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  A Conversation with Daniel Silva, Author of MOSCOW RULES Q: What are the Moscow Rules and are they real? A: They are real, and every spy and intelligence officer knows them. During the Cold War, Moscow was by far the toughest, most dangerous city in the world to work. So the CIA created a set of operating principles. They applied not only to Moscow but other rough stations and bases as well. When I started researching the book, I tried to find an official list of the rules, but I discovered from friends at the CIA that the agency never really bothered to write them down. I suppose they did that on purpose. Some of the rules are quite chilling: “Assume everyone you meet is under opposition control.” “Assume every telephone is tapped and every room is bugged.” Some are hysterical: “Murphy was right.” “Technology will always let you down.” My personal favorite is: “Don’t look back. You are never completely alone.” That rule serves not only as the epigraph of the novel but its spine as well. Q: Why did you pick Moscow Rules for the title? A: Without giving too much away, the villain of the book is one of those New Russian oligarchs we’ve all been reading about in the newspapers. His name is Ivan Kharkov. Before the fall of communism, he was a KGB officer. Now he’s a fabulously successful investor and businessman. He has mansions in Moscow, London, and the South of France, and he flies between them on his private jet. He has close friends in high places in Moscow, including the Russian president himself. But there’s a part of Ivan’s business empire he keeps carefully hidden from outside eyes. Ivan is the world’s biggest arms dealer, and he’s planning to sell some very dangerous weapons to some very dangerous people. Someone close to Ivan—someone who is surrounded day and night by bodyguards, someone who’s every e-mail and conversation is monitored—has risked everything in an attempt to stop the deal. The hero of my series, Gabriel Allon, needs to talk to this person. To do so, he has to operate under the Moscow Rules. What I was trying to do with the title and tone of the book was to take the iconography of the Cold War and apply it to a very human, present-day story. I wanted to create a sense in the reader’s mind that maybe things haven’t changed that much in Russia. Maybe a new tsar, a new Stalin, is running the place. The action at the end of the novel flows up and down a boulevard called the Leninsky Prospekt. I did that or a specific reason. Lenin is the man who inflicted communism on the Russian people, yet one of the most important avenues in Moscow still bears his name. Q: This is your eleventh novel and the eighth in your featuring spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon. Your thrillers take place all over the world, but this is the first time you’ve chosen to set a book in Russia. Why now? A: I suppose Russia has been calling me for a long time. I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage. I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy in college. I even wanted to work in Moscow as a foreign correspondent. But by the time I started writing novels full-time, the Cold War was over. I thought several times about writing a historical novel of the Cold War, but it didn’t feel right. I’d always enjoyed the challenge of trying to catch history in the act. I knew enough about Russian history to bide my time. I told myself to be patient. Eventually, Russia would find a new tsar and challenge us again. The new tsar turned out to be Vladimir Putin, and his critics were soon dying under mysterious and violent circumstances. When Aleksandr Litvinenko was murdered in London in 2006 with a lethal dose of polonium-210, I knew it was time for Gabriel Allon to go to Russia. Q: Before Gabriel Allon could go to Moscow, you had to go. You spent last summer there. What did you find? A: I absolutely fell in love with Moscow. Strange, because it’s not an easy place to visit. Just getting around the city can be a challenge because of the nightmarish traffic. But it’s one of those places where you can’t help but trip over history at every turn. And now, because of Russia’s newfound wealth, it’s a city of enormous contradictions. Within a few yards of Lenin’s Tomb is some of the most expensive shopping in the world. The city is filled with luxury cars, exclusive boutiques, and trendy restaurants. It’s as if the entire country is trying to make up for sixty years of lost time with an orgy of capitalism and consumerism. Every night, we watched Russian millionaires making deals in the bar of our hotel. They dressed in the latest designer clothing, spoke fluent English, and were surrounded by bodyguards who made no effort to conceal their weapons. There’s a reason why they call Moscow “the Wild East.” Needless to say, I found it to be the perfect setting for a thriller. Q: There’s a theme that runs through the novel, a sort of running joke between the characters about how everything in Russia is “the world’s biggest.” A:It really came to be a refrain wherever we went. World’s biggest hotel. World’s biggest bell. World’s biggest swimming pool. World’s biggest supermarket. One evening when I was returning to my hotel from a meeting, my driver looked at one of the old Stalinist towers that still dominate the Moscow skyline. “Europe’s biggest apartment building,” he said. Then he sighed heavily and added, “Everything in this country has to be the biggest, the tallest, the fastest, and the best. We cannot live as normal people.” The line really stuck with me, and I used it as the spine of the novel. Russians cannot live as normal people. Russia is not a normal country. Q: The action in Moscow Rules moves from one exotic locale to the next: Moscow, Italy, Israel, the Alps, the French Riviera, London. Did you spend a lot of time in those places? A: Thankfully, yes. That’s the best part of my job. For example, at the start of the story, Gabriel is staying at an isolated cattle farm in the hills of Umbria. My family and I were lucky enough to stay on a farm just like it as I was finishing The Messenger. I also spent a great deal of time chasing rich Russians around Western Europe, trying to get a glimpse of the way they’re spending their money. And I can report that they’re spending an enormous amount of it. Even a novelist can’t make this up. In Saint-Tropez, there’s a restaurant frequented by Russians where a caviar appetizer costs three thousand euros, about five thousand dollars. In Courchevel, I visited a restaurant where the manager told me about a group of Russians who had just spent three hundred thousand euros for lunch. That’s about a half million dollars. For lunch! My dedication to accuracy went only so far. I didn’t eat at these restaurants, but my characters had a fabulous time there. Our guides in Russia also told us several jokes that Russians like to tell on themselves about the extravagant spending of the New Russian millionaires. Our favorite was this one: A Russian millionaire buys a luxury Mercedes. The next week, he goes back to the dealer and says he wants to trade the car in for a new model. The mystified dealer asks, “What wrong with this one?” The Russian millionaire answers, “The ashtrays are full.” Q: You managed to get inside Lubyanka, the infamous former home of the KGB and current headquarters of its successor agency, the FSB. How did you get in, and what was it like? A: The truth is, I am still not sure how we got in, but it was the experience of a lifetime. We put in a request and waited. Finally, near the end of our stay, the call came. We were ordered to present ourselves at a side door of