From Christopher Dickey, the author of "Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South" and "Securing the City," this site provides updates and footnotes on history, espionage, terrorism, fanaticism, policing and counterinsurgency linked to Dickey's columns for The Daily Beast and his other writings; also, occasional dialogues, diatribes, and contributions from friends.
"Our Man in Charleston is a joy to discover. It is a perfect book about an imperfect spy." —Joan Didion
"Thoroughly researched and deftly crafted. [Our Man in Charleston will] introduce people to a man who should be better known, one who cannily fought the good fight at a fateful moment in history." —Wall Street Journal"Dickey tells Bunch’s story with aplomb and a good deal of fine wit. On one level, Dickey has written a spicy historical beach read, chock-full of memorable characters and intrigue. But into this page-turning entertainment, Dickey has smuggled a thoughtful examination of the geopolitical issues of the day...splendid." —Boston Globe "A fascinating page-turner that takes on special relevance as South Carolina fills our thoughts in the summer of 2015...[Dickey] brings to life a feverish Southern city, an un-united nation of states, and the 'lively and indiscreet, indefatigable and thoroughly British' man in the middle. Dickey...clearly understands the dance of diplomacy that evolves day by day as personalities and priorities change." —Christian Science Monitor
Elizabeth Hardwick: A heartbreaking, eloquent memoir by the son of the heartbreaking, eloquent poet, James Dickey.
David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review: Angry, affectionate...both gut-wrenching and hypnotic. A father-son conflict worthy of the pen of Sophocles.
Joseph P. Kahn, The Boston Globe: As unsentimental a father-son memoir as one can imagine. James Dickey may have died a broken man, but he was given a tremendous opportunity to get at least one thing right. By the evidence of this book, he succeeded, too.
David Bottoms, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: An exquisite balance of blistering candor and healing grace....Writing so wonderful that it simply transcends the limits of the genre.
"A fascinating, and frightening, look into the world of antiterrorism. Securing the City kept me riveted." — Kathy Reichs, author of Devil Bones "If you're concerned about a terrorist threat to America, you need to read this eye-opening and extraordinary book. Dickey reveals the little-known existence of the New York Police Department's counterterror force, the first line of defense against another 9/11. This book should be read by the FBI, the CIA, and by every cop in America. An essential addition to the literature on global terrorism." — Nelson DeMille, author of The Gate House "The United States needs a new counterterrorism strategy -- one that is vigilant, creative, sustainable, and aligned with the country's constitutional values. Securing the City is not only a fascinating inside portrait of the New York Police Department's response to the terror threat after 9/11, it is also an important contribution to public policy. The federal government has much to learn from the leadership culture and street work of the NYPD, as Christopher Dickey's penetrating reporting makes clear." — Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens "Dickey offers a rich inside account of the most extensive antiterrorism effort in any American city. A long-time expert on extremism and the Middle East, Dickey offers amazing detail as well as a broad history of the threats to U.S. national security. There are many important lessons to be learned in Securing the City." — Robin Wright, author of Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East "Christopher Dickey has written a work of meticulous reporting that reads like a John Le Carré novel, illuminating the shadowy world of terrorists, and that of the New York City cops who hunt them down. A terrifying, and yet reassuring, read." — Michael Korda, author of Ike and With Wings Like Eagles "Revealing and nerve-rattling." — The New York Times
Once the familiar thriller trappings are out of the way ... we are left with a narrative that asks what it means to be an American, alone and rootless, at the end of this, the American Century. —The New York Times Book Review, James Polk
Vividly authentic. . . .Mr. Dickey's first novel moves like lightning through a sophisticated plot and lands with a direct hit in the gut." —The Dallas Morning News
"Dickey writes about war with authority." — Los Angeles Times
Newsweek's Paris bureau chief offers a fictional expression of the evolution of a midwestern American into a Muslim terrorist. The narrator, ex-army ranger Kurt Kurtovic, explores his spiritual metamorphosis, the chrysalis of which is his father's ethnic background, Bosnian Muslim. But combat, in Panama, Kuwait, and Bosnia, propels the narrative. In the Gulf War, Kurtovic encounters Rashid, a Kuwaiti resister who kills without compunction; another factor in Kurtovic's development is the anti-Muslim attitudes of his fellow soldiers, who don't realize his increasing curiosity about the Koran. Scene-shift to Bosnia, where Kurtovic visits his father's home village (destroyed), and enter Rashid, out of the blue--it's a small, small world, after all. Rashid recruits Kurtovic for the Muslim side of the war and later for a terrorist act in New York. — Gilbert Taylor, Booklist
