Question: Why a Soviet Union hero? Why not a Brit or American or any country but Russia?
Answer: My heroes have always been people who grow up in a system advocated to them, forced on them is maybe truer, by their parents and schools. We all have to rebel against “everything,” so we all have that story in common. My hero, Nikolai Semenov, is a youth who hungers to be a KGB officer by blindly following in the footsteps of his father and uncles, all KGB officers. Plus, there's his wife, Yulia, the daughter of a KGB officer. The challenge for God Save the Spy was to construct a world where a KGB officer such as Nikolai, who knew only KGB, would even want to cross over. Could decide to “become” British. These are the stories that move me, the stories about people who overcome a set of beliefs to become something better. Our beliefs are more challenging to overcome even than some terrible diseases, because one is about “I” or our essence, while the disease is just physical. Is being British better than being Russian? I didn’t say that. But being free, in my experience, is something I would never give up for ideology. Would you?
Question: Why should God save the spy?
Answer: Because we need to know what our enemy is thinking.
Question: What was the most challenging part of writing this book?
Answer: First, I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. It scared the living hell out of all of us. TV was three channels at the time, with no endless talking heads to help us understand like they do today, so we were left with images of world leaders saying terrifying things without predictive analyses--we knew the worst was yet to come.
The hardest part of this book was capturing those moments of terror where it’s happening offstage. I’m talking in a literary sense here, from the viewpoint of the writer. The day's real story was the Kennedy brothers, McNamara, Rusk, Macmillan, Khrushchev, and the headliners. In retrospect, we find, like we always do, that other players lent intelligence to the moving parts. Spies like the real Oleg Penkovsky, who told Kennedy about the Soviet plans and weapons. Were there critical pieces of that which Penkovsky did not know that Kennedy had to know anyway? Enter my fictional hero, Nikolai Semenov, who did know those special things and was willing to reveal them because he had overcome his entire system of beliefs and exchanged those for freedom of expression. And freedom to take a vacation without spies following you to Yellowstone to watch Old Faithful just for the heck of it. Nikolai had the goods Kennedy needed, leaving me with a story to tell. As I’ve said before, my stories operate in the seams, the interstices where history has left an opening.
Question: Are we going to be seeing more of Nikolai Semenov?
Answer: Definitely. Next, when we take up his story, he’s a widower, living in England, 33 years old, with a young daughter, and thinking about—maybe even obsessing about—the men who murdered the wife he loved, his Yulia. The problem is, those men are in Russia, and he’s in England. Which rules them out, unless, and until, the British foreign spy service, MI6, taps him on the shoulder and asks him if he’s interested….