FSB headquarters, on Bolshaya Lubyanka Street, early on a Sunday morning. We were told not to be late. Waiting inside was a fit-looking colonel in his late fifties. He had a pleasant smile, and eyes that actually seemed to twinkle. He spoke only Russian, so our guide had to provide simultaneous translation. We followed him through darkened corridors and up darkened staircases. We didn’t get to visit the part of the building were where poor Gabriel ends up in the story—the notorious holding cells of Lubyanka—but it was still fascinating. Q: Is it true the KGB really has a private museum? A: Absolutely true. It’s near the offices that were once used by some of the KGB’s most notorious chiefs. No other intelligence service in the world has a history quite like the KGB’s, and for someone like me, a student of Russian history and espionage, the museum was Valhalla. It’s a surprisingly candid place, but it contains almost no evidence that the KGB had ever tried to spy on the United States. When I asked to see the exhibits dealing with the traitors Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, our guide only laughed. My favorite moment occurred when we stopped before a large album containing the official portraits of every KGB and FSB chief, beginning with Felix Dzerzhinsky. “He was shot,” the colonel said of one early chief. He turned the page. “He was shot… He was shot… He was shot.” At the next portrait, he paused for a moment. “Ah, this one was different.” He paused dramatically. “He was poisoned.” What more could I ask for. Q: Were there any other moments that stood out during your Moscow trip? A: I loved riding in gypsy cabs. You can walk to the curb of virtually any street in Moscow, stick out your arm, and twenty cars will pull over. You don’t know who the driver is, but you hop in and away you go. I got into one of these “cabs” one night and there was a kid behind the wheel who looked like he might have been twelve years old. He had dark-tinted film on the inside of car’s windows and was wearing sunglasses. At night, mind you! We drove along the Kremlin walls, listening to American music on the car’s stereo. The juxtaposition was quite jarring. But I have to thank him for inspiring a scene in the book. Q: Do your children always accompany you on these research trips? A: Whenever possible, yes. They love to joke that when they get back to school every fall and have to write the usual essay, “What I did on my summer vacation,” they get to say they helped their father pick out places to kill people! But sometimes it really is true. For example, my son, Nicholas, helped me to choreograph the kidnapping of Elizabeth Halton in The Secret Servant. And the murder in the opening chapter of that novel was inspired by an incident involving my daughter, Lily, and a housepainter in Amsterdam. I’m sure they would have rather spent their summer on a beach somewhere, but they really did learn a great deal about Russian history and culture. And it’s already paid dividends. This year, when my son’s English class read Animal Farm, he understood everything in a deeply personal way because he’d been to the real Animal Farm. Q: Were you operating under Moscow Rules when you were in Moscow? A: We had a family joke the entire time we were in Russia: “Mr. Putin is watching.” Oddly enough, our guide could have been a Putin double. I’m not exaggerating. He looked shockingly like Putin himself. But having been a reporter in the Middle East, I tend to operate by the Moscow Rules wherever I go. Q: Your novel doesn’t paint a particularly flattering portrait of the new rulers of Russia. Are you nervous about what Mr. Putin will think of your book? A: That’s a great question. President Putin – uh, excuse me, Prime Minister Putin – is very busy man who probably doesn’t have time to read many American thrillers. But who knows? He was the chief of the FSB, after all. He might like a good spy story. Q: Your story deals with the dangers faced by Russian journalists. In fact, two reporters for a publication called Moskovsky Gazeta are murdered during the course of the story. Were you able to talk to Russian reporters for your research? A: I did, actually, and they were incredibly helpful. I was deeply moved by their courage and their dedication to a principle that we all too often take for granted. Not many people realize this, but Russia is an extremely dangerous place to be a journalist. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, forty-seven reporters, editors, cameramen, and photographers have been killed in Russia since 1992, making it the third-deadliest country in the world in which to practice the craft of journalism, after Iraq and Algeria. Fourteen of those deaths occurred during Putin’s presidency. Nearly all of them were contract killings, and very few have been solved or prosecuted. I met a reporter who literally broke down in tears as he described the murder of his friend. It affected me deeply, and had a profound impact on the book. Q: At one point in the story, a Russian journalist named Olga Sukhova describes the political and cultural situation in Russia today. In doing so, she refers several times to the siloviki. Who are the siloviki? A: It’s a word Russians use to describe the men from the security and intelligence services who are now ruling Russia. In a way, it’s the modern-day equivalent of calling someone a chekist. The siloviki took control of Russia after the chaos of Yeltsin’s presidency and said, in effect, enough is enough. They have a plan. They’re not the least bit interested in democracy. They believe, as Putin has said many times, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in history. They want Russia to be a great country again. An important country. And they want their empire back. Q: As of 2008, Putin remains the most popular politician in Russia according to opinion polls. If the Putin government has no interest in democracy, why aren’t the people more up in arms about him? A: It might seem strange to us but the Russian people aren’t terribly interested in democracy, at least not the kind of democracy that’s practiced in the United States or Western Europe. Let’s try to look at it from their perspective. They went through a terrible time in the nineties. Their experience with multiparty democracy was, quite frankly, an unmitigated disaster. Putin righted the ship and restored order. But there’s been a price to pay. Putin has put in place a system where he and his party dominate Russian politics and the media. The Russian people are arguably freer than they’ve ever been, but there’s a line they dare not cross. Everyone in the country knows where that line is. And if they do cross it, they’re likely to run straight into the siloviki. Q: What do you see as the challenges we’ll be facing with Russia? Are we, in fact, about to embark on a new Cold War? A: I think it’s too early to say. Clearly, the Russians want to be a major world power again. They liked the bipolar world of the Cold War much better than the unipolar world of today. I think that in the future they’re going to look for opportunities to challenge American power and hegemony around the world. In many respects, they still regard us as “the main adversary.” There’s an embedded anti-Americanism in Russia that we should never discount. The intellectual classes can say nice things about us, but, in the main, Russians are basically anti-American. They also think of themselves as superior to us in many respects. It sets up a strange contradiction. They don’t really like us, but, at the same time, they want to be part of us. The G8 is a perfect example of this. The Russians want to sit at the table with