David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and author of Agents of Innocence and A Firing Offense: Here's a promise: The Sleeper will keep you up late at night. Chris Dickey takes readers inside an operation to destroy deadly Al-Qaeda terrorist operations. He claims it's all imaginary, but it feels as real as the morning newspaper. For thriller readers, this is solid gold. Gilles Kepel, author of Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam and The War for Muslim Minds: Christopher Dickey's The Sleeper is a breathtaking thriller that takes you deep into the hearts and minds of those who fight on both sides of the 'War on Terror,' a universe where many have lost all moral balance and would use any means to achieve their ends. It captures the psyche of the radical Islamists and of their hunters, based on the author's intimate knowledge. A tour de force -- and great reading from cover to cover! Bruce Hoffman, author of Inside Terrorism and Senior Fellow, Combating Terrorism Center, U.S. Military Academy: In The Sleeper, Dickey paints a compelling and gripping picture of terrorists prepared to unleash the ultimate horror in order to destroy America. The story he tells is not only engrossing but also accurately depicts the challenges and choices we face in fighting the real war on terrorism. Denver Post:Plenty of action as Kurt uses all his military muscle and wiles in an attempt to thwart al-Qaeda. Baltimore Sun: It was inevitable that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, would produce, for better or worse, a literature, and equally inevitable that one of the genres would be the thriller. Fortunately for readers, Christopher Dickey has produced in The Sleeper one that is both sophisticated and compelling...Dickey, a Newsweek reporter and editor, has the background to draw a convincing picture of the network of international terrorism, colorful detail in the novel's locales, and the cross currents of rivalry among the intelligence agencies. He also has the heritage, as son of the poet James Dickey, to produce vivid language. This is a quick-moving novel, exciting and disturbing. Bookpage: The Sleeper is a tense and persuasive thriller, timely as today's headlines, of a world in the throes of chaos and panic, and one man's efforts to restore some semblance of order. The New York Times: Christopher Dickey's first-rate thriller...Dickey, a Newsweek correspondent who has reported widely on terrorism, has the facts to make this novel chilling as well as engrossing.
Expats came out in 1990, but continues to be available in paperback from The Atlantic Monthly Press. The most handsome edition was the one published in Britain in 1991 by The Fourth Estate.
"Without question one of the best travel books of this or any other year." — David Rieff, Los Angeles Times
"In his engaging book, laced with humor, pathos and sensitivity, Mr. Dickey unveils this new Arabia, shaped by the sometimes creative, always skeptical tension between the Arab and the expatriate." — Sandra Mackey, The New York Times Book Review
"Succeeds better than any account I have seen in capturing the sordid climate of the undeclared war. ... Most valuable on the American role in organizing, directing and selling the not-so-secret 'secret war' to Congress and the American people." —New York Times Book Review
"Reads like a thriller, and carries the authority of solid reporting." —Washington Journalism Review
PLUS, Death, and the Day's Light, my father's last poems, for which I wrote a preface; and The Best Science Writing 2002, which picked a piece I wrote about a mix of science, art and hucksterism—a bunny that was supposed to glow in the dark.
In the Age of Facebook and the Time of Twitter, the
age-old clash between free speech and security is not about editorials in the
press, graffiti in the streets or speeches on street corners. It’s about the
ability of violent extremists to reach a global audience with a compelling
narrative that attracts recruits, volunteers, “lone wolves”—a narrative that
motivates them, and activates them. Traditional government controls and
censorship are virtually useless. The extremists have to be met on their own
communications battleground, but if we don’t understand the extremists’ tools
and their narrative there is little hope that we can neutralize their message.
Even then, there are no guarantees.
Text:
For the foreseeable future one of the central
preoccupations of the global press, and certainly of the American press, is
going to be the communications challenge presented by the “so-called Islamic
State,” or ISIS, or ISIL, or Da'esh, the acronyms we use when we don't want to
dignify this group with a name that makes it sound like a national entity.
And let’s make no mistake, the danger it poses is,
first and foremost, one of communications. Its military victories have mostly
been against hollow armies rife with corruption or weakened by other
insurgencies. Its impact on global opinion, however, is based on its creative
exploitation of media and myths, some old and some new, all wrapped up in an
iconography that is deeply seductive for many young people in many different
parts of the world.
