in death camps, the dubious and complex role of the Vatican in World War II and the roots and remnants of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The latest novel, The Defector, shows Daniel Silva at the top of his form, using spy capers as story-telling vehicles on an international stage as real as life. Like its predecessor, Moscow Rules, the book examines the unholy alliance between the Russian oligarchy and the Russian mafia, which is for hire to Israel’s enemies. This time, Allon is brought back from his peaceful life in Umbria, where he has retreated with his new young wife and is restoring a valuable work of art, a 17th century altarpiece from the Vatican. He is implored to help find a missing Russian expatriate, a former intelligence officer who had been living in the UK. Allon can’t say “no” because this person once saved his life and helped him solve the crimes of Moscow Rules. He owes him a debt of honor. Allon knows that “traitors” in Russia, those who betray the power structure, end up in unmarked graves.

Allon’s nemesis is Ivan Kharkov, a larger than life villain who could have been scripted by Ian Fleming. A former KGB official, Kharkov is a corrupt and ruthless business magnate who deals arms with al-Qaeda and is protected by old KGB cronies in the Russian government. As in earlier books in the series, Allon collaborates with friendly competitive counterparts, including Adrian Carter, the cool and dapper CIA spymaster. The trail leads—as all Silva stories do— to colorful sites in Europe: Lake Como, Geneva, Zurich and Moscow.

Allon was originally recruited to the Mossad by his avuncular mentor, the irascible Israeli master spy Ari Shamron, “The Memuneh,” the one in charge. Allon, a child of Holocaust survivors, interrupted his career as an artist to command Operation Wrath of God, the hunting down and killing of five Arab terrorists who murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. After the patiently elaborate, worldwide plan of revenge ended successfully, Allon became a legend, paid a tragic personal price and was never able to decline another summons to retaliate against those who put Israel in jeopardy.

He is a loner, obsessive and skillful both in his preferred art restoration and in his black work, irresistible to the women he meets along the way. Gabriel is the author’s “able-bodied angel of God,” Israel’s biblical namesake who delivers a special message—an eye for an eye—to its enemies.

Silva does not romanticize Allon’s work. As Shamron once told Allon, “The old hands like to say that the life of an Office field agent is one of constant travel and mind-numbing boredom, broken by interludes of sheer terror.” Mostly, spying involves waiting: “The waiting... Always the waiting.... Waiting for a plane or a train. Waiting for a source. Waiting for the sun to rise after a night of killing.”

Behind every adventure in a Silva novel is the reminder of Israel’s fragile survival. “There wouldn’t be an Israel if it weren’t for men like Shamron,” Allon explains. “He was there at the creation. And he doesn’t want to see his life’s work destroyed.” When Allon hesitates about having a child, remembering the horror of his first wife’s death in a bombing (“trapped in a body that no longer functioned”) and his only child’s murder by terrorists, his young second wife says, “The best way to honor his memory is to have another child. We’re Jews. . .That’s what we do. We mourn the dead and keep them in our hearts. But we live our lives.”

The message of Allon and his cohorts is that luck is earned, never bestowed. As Shamron once told Gabriel, “I don’t believe in sitting around while others plot my destruction. It seems to me we have a choice. We can live in fear. Or we can fight back.” That is what we do, he continued, we kill, and “clean up the mess later.” Entebbe—the daring rescue by Israeli forces in 1976 of a plane hijacked by pro-Palestinian terrorists—is their marker. When Allon regrets that he is not a leader but an assassin, Shamron tells him, “You were a soldier on the secret battlefield. You gave justice to those who could not seek it themselves... The country needs you... [it] has lost faith in its political leaders. Our society is beginning to fray. The people need someone they can believe in.”

Ronald Goldfarb is an attorney, author and literary agent based in Washington, DC and Miami. He served in the Department of Justice under Robert F. Kennedy. He writes frequently on legal affairs.