the rest of the world’s wealthiest nations, but, at the same time, when things don’t go their way, they threaten to target G8 cities with their nukes. And then there’s the case of Aleksandr Litvinenko. The British government has accused the Russians, in effect, of carrying out an act of nuclear murder in the heart of the British capital. It boggles the mind when you think about it in those terms. Q: How do Russian arms sales play into this scenario? A: In my opinion, they are a critical component. One of the places where the Russians look to challenge America is in the Middle East and broader Muslim world. They see an opening there. And they’re using arms sales to some of the world’s must dangerous regimes as a way to raise their profile. They’ve sold highly sophisticated weapons to Syria, for example. And, of course, they’re deeply involved in Iran’s nuclear program. Q: Your novel deals with a plot to sell very dangerous weapons to al-Qaeda. Is there any evidence to suggest that the Russians have ever sold weapons directly to terrorists? A: The Russian government? I wouldn’t rule anything out, but the answer is probably not. But there’s strong evidence to suggest that Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer who operated under the umbrella of protection of the Russian security services, sold weapons to al-Qaeda. He also sold to the Taliban. And the Taliban, in turn, probably supplied some of those weapons to al-Qaeda. Let’s keep something else in mind: Before the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB worked with anti-Western and anti-American terrorists of every stripe. And some of those KGB men are now running Russia. Q: Where is Viktor Bout now? A: He was arrested in Thailand earlier this year in a U.S.-led sting operation. He allegedly thought he was negotiating a major deal with the FARC rebels in Colombia. In reality, he was dealing with American agents. Apparently, he was planning to sell the Colombians the same weapons that my fictitious arms dealer, Ivan Kharkov, was prepared to sell al-Qaeda: shoulder-launch antiaircraft missiles. Bout has been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York. It’s quite possible he could end up being brought to the United States to stand trial. Q: You’re well connected in Washington? Did you have any inside knowledge that the operation against Bout was under way? A: None whatsoever. When I saw the reports of Bout’s arrest, I was shocked. Q: Viktor Bout plied his deadly trade for years. Why is it so hard to bring people like him - or, for that matter, the villain in your book - to justice? A: In short, because it’s very difficult. Much of what arms dealers do is perfectly legal, or it has the patina of legality. They operate in a gray area of international law. Very few have ever been arrested and prosecuted. And I’m afraid I’m not terribly optimistic when it comes to shutting down the trade in weapons anytime soon. Look at what’s happening around the world now. Food shortages, global warming, competition for scarce resources such as water and energy. It doesn’t take a scholar to imagine a world where we have more and more failed states. And that means more civil wars. And more potential markets for men like Viktor Bout and his fellow travelers. Q: Your last book, The Secret Servant, was #2 on the New York Times bestseller list, your highest ranking ever. Each one of your novels has been more successful than its predecessor. Why do you think Gabriel Allon has caught on the way he has? A: No one is more surprised by the success of Gabriel and the series than I am. He really seems to have struck a chord with readers—and not just Gabriel but the entire cast of secondary characters that surround him. Everyone seems to have their favorite, but I do think Gabriel is unique. There really is no one else quite like him on the literary landscape: an Israeli assassin who also happens to be one of the world’s finest art restorers and who lives in Italy under an assumed identity. The funny thing is Gabriel was never supposed to be a continuing character. I actually had to be talked into it. I really believed that no one wanted to read about an Israeli hero. But I had an idea for a book I wanted to write—a story involving looted art and Switzerland’s behavior during World War II—and Gabriel was a perfect fit. It turned out to be a book called The English Assassin, and, in many ways, it was my breakout novel. Despite the book’s success, I still wasn’t sure about him. When I made my first notes for The Confessor, Gabriel wasn’t in the story. Fortunately, I came to my senses. Q: What sort of man is Gabriel? A: He’s not someone you’d actually like to spend a lot of time around. In fact, that’s one of the reasons he’s so interesting to write about. He’s not the friendliest person in the world, and there are very few people in the world who actually know who he is. He’s incredibly gifted and very smart. And as his mentor, Ari Shamron, points out at the end of the book, he suffers from melancholy and mood swings. His attitudes have hardened a bit over the last couple of books, but he’s by no means a gunslinging, kill-all-the-bad-guys kind of superhero. He knows what it means to lose loved ones. I think that if the president of the United States had asked Gabriel for advice after 9/11, Gabriel would have warned him about the price to be paid for climbing into the gutter with terrorists and murderers and fighting them at their level. Q: What do you think will most surprise readers of this book? A: I think many American readers will be surprised by the extent to which Russians have invaded Western Europe. When you go to places like the South of France, the place is teeming with Russians. And London is now home to a Russian population of more than three hundred thousand. That’s why I structured my story the way I did. It moves between Russia and Western Europe just like the rich Russians of today. Q: You’ve talked about bringing your kids along on your research trips. Would you want either of them to follow in your footsteps and become a writer? A: Like every parent, I want them to do whatever will make them happy. But both of them are very good writers already. But writing a book a year is an interesting challenge to say they least, and I put a great deal of pressure on myself to make each novel better. I throw out hundreds of pages for each book, because it’s all about finding the right pages. A couple of years ago, I took a private tour of the Vatican Museums with its chief art historian. We were standing in front of one of my favorite paintings, The Deposition of Christ by Caravaggio. The historian pointed to the right hand of Christ and explained that a recent examination of the painting had revealed the existence of five other hands beneath, meaning that Caravaggio actually had to paint it six times before he was satisfied. Let me be absolutely clear: I am by no means comparing myself to Caravaggio, but it is reassuring to a mere mortal such as me to know that a genius like Caravaggio had to work very hard at his craft. A Conversation with Daniel Silva About His Electrifying New Novel THE SECRET SERVANT
Q. You had one of last summer’s biggest
thrillers with The Messenger, a story about a Saudi-inspired attack on
the Vatican. When you sat down to start working on the follow-up, did you ask
yourself, “How do I top this one?”
extraordinary young woman, and perhaps
even the fate of a nation, hanging in the balance. It means the characters
have to make decisions of great moral significance under conditions of extreme
time pressure. It also means that the novel plunges forward at a breathless
pace, particularly toward the end.