I think all of us here can agree that we do not
agree with almost anything that Da'esh represents, but we would be making a
major mistake, as people concerned about the media, security and free speech,
if we did not admit the agility and creativity of its messaging, which is much
more supple and much more focused than most of the media when we are trying to
tell something like the truth about the events that surround us.
If you want to understand one key aspect of the way
Da'esh gets its message across, you would do well to spend a little time
playing "Call of Duty," which has gamers enraptured all over the
world.
Start at 00:33
If you then look at any of the highly produced films by Da'esh showing the actual murder of Western hostages, Syrian soldiers, Egyptian and other Christians, crucifixions, stonings, people thrown from towers and, most notably, the burning alive of a captured Jordanian pilot — then you, as a player of "Call of Duty," will find yourself in very familiar territory.
In “Call of Da'esh,” if you will, real people really are dying these gruesome deaths, but the video presentation has moved all that into a more accessible and, for a certain mindset, more acceptable dimension.
While Facebook, Twitter and YouTube certainly have been revolutionary communications tools, relatively few people in the press have understood how to exploit them effectively. And if we are going to talk about freedom of speech, we need to understand that these are the venues, much more than newspapers, or even television, that really count.
Journalists, I am sorry to say, are among the least imaginative users of social media. We employ social media these days to glean information because even the richest news organizations are reluctant to deploy people to war zones. Battlefields are expensive to cover.
But the most imaginative and effective users of social media as a tool to try to change the world are not doing what journalists do—grabbing bits of fact here and there to try to discover a truth—they are creating narratives to engage a following. And the most successful users of social media, at least in a political and potentially revolutionary sense, are those who create a narrative for a targeted audience that can be moved to action which then reinforces the narrative.
Barack Obama won the presidency of the United States this way in 2008. His campaign’s use of social media first engaged people who might only be vaguely interested in supporting him. Then it asked them to carry out specific acts, ringing specific doorbells to talk to people face to face to raise money and encourage voting. Then it asked people — young, enthusiastic people, for the most part — to record the results so Obama’s analysts and algorythms could gauge where their performance might be improved. And the narrative? The election of the first black president of the United States, a young man who said, “Yes, we can.”
I actually wrote in 2008 that these same kinds of tactics could be employed by terrorists. It's a question of tools, after all, not of ideology. At the time I was thinking of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, who had first used CD-Roms and DVDs to spread their narrative, then satellite television, and who had just begun to experiment with YouTube.
From 2009 to 2011, we saw the power of narrative combined with social media and satellite to create popular uprisings in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and much of the rest of the deeply frustrated Arab world. But their narrative was a short one—to gather, to protest, to try to bring down the government—with no real strategy for what might come after. I remember when I was in Tahrir Square in Egypt people talking about “crowd sourcing” the leadership of the revolution. Well, we know that doesn’t work. Militant groups with long histories of discipline and organization move into the vacuum and, more often than not, frustrate entirely the hopes of the free-thinking crowd on Facebook and Twitter.
In fact, coming full circle, we have to understand that the people who truly mastered the new media are those associated with the Al Qaeda spin-off that we’ve been calling Da’esh, because it understood its audiences—there are several; it knew how to develop narratives that they would feel compelling; and it has the leadership to continue an organized drive to create a new state in the Middle East that has goals far outside the region.
I want to focus here on the Da’esh narrative that has proved so seductive to young people in the West, because that is the one that Western governments have found so surprising.
In fact, today’s terrorists have certain common characteristics. I think of them as testosterone, narrative, and theater, or, if you will, TNT.
Testosterone because they are predominantly young men, often frustrated in their work lives and sex lives, who want an outlet for their energies. (This is true of many recruits in conventional armies. But one of the things Da’esh adds to the mix is the promise of wives and even slave girls.)
Narrative, which we keep coming back to, is absolutely central. Almost all terrorist recruits over the years, whether in the IRA, the Sendero Luminoso or Black September, have been convinced they were fighting to defend an oppressed people. They were not necessarily oppressed themselves, but they identified with those who were, and they see themselves in noble, even chivalric terms, like knights in shining armor coming to the rescue, which gives them the ability to justify, as knights often did, absolutely horrific acts. It is no accident that Al Qaeda’s core book of ideology by Ayman al Zawahiri bears the title Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. Young men and women are inspired to answer their call of duty.