of the native population is below
replacement level, while the Muslim population is
Q: The Messenger is the sixth novel featuring Israeli intelligence agent and art restorer Gabriel Allon, a man who has been described as one of the most intriguing and original characters in today's commercial fiction. He's had a long and colorful career, to say the least, and now he's found himself in a fight with a new enemy: Saudi Arabia. What attracted you to the material? A: The Saudis are, quite simply, the perfect villains. They have a seemingly endless supply of money and hold the economic security of not only this country but the entire world in the palm of their hand. They have been described as one of our closest allies in the Middle East, yet at various times throughout their history, they have behaved more like enemies than friends. I also believe that Saudi Arabia bears a large responsibility for what happened to this country on 9/11 and have never truly been held accountant. The 9/11 Commission described them as "a problematic ally in the war against terrorism," a stunning example of understatement. They are, to a large degree, the ideologues and financiers of global Islamic extremism. Indeed, I believe one can argue it was the House of Saud that started the fire of the global jihad movement in the first place. The Messenger gave me an opportunity to explore some of those themes. Q: Without giving too much away of the plot, The Messenger deals with a terrorist conspiracy to attack the Vatican-a conspiracy financed and enabled by a Saudi billionaire and a former Saudi intelligence officer. All of your work has some foundation in fact. I assume this one does, too. A: It does, indeed. In fact, the plot of The Messenger was inspired to a large degree by a report produced by German intelligence in 2004. They found that a pair of Saudi companies-one of them was a hundred-million-dollar-a-year holding company-were essentially front companies for the Saudi intelligence service, and that these companies had substantial ties to al-Qaeda cells operating in Germany and Indonesia. The report made me think. What if the holding company was owned and operated by a globe-trotting billionaire with close ties to Washington elite? What if he was using his company and his businesses to move men and materiel around the globe? What if a terrorist mastermind was hidden somewhere within his empire? It didn't take long before I had a frighteningly plausible scenario. Q: Is there evidence that the Saudi elite have contributed directly to al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists? A: A great deal of evidence, unfortunately. In many cases wealthy Saudis have given money to Islamic charities that has found its way into the coffers of the terrorist organizations. In others they've given money directly to the terrorists. In 2002, police in Bosnia raided the offices of a Saudi charitable organization and discovered, among other things, a list of al-Qaeda's earliest financial backers. There were twenty names. Six were Saudi bankers, twelve were businessmen, and of those twelve, two had served as Saudi government ministers. Q: Can we assume individual Saudis are still involved in funding the global terrorist movement? A: I asked that question of a very senior American official while researching the novel. He expressed confidence that the Saudi government had managed to stem the flow of money from the official Saudi charities to the terrorists, but he was less confident when it came to individual Saudi citizens. In fact, it was his assumption that individual Saudis were still giving money to al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, even though bin Laden and his lieutenants now appear to have the House of Saud clearly in their sights. It's one of the most intriguing aspects of Saudi Arabia and its ties to global terror. The House of Saud helped to inspire and nurture the terrorists with money and ideology, and now those terrorists are calling for its destruction. During a conversation with a senior CIA official, he compared the House of Saud to a man holding a tiger by the ears. The tiger is symbolic of the terrorists, of course, and if the man lets go, he'll be devoured. Q: Any chance you'll tell us the name of the "very senior" government official to whom you spoke? A: None at all. Q: There's a wonderful line in The Messenger, uttered by the deputy director of the CIA: "There's a pipeline between Riyadh and Washington, and it flows green with cash." You live in Washington, and before becoming a novelist, you were a journalist and television producer. Does this fictitious pipeline exist? A: I'm afraid it does. Critics of Israel love to point out the legendary influence of "the Jewish lobby" in Washington, but the Jewish lobby has a rival, and that's the Saudi lobby. Money talks in Washington, and the Saudis have petrodollars to burn. They pour money into the big law firms, and hire the most influential lobbyists, many of whom are former members of congress or former senior government officials. They give generously to American charities, and fund think tanks and Middle East policy centers that have a distinctly pro-Saudi tilt in their view of the world. Prince Alwaleed, the Saudi billionaire investor, recently gave twenty million dollars to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where many of tomorrow's diplomats are being trained. Prince Bandar, the roguish former Saudi Ambassador to the United States, used to boast openly about the impact of Saudi money on Washington. He once told the Washington Post in an interview: "If the reputation, then, builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office." Now that's chutzpah. Q: There are a number of references in the book to Wahhabi Muslims. What is Wahhabism and what are its connections to Saudi terrorism? A: Wahhabism, or Wahabbi Islam, is the form of Sunni Islam practiced by the majority of Saudi citizens. It's puritanical and deeply intolerant of other faiths and even other sects of Islam itself, especially Shiism. The Saudis have spent billions of dollars propagating the faith across the Muslim world, in Europe, and even here in the United States. I've come to the conclusion, after a great deal of thought and research, that much of the Islamic extremism sweeping the Middle East and beyond flowed from the well of Saudi Wahhabism. It's no accident that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, or that the majority of those held at Guantánamo Bay are Saudis. I think most Americans would be shocked at the sort of things that are said by extreme Wahhabi preachers during the average Friday sermon-or at the things that are taught about Christians and Jews in the average Saudi classroom. In the novel, Gabriel Allon tells his American counterpart that the war on terror can never be won unless something is done to stem the flow of hatred in Saudi mosques and schools. I truly believe this. Dore Gold said it best in his groundbreaking book, Hatred's Kingdom: "Unless the ideological roots of the hatred that led to September 11 are addressed, the war on terrorism will not be won. It will be only a matter of time before the next Osama bin Laden emerges." Q: Gabriel Allon has been surrounded by a remarkable cast of characters from the outset of the series, and The Messenger features many of them. But it also stars a new character. Tell me about Sarah Bancroft. A: Sarah Bancroft is a curator working for a small museum in Washington who is recruited by Gabriel and his American counterparts for a covert operation. She's young, very attractive, and lost someone close to her on 9/11. She actually tried to join the CIA after the attacks but was turned down because the CIA screeners thought she was too independent-minded. Now she's going to be given a second chance, because she is exactly the sort of person Gabriel needs for the operation he has in mind. She's a deeply symbolic character. In many ways, she's representative of America itself. Wounded by 9/11, well-intentioned, but perhaps in a bit over her head. Q: Do the Americans and Israelis really conduct joint operations? A: I have it on very good authority that the CIA and Israeli intelligence operate jointly on a regular basis. I also have it on good authority that the Americans never come away from those operations without being impressed by the ingenuity and creativity of their Israeli counterparts. I only hope I've done justice to that spirit with the operation at the heart of The Messenger. Q: It's an operation that involves, of all things, a lost painting by Vincent van Gogh called Marguerite Gachet at her Dressing Table. Does the painting really exist? A: No, I'm afraid this canvas exists only on the pages of The Messenger. Q: It feels like it could exist, though. You must have done a lot of research to bring the painting to life. A: I did actually, most of it focused on Vincent's final days. Fortunately for me, there's no shortage of great research and writing on the demise and suicide of Vincent van Gogh, and I have to admit to becoming a bit sidetracked for a few days as I wandered through his remarkable and tragic life. There are three known works depicting Marguerite Gachet. I worked hard to concoct a scenario by which there could have been a fourth painting-a painting that was sold not long after Vincent's death and kept secret by its owners for a variety of reasons. I enjoy art and art history very much, and it's one of the great guilty pleasures of the series. It allows me to indulge my own passions. Q: It's very convincing. I suspect it might encourage a few art detectives to start looking for a work just like it. A: I'm afraid they'll be searching in vain. But if they should find it, please call me! Q: As with the best spy fiction, exotic locations abound in The Messenger. Rome, Venice, Tel Aviv, London, and the Caribbean islands. Did you spend time in each of the places while preparing to write the book, or do you create local color based on research from afar? A: It can be a mixture of both, but for this novel I've really been to nearly every place described. There are a couple of exceptions. I've never actually been inside the private apartments of the Pope. Nor have I been beyond the entrance of the barracks of the Swiss Guards. Maybe someday I'll be lucky enough to get an invitation. Q: Your last two novels, A Death in Vienna and Prince of Fire, were serious in their subject matter and somewhat somber in tone. Don't take this the wrong way, but The Messenger is a bit more entertaining, if that's the right word. Was it intentional? A: Yes and no. Each novel tends to take on a life of its own, and if I've done my job correctly, the characters really do determine the tone and course of the story. That said, I'm being published in the summer for the first time this year instead of winter, and I wanted to make sure The Messenger was sort of book one would carry to the beach. Q: Mission accomplished. A: I'll take that as a compliment. Q: At the novel's outset, Gabriel is wanted for questioning by the French government and more or less resigned himself to a life in hiding. By the end, he's come face-to-face with the prime minister of Israel, the president of the United States, the Pope, and one of the world's most dangerous terrorists in the world. Now that he's the world's most famous terrorist fighter, where else can he go? A: I've learned many lessons in the decade I've been writing books, and one of them is that it is never wise to talk about the book you intend to write, because they never come out the way you think they will-at least mine don't. Suffice it to say that we live in a dangerous world and Gabriel, for all his desire to spend his life quietly restoring paintings, is likely to be drawn back into the fight against global terrorism. In this interview Daniel Silva talks about his interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict, shares why he chose this moment to write about terrorism and sheds light on his character Gabriel Allon, as well as revealing some of his personal reflections on researching Prince of Fire. Q: You described your previous three books as "an accidental trilogy dealing with the unfinished business of the Holocaust." Could Prince of Fire be the beginning of another "accidental" series? A: When it comes to something as unpredictable as writing novels, it's generally a mistake to make predictions, but, no, I don't see this as the beginning of a new cycle of novels. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. This novel is something of a conclusion to the series. When I introduced the Gabriel Allon character in The Kill Artist, he was cast in the unlikely role of safeguarding the life of Yasir Arafat, who was then engaged in the Oslo peace process. Of course, everything changed shortly after that novel was published. Yasir Arafat rejected the peace deal he was offered at Camp David and then launched the second Intifada. In a way, I felt obligated to write this novel. The Kill Artist was written in a time of hope, Prince of Fire in a time of despair and terror, and I think that's reflected in the tone of some of the book's more memorable passages. Q: Prince of Fire offers a virtual history lesson on the Arab-Israeli conflict during the entire twentieth century. How did you develop an interest in this part of the world? A: I've always been captivated by the history of Zionism and the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine-the notion that history and Providence has thrown these two remarkable peoples together in this tiny slice of land and bound them in bloodshed. As a writer of fiction, there is a deep well from which to draw: fascinating characters, a compelling and violent history, and a starkly beautiful physical landscape. And, of course, it is a conflict that affects us all. I tried very hard to do justice to both sides and to capture, in microcosm, the pain felt by both Arabs and Jews. At its core, the book is a thriller, not a history lesson, but I was careful to include enough history so that situation can be understood and placed in context. It's amazing how little many people really know about the history of the conflict. Q: In Prince of Fire the action moves across continents, from Rome, Venice, and Cairo, to London, Paris and Jerusalem. Whether the setting is verdant Celtic ruins in Provence or the tan hills of Galilee, each location is vividly rendered. What kind of research did you do to capture each one so precisely? A: There's really no substitute for going to a place and seeing it with your own eyes-looking at a landscape and imagining your characters moving across it. The research for this book took me from Israel to Paris to the south of France. A significant portion is set in Marseilles. It had been some time since I'd been there. In fact, the last time was before the attacks of September 11. It was interesting to look at a place like Marseilles and imagine it as a hub of terrorist activity. In all honesty, it wasn't too difficult. Q: In the thriller's opening scenes, a massive terrorist bombing sparks an international manhunt for an elusive Arab terrorist. Was this an unconscious or a deliberate response to the September 11th attacks in the U.S.? A: For a long time after the attacks of September 11, I felt reluctant to touch the subject of terrorism. For me, like most Americans, the attacks were a watershed event, a tear in the fabric of human history. I still don't think I'll ever write a book about a terrorist plot against America, but I finally felt capable of writing about terrorism in the Israeli context. Q: The terrorist mastermind in your book is a man named Khaled al-Khalifa. He is the son of the leader of Black September, the notorious Palestinian terror group of the 1970s that carried out the Munich Olympics massacre. Why did you choose to resurrect Black September for this novel? A: As I say in the author's note of the novel, the story of Prince of Fire was really inspired by a photograph taken at the funeral of Ali Hassan Salemeh, the operations chief of Black September. The photograph shows Salemeh's young son seated on the lap of a grieving Yasir Arafat. It made me think: What if the boy had been hidden away by Arafat and trained to carry on the tradition of his father? As for my interest in Black September, it began with the Munich Olympics massacre. Like millions of other people around the world, I watched the drama unfold from beginning to end, and the murder of the hostages hit me very hard. Although we didn't realize it then, the Munich Massacre was in many ways the beginning of the modern terrorist age. I believe Black September and the Palestinians must share some of the blame for the events of September 11. Remember, it was Black September that first demonstrated the utility of carrying out spectacular acts of terrorism on the international stage. I'm quite confident that the planners of Al Qaeda have studied their exploits carefully. Q:. Your protagonist, Gabriel Allon, is a gifted art restorer when he's not involved in international espionage. The meticulous description of his work suggests that you also have a great appreciation for the Grand Masters. Is painting or art history a passion of yours? A: It is, and I've been able to indulge that passion with this series. I'm also fortunate enough to have wonderful and generous friends who know much more about art than I do. Q: Fidelity and loyalty are prominent themes in your hero's relationships with his estranged wife, his lover, and his boss in the Israeli Secret Service, as well as in his adversaries' relationships. Do these issues have special significance for you? A: Something happened inside Israel when the Palestinian terrorists started setting off bombs on buses, in cafés and even during a Passover Seder. Israelis set aside their differences and demanded an end to the violence. A certain tribalism took hold, in my opinion, and Gabriel Allon was not immune to that. His name is significant. The archangel Gabriel is the defender of Israel, the angel of