Theater? This is another area where social media have become so important. The recruits of modern terrorist organizations want to project themselves and their actions on the world stage, even if they are not going to be around on this earth to see the result. Social media have made this effect incalculably easier to achieve. And this is hardly limited to Islamic extremists. We just saw in a rural college in Oregon a horrendous mass murder by a young man who clearly thought he could write his name in history with the blood of his classmates. A few months earlier, another young man tried to do the same thing in Charleston, South Carolina, which is my home away from home in the United States.
As the Internet and social media have lowered the monetary costs of global communications, they also have lowered the threshold for violence that can command the world’s attention.
Fifteen years ago, Bin Laden and his men spent a lot of time watching disaster movies like “Independence Day,” and they plotted their attacks to imitate that sort of iconography. Without huge spectaculars, they knew they could never command the kind of headlines and television time that they and their suicide troops wanted.
Ten years ago, when Abu Musab al Zarqawi was decapitating his enemies in Iraq, he had to depend on satellite news networks to show clips of the grotesque videotapes that preached about his sense of justice and were intended to horrify his enemies.
Terrorists of those earlier generations had to depend on others, even on the "mainstream media," to get their message out. But no longer.
Today, Da’esh has so many more tools at its disposal to sicken its enemies and glorify its knights in blood-spattered balaclavas, and not only the soft social media like Facebook and Twitter, but the hard core violent excitement of shared video games.
It isn’t so much that Da’esh produces its own version of “Grand Theft Auto,” although it has done that, it is the way it uses the imagery and iconography of video games to put its message across, blurring intentionally and cruelly the lines between the Xbox and the execution grounds of Raqqa.
Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.
Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.
Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.
Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.
Screen shot from trailer of Call of Duty: Black Ops II
You may have noticed I have barely mentioned religion.
When we talk about Al Qaeda and Da’esh, there is often a lot of discussion about what the Qur’an says or does not say. And there is a lot of tweeting from this Surah or that one. But, of course, the Qur’an can say or not say just about anything these organizations want.
Do the Qur’an and the hadith warn against the worship of idols? Yes. So let’s destroy Nimrud and Palmyra. But have those same lines been interpreted by scholars for many centuries to warn against the portrayal of the human form? Absolutely. You can see the result in mosques all over the world. There are no representations of human beings.
Earlier radical movements, like the Ikhwan in Arabia, not only fought and died to keep television out of the Saudi kingdom in the 1960s for that reason, earlier on they smashed every mirror they could find in Jeddah and Mecca when they conquered those cities.
But Da’esh has no problem with the human form because it is so vital to its new media narrative—it won’t motivate many young men or women with calligraphy and arabesques—and Da’esh is a very practical organization.
There once was a notion that the people, on social media by the millions, or the billions, would offer correctives to the inhuman propaganda of monsters like the killers of Da’esh. But that simply is not the case—unless the people have a narrative that is more compelling. And they do not.
Neither do governments. Take a look at the deeply embarrassing efforts of the U.S. State Department’s @ThinkAgainTurnAway Twitter feed. That makes the point better than I can.
So, here’s my question for you—and it is not a rhetorical one:
Is there a narrative that we liberal-thinkers can use to counter the TNT that Da’esh offers its recruits? Maybe that is not exactly our duty, but it is something we have to think about in the name of humanity and, yes, whenver we talk about journalism, free speech and the tools of terror. END
So much is gone with the wind and the floods that ravaged the Carolinas. In Columbia, SC, the dam that created Lake Katharine broke, devastating the homes downstream. (See Ben Hoover's stunning coverage at https://www.facebook.com/bl.hoover.3?pnref=story ). My family lived on Lake Katharine for almost 30 years and these are some snapshot memories cerca 1970-74, including James Dickey with Robert Lowell, Robert Redford, and grandson James B.T. Dickey on the dock behind our house at 4620 Lelia's Court (which was torn down after we sold it in 1998). I am sure Bronnie and Kevin, Janet Lee Burnet, who took the great photo with Lowell, James Mann, Michael Allin (who taught me to water ski on that lake), Ward Briggs, Gordon Van Ness III, and others have more pictures they could share as well to help us remember our time on Lake Katharine, and I hope Shani Shani Raine Gilchrist has great success helping to organize relief efforts for people who live below the broken dam. To that end there will be a reading by South Carolina authors, including Marjory Wentworth, on Oct. 10 in Charleston.
prominently displayed. (And if not, tell them they should!) It's all over Amazon, with a fantastic price for the moment of $14.01 for the beautifully produced hardcover edition, plus a Kindle edition, and an Audible audio version read elegantly and appropriately by a Briton, Antony Ferguson.