vengeance, and the Prince of Fire. In a time of terror and bloodshed, Gabriel has no choice but to pick up his gun once again in service of his country and his people. He does so with a certain reluctance, because he fears he is a soldier in a war without end, but he does so all the same, out of loyalty and fidelity. Q: Your characters offer strong opinions on hot-button issues such as Israel's Separation Fence. Do you find yourself taking sides as you write? A: At the risk of sounding as though I'm dodging the question, I have sympathy for both parties to the conflict. I believe that Jews have a right to a homeland. I also believe that Palestinians suffered terribly as a result of the birth of Israel and that they deserve a state of their own. That said, I have to say that I am profoundly disappointed, to put it mildly, in the way the Palestinian side conducted itself after the signing of the Oslo peace accords. I was a supporter of the Oslo Agreement, even though I had doubts about the ability of the two sides to reach a final accord. I believed that Arafat had truly reconciled himself to the existence of a Jewish State in the Middle East and was committed to peace. That turned out to be wrong. Arafat, I'm convinced, viewed the Oslo process as part of his "phased strategy" to bring about the destruction of the Jewish State. He said so many times, in Arabic, when he was speaking to his own people. I also believe he ended his career as he began it: as a terrorist. With his passing, there might be a chance for peace, but I tend to doubt it. Arafat left behind a mess, but then, he always did -- in Lebanon and before that in Jordan. Still, one has to hope. The alternative is too awful to contemplate: Arabs and Jews, killing each other in the Promised Land, until the end of time. Q: Your popular protagonist, Gabriel Allon, is a melancholy man haunted by his past, or as you describe him, "the eternal wandering Jew." Is the character based on anyone you've actually known? A: Thankfully, no. Gabriel Allon is truly a fictitious character. Q:. Allon has a tense face-to-face conversation with Arafat. How did you prepare to write that scene? Did Arafat's death affect what you wrote? A: Arafat died as I was finishing the novel, and I chose not to incorporate his death into the story. As for the preparation, I've come to know both of these men very well. It was really a matter of putting them in a room together, along with their terrible history, and letting them show me the way. Q: What's next for Gabriel Allon? Can you give us a clue about what part of the world he'll visit in a future book? A: I haven't made any final decisions yet, but there are a couple books I've been longing to write that don't suit Mr. Allon, so there's a chance we might be taking a break from each other. Q: A Death in Vienna is the third book in what you've described as "an accidental trilogy dealing with the unfinished business of the Holocaust." Nazi art looting and the collaboration of Swiss banks served as the backdrop for The English Assassin. The role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and the silence of Pope Pius XII inspired The Confessor. In the new book, your hero, the Israeli agent Gabriel Allon, pursues a Nazi war criminal living in the heart of Vienna under an assumed identity. What attracted you to the subject matter? DS: I've always been haunted by the notion that men who committed some of the worst atrocities in human history were never brought to justice for their deeds. While I was researching the book, I read Olga Lengyel's mémoire of survival at Auschwitz entitled Five Chimneys. She wrote: "Certainly everyone whose hands were directly or indirectly stained with our blood must pay for his or her crimes. Less than that would be an outrage against the millions of innocent dead." To me her words were made even more moving by the fact her wish did not come true. I think that, subconsciously, I wanted to punish the guilty, even if it was only in a fictional sense, and Gabriel was my tool. Q: The story plays out in cities across Europe and the Middle East, each with a distinct sense of place. How did you choose these locations for your novel and what helps you capture each one's culture? DS: I suppose that the story chooses the settings rather than the author. Gabriel lives and works in Venice because, besides being an Israeli agent, he's an art restorer who specializes in Italian Old Masters. Vienna was really the natural backdrop for a story about a fugitive Nazi war criminal because Austria, in many respects, is in denial over its past, and I wanted to explore that in the novel. Austrians made up a disproportionate share of the Nazi SS and the forces that carried out the extermination of the Jews, yet relatively few ever faced justice for their crimes. At the same time, there's a new wave of anti-Semitism in Austria, and the extreme right is once again knocking on the door of political power. As for the research, I travel, I watch, I talk to people, but mainly, I listen. Q: In doing research for the book, what was the biggest surprise? DS: The book was really inspired by some of the research I did for my last book, The Confessor. Perhaps I was somewhat naïve, but I never really understood how deeply the Church was involved with helping fugitive Nazis escape justice. I'd always assumed that something like ODESSA, the organization of former SS officers, was the culprit, but the efforts of ODESSA and the other postwar Nazi organizations were insignificant compared with those of the Vatican. Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and hundreds of other war criminals were helped by the Vatican. Michael Phayer, who wrote what many people regard as a very balanced study of the Church and the Holocaust, said that "by allowing the Vatican to become engaged in providing refuge for Holocaust perpetrators, Pius XII committed the greatest impropriety of his pontificate." I was also surprised at how quickly the victorious powers lost interest in bringing the murderers to justice after the war. The Cold War changed everyone's priorities. Q: Are there still war criminals to be captured? DS: Certainly. Obviously, most of them are extremely elderly, but Italy recently saw fit to indict three former SS men for the massacre of 560 people in a village in Tuscany. Ephraim Zuroff, the primary Nazi-hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, estimates that we have five years before all the war criminals are dead. The Center has launched a program called Operation Last Chance, which offers financial rewards for information on suspected war criminals. And where has the program received the most hostile reception? Austria. Q: You allude to the Secret Archives of the Vatican and the politically explosive material hidden in them. Do these archives really exist? DS: They do indeed. In fact, they're called the Vatican Secret Archives, and presumably they contain a great deal of information about the conduct of the Holy See during and after the Second World War. The Vatican has allowed scholars to see some of this material, but most of it remains securely under lock and key. Anyone who's read The Confessor can probably surmise that I believe the material should be made public. Q: You devote a chapter to the recorded testimony of a character who survived years in Auschwitz and the Death March from Birkenau. What provided the foundation for the devastating details? Did you read actual testimonies? DS: I read a tremendous amount of material, not only survivor testimonies but histories of the Holocaust and the extermination camps. It was wrenching, and when I sat down to create a fictitious testimony, I found it to be one of the most difficult things I've ever attempted. It left me physically and emotionally exhausted, and for months afterward I suffered terrible nightmares. Q: You refer to a German secret operation called Aktion 1005, a plan to conceal the evidence of the Holocaust. Did such a program truly exist? DS: Yes, and it's one of the least-examined facets of the Holocaust. Without dwelling on the gruesome details, a special SS unit was created to organize and carry out the excavation and destruction of millions of Jewish corpses -- from the killing pits of Russia and the Baltic states to the extermination camps of Poland. The unit was very successful, and unfortunately we're dealing with its terrible legacy today. The pseudo-scholars and anti-Semites who try to argue that the Holocaust never happened-or say that it has been greatly exaggerated-like to point out that the remains of six million Jews cannot be produced. That is because so many bodies were destroyed byAktion 1005. Q: The climax of the story takes place in modern-day Treblinka. Did you visit the camp? DS: I did, and it was a day I will never forget. It was a bitterly cold afternoon last October, and when I entered the camp, I was completely alone. I'd studied the operations of Treblinka before I arrived, but I still found it almost impossible to imagine that more than eight hundred thousand people had been murdered there. The Polish government memorial is an effective and moving tribute to the dead. It's not an easy place to get to, but if you care about this issue, as I do, then I recommend trying to see it. Q: A Death in Vienna comes across as something of a cautionary tale. Did you form an opinion about the CIA's use of war criminals? Is there a message contained in the novel that reflects upon the times in which we find ourselves now? DS: Decent nations, when they are frightened, sometimes take actions that don't look so flattering with the passage of time. Most of the men who worked for the CIA in the years immediately after its birth say they have few regrets about utilizing the talents of war criminals who served Hitler's Germany. I suspect there are a great many, though, who wish we hadn't employed such men. I'm sure we'll face many similar questions as the war on terrorism drags on. I only hope that fifty years on, when the archives are thrown open to the light of day, our children and grandchildren be proud of what they find there. Q: This is your seventh book in seven years, and all of them have been New York Times bestsellers. Did you ever think you'd write so many books? DS: Not really. I wrote the first one just for fun and would have been pleased just to have been a part-time writer. I was working in television news at the time my first book was published. I tried to do both for awhile, but something had to give. I chose writing. Secretly it is always what I wanted to do. Q: A reviewer once wrote that he loved your work because you "strike that sweet spot of balance between reality and fantasy." Does it come naturally or do you have to aim? DS: I like to search for a factual underpinning for all my stories, but once that foundation is in place, I feel free to go wherever my imagination wants to take me. A Death in Vienna, like The Confessor, is rooted squarely in fact, but it is also a work of entertainment. I like to think that I write serious novels in the thriller mode, and that's why they appeal to a wide range of readers. Q: A number of reviewers have suggested that you've joined the ranks of Graham Greene and John LeCarré. Do you feel pressure being in such esteemed company? DS: I feel flattered by the comparisons. I regard them as two of the most important novelists of the twentieth century. Period. In all honesty though, I think I have a long way to go before I would feel comfortable with comparisons to such literary giants. Q: Your central character seems like a natural for the big screen. Are we likely to see Gabriel Allon in a screenplay in the future? DS: One of the Allon books, The English Assassin, has been sold as a film and is currently in development. We've traveled a long road together, Gabriel and I. I must say that it would be very strange to see him on the big screen-but very exciting too. In this February 2003 interview Daniel Silva discusses the inspiration and historical research behind his latest novel, THE CONFESSOR, and reveals what he hopes to accomplish with his books. Q: One of the major New York dailies recently described you as someone who has "graduated from being a writer of thrillers that sneak onto the bestseller lists for a week or two to a brand-name author-one of those people like Tom Clancy who can launch book after book onto the charts." What does it feel like to be compared to someone like Clancy? And what was that transition like to "brand-name" author? DS: (Laughter) That's very flattering, but I'm no where near Clancy's league in terms of sales. Someday, I hope. If, as you say, the brand name has taken hold, that's great, but I don't take anything for granted. When my books become bestsellers, I'm always pleasantly surprised, and it's still a big thrill. Q: Critics have also praised your "journalistic passion that animates your stories." How have your experiences as a journalist for UPI and then CNN influenced the way you approach your fiction writing? DS: I always look for a factual underpinning to my stories, and I read and research until I'm blind. THE ENGLISH ASSASSIN dealt with Nazi art looting. I devoured everything I could find on the subject. THE CONFESSOR also deals with the Holocaust and the Second World War, but this time focuses on Pope Pius XII and the role of the Catholic church. I must have read a hundred books and scholarly articles on the topic. And, of course, as with all the Gabriel Allon books, I did tremendous amounts of research on art restoration and, in this case, the artist Bellini. I love it. But no matter how much time I spend conducting journalism-style research on the subjects I'm writing about, I never want the research to get in the way of the imagination. Essentially, I fill up the tank with as many facts and as much history and analysis of the subject as possible, and then I try to walk through a door and create something that's pure entertainment and fun to read. I always try to go just far enough with my research so that the imagination has room to work and spin a story that readers will find entertaining. That's the primary goal. Q: Where did the inspiration for this story come from? DS: It's a topic I've been interested in for a long time, but the specific inspiration can be traced back to two incidents. One was We Remember, the long-awaited statement on the Holocaust released by the Vatican in 1998. I felt it came up far short of what it set out to do in terms of reconciliation and atonement and apologizing for the conduct of the Church during the war. The other incident was the squabble that broke out when a commission of six independent historians, which was created by the Vatican in a bid to calm the controversy surrounding Pius XII, requested access to the Vatican's Secret Archives, and the Vatican refused. It was clear that there were things in the Archives they didn't want the world to see. According to sources quoted by a newspaper at the time, access to the Secret Archives was blocked by a cabal led by the Vatican's secretary of state. All these things just started simmering, and a story started to take shape: What would happen if a pope wanted to throw open the Secret Archives? Q: Aside from all the reading, and your focus on Pius XII, what other research did you do? DS: The inner workings of the Vatican, of course. I interviewed diplomats, former priests, and reporters who've covered the Vatican and been behind the walls. I made a decision that there would be very little spirituality in the book, if that's the right word. Instead, I choose to write about the Vatican as a political institution and to treat the characters as politicians. Keeping that image in my mind-of Church officials as quarreling politicians in a pressure-cooker atmosphere-helped me get the feel and tone that I wanted. Q: What makes the spy thriller such a compelling genre? DS: First of all, I should say that I consider myself a writer of international intrigue stories as opposed to a writer of pure espionage thrillers. I like the genre because it gives you more license. There are no police procedures or rules of evidence to hem you in. Also, I'm a student of twentieth-century European history and politics. That's what interests me. And so the international intrigue genre is where I feel the most at home. Q: How did you come up with the Gabriel Allon character? DS: He came as a thunderbolt. I can't describe it any other way than that. I was working on The Kill Artist and doing the initial sketches for the character. My wife and I were walking down the street in Georgetown when she turned to me and said, "By the way, we're having dinner tonight with David Bull." David was the head of the restoration department at the National Gallery. I stopped dead in my tracks and said, "Oh my God! An assassin whose cover job is art restoration." The character has been such a joy to work with. He's not a person I'd necessarily want to hang out with, but I just find him so compelling. There's something about him that makes him impossible not to watch. He allows me to write the way I want to write. I always thought it strange when writers became so attached to their characters that they'd talk about them as if they were real people, but Gabriel Allon has definitely become a real person for me. He's just there. He is. He exists. Q: What fascinates you so about him? DS: The fact that Gabriel is an art restorer and a reluctant assassin allowed me to plumb the two distinct sides of his character that are constantly at war within him: He's a healer, but he's also a destroyer. He finds peace in restoration. He's also attractive to me because so much history and pain and suffering-the Holocaust, the Israeli-Arab conflict-flow through this man. He and Ari Shamron, my fictional spymaster of Israeli intelligence, are at the crossroads of twentieth century Middle Eastern and European history. Who better to investigate the role of the Catholic church in the Holocaust than Gabriel Allon? It's no accident that, when the story opens, Gabriel is living quietly in Venice, restoring churches. Q: Writers of fiction will often say their characters become so alive that they end up doing things they-as the writer-hadn't intended them to do. Did that happen with Gabriel? DS: Definitely. What I try to do is create the character first, as opposed to first creating the line I want the character to walk through the novel. If I do it right, I end up with a character who's multidimensional, a character who will lead me by the hand, not through the grand arc of the story but rather through interesting little side journeys. And those are the things that usually make a novel memorable. Q: Why do so many of your stories center around this notion of history guided by men of the secret world? DS: Because I think history is about 80 percent classified. I believe that intelligence agencies guide the course of history much more than we'll ever really know. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I think men of the secret world really have had a tremendous influence on the course of human history. And when you talk about those kinds of individuals, you can't help but think of the Vatican, the oldest political institution in the western world. The men of the Vatican have been engaging in conspiracies and intrigues for centuries, and they're very good at their craft. Q: There's been a lot of speculation in recent years regarding what's going on inside the Vatican's walls as the current pope, John Paul II, gets older and ever more enfeebled. What sort of maneuvering do you think is going on as this pope ages? DS: I'm not convinced he's as feeble as he appears. According to those closest to him, he still has tremendous powers of concentration and intellect. But having said that, the Church is in crisis, and there are certainly people within the Vatican who are preparing for the next conclave. Names are being mentioned as possible successors, and records are being examined. It will be fascinating to watch the next conclave. Will the next pope be an Italian or perhaps a cardinal from the Third World? Will he be a doctrinaire pope, or will he permit change? The future of the Roman Catholic church might rest on the answers to those questions. Q: One of the central entities of The Confessor is this secret group within the Vatican, Crux Vera, that holds the true power of the Church. Over the centuries the Vatican has seen its share of Machiavellian intrigue. Are there any specific historical precedents for the fictional cabal you describe here? DS: I looked at all sorts of reactionary Church groups and secret Church societies. Some operate openly --- they even have web sites you can browse --- but many still remain very secretive. There are a number of groups who are opposed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and want to reverse them. Some operate quite openly with the tolerance and, some might say, the encouragement, of the Vatican. On other occasions the Vatican has chosen to crack down and punish rebellious leaders. These groups are very conservative, very reactionary, and there have been suggestions that some of them may have been involved in some dirty dealings in the past. What I essentially did was take their worst attributes, magnify them, and apply them to my fictional group, Crux Vera. But as I said in the author's note, Crux Vera is a complete creation on my part. Q: One of pivotal moments of the story occurs as Hitler's final solution is well underway when officials from Crux Vera meet with the Germans and essentially collude with them --- by their silence about the Holocaust --- to carry out the extermination of European Jewry. Their goal, set forth in the story, was to forestall the creation of a postwar Jewish homeland because it would result in Jewish control of Christian holy sites, and would also leave Jews on an equal diplomatic footing with the Vatican among the world's nations. Notwithstanding that this is fiction, are you suggesting this could have happened? DS: I set out to answer the question: Why was Pope Pius XII silent regarding the plight of the Jews under Hitler and the Nazi regime? I made a decision early on in the writing process that I would attribute no fictitious actions to the Pope. Out of respect for him and for the papacy, I was not going to create actions on his part. What I did do, however, was put forward a fictional explanation of why he was silent, an explanation that was both historically possible and at the same time compelling and dramatic. Were there priests and bishops within the Church who actually supported the extermination of European Jews and took part in the Holocaust? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Did the Vatican oppose the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, even Jewish emigration to Palestine, when it was the only escape hatch available to Jews? Once again, the answer is yes. I basically took those elements and spun them into a fiction that might logically explain why Pius XII failed to speak out. Q: Were there any surprises for you as you carried on this yearlong running conversation about the Church with various sources? DS: As I took a hard look at the Church, its long history of anti-Semitism, and its conduct during the war, I guess you could say I was somewhat shocked, but I also felt a great sense of sadness. That same sense of sadness can be found in a lot of Catholic writers --- James Carroll, Gary Wills, John Cornwell and others --- who have explored these subjects. You can feel it in the way they write. One of the things that became clear to me is that there's still a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism within the Vatican, despite all the efforts to improve relations between the two communities. Q: Most people have this view of the pope as someone who has absolute power within the Church. Is this the case? DS: The Roman Curia is the oldest court and oldest bureaucracy in Europe. It wields tremendous power even over a pope, who, technically, is an absolute monarch. In order to get things done, like any other head of state, the pope has to work through his bureaucracy. It's a very tough, backbiting, jealous atmosphere. A lot of backstabbing goes on, and apparently it's quite a vicious place to work. What a perfect setting for a thriller: the Vatican in all its power and majesty, and filled with scheming and intrigue. For me, it's impossible to stand in St. Peter's Square and not wonder what's really going on behind those walls. Q: According to Pius's defenders, he was a friend of the Jews who saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives through quiet diplomacy. His critics say he was a calculating politician who displayed a callous and near-criminal indifference to the plight of the Jews. Some even go so far as to say he was actually complicit in the Holocaust. What's your take on Pius XII? Was he as vile as his critics suggest; as virtuous as his defenders suggest; or somewhere in between? DS: Let's look at this, for a moment, as if it were a court case with prosecutors and defense attorneys. I think even honest defenders of the pope would agree that Pius XII knew about the Holocaust from almost the very beginning; that he said nothing and did very little; that most of the Vatican's efforts were confined to Jews who had converted to Christianity; and that those efforts came late in the war once the tide had turned against Germany. Rightly or wrongly, I think Pius XII had a fear of dividing German Catholics, a fear of German retaliation against the Vatican, a desire to play a diplomatic role as a peacemaker, and that he clearly wanted Nazi Germany to prevail in its confrontation with Communist Russia, which the Church viewed as its mortal enemy. Pius didn't want to do anything to undermine the Nazis, and he apparently was not sufficiently morally moved by the murder of millions of Jews to back away from that course of action. I'm afraid that's about the most positive portrait that one can draw based on an honest appraisal of the facts. But if you look at the case in total: the long history of anti-Semitism within the Church; the fact that Pius never excommunicated a single Nazi leader and yet, in 1949, he excommunicated all communists worldwide; the fact that he opposed the Nuremberg trials and that the Vatican helped thousands of Nazi war criminals escape justice, then a much darker picture emerges. Q: There's a movie currently playing, called Amen, which explores some of the issues you write about in THE CONFESSOR. Have you seen it and what did you think of it? DS: I have seen it. I think it's an excellent film. Very powerful. Q: What do you want readers to get out of this book? DS: I want them to be entertained. That's the first and primary goal of my storytelling. The greatest compliment readers give me is when they complain that I kept them up all night. If I'm also able to teach them a little something along the way, that's great too. ©Copyright 2003, The Penguin Group. All rights reserved. |
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