The hardcover book also is available at Barnes and Noble, in the stores and online.
Over the past week I have written two essays for The Daily Beast that put "Our Man" in the context of recent events and my own background as a Southerner. The first, "Confederate Madness Then and Now," many of you have seen already. The second was just published this morning:
Today, I will be talking about the book and about the Confederate legacy on NPR's "Here and Now," which airs at noon on Boston's WBUR and in many other parts for the country as well. Tomorrow I will be on the BBC.
I am happy and, yes, more than a little proud to say the early reviews and comments have ranged from good to great, and next week the New York Times Book Review will list "Our Man" as an "Editor's Choice."
"Our Man in Charleston is a joy to discover. It is a perfect book about an imperfect spy." —Joan Didion
"Thoroughly researched and deftly crafted. [Our Man in Charleston will] introduce people to a man who should be better known, one who cannily fought the good fight at a fateful moment in history." —Wall Street Journal
"One heck of a good read." —The Charlotte Observer
"[Bunch is] a brilliant find…Dickey, the foreign editor of The Daily Beast and a former longtime Newsweek correspondent, uses his research well: in a story like this one, point of view is everything, and Bunch's is razor sharp." —American Scholar "Dickey has written a book that is as much suspense and spy adventure as it is a history book... A story as compelling as this one does not come around very often. With so much already written about the Civil War, and more coming every year, originality is a rare thing these days. The story of Robert Bunch is that and more." —The Carolina Chronicles
"A fascinating tale of compromise, political maneuvering, and espionage." —Publishers Weekly "Dickey's comprehension of the mindset of the area, coupled with the enlightening missives from Bunch, provides a rich background to understanding the time period….A great book explaining the workings of what Dickey calls an erratic, cobbled-together coalition of ferociously independent states. It should be in the library of any student of diplomacy, as well as Civil War buffs." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"A fine examination of a superbly skilled diplomat." —Booklist
"Britain's consul in Charleston before and during the first two years of the Civil War was outwardly pro-Southern and earned notoriety in the North. But in secret correspondence with the British Foreign Office he made clear his hostility to slavery and the Confederacy. His dispatches helped prevent British recognition of the Confederacy. Christopher Dickey has skillfully unraveled the threads of this story in an engrossing account of diplomatic derring-do." —James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom
"Did Robert Bunch, Her Majesty's consul in Charleston, keep Britain out of the Confederacy's war? Drawing on Bunch's clandestine correspondence, Christopher Dickey makes a compelling case that this dazzlingly duplicitous, ardent anti-slaver played a key role. A fascinating, little-known shard of vital Civil War history, brought glitteringly alive with all the verve and panache of a master story teller." —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March "In his extraordinary new history Our Man in Charleston, Christopher Dickey has written a book you can't put down. This is a well-researched history with the immense power and sheer element of surprise we find in the finest spy novels. It's like reading a book by Graham Greene, written while he was staying at the house of John le Carré, discussing the fate of nations over drinks. With Charleston consul Robert Bunch, Dickey has introduced a new great man in the great war that haunts America still. I adored this book." —Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini and South of Broad
"Our Man in Charleston is a superlative and entertaining history of the grey area where diplomacy ends and spy craft begins. British Consul Robert Bunch played a secret role in the anti-slavery fight in Charleston, which would remain secret to this day were it not for Christopher Dickey's extraordinary detective skills." —Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire and Georgiana
"Wonderfully written and researched, Our Man in Charleston is the best espionage book I've read. I couldn't put it down." —Robert Baer, former CIA case officer and author of See No Evil
"Robert Bunch is an unlikely spy, but his bravery and moral sensibility make him an intriguing hero for Christopher Dickey's Civil War history. Dickey knows his stuff, from spying to the slave trade, and he's a master at telling a fast-paced, gripping yarn." —Evan Thomas, author of John Paul Jones and The Very Best Men "Christopher Dickey has accomplished the near-impossible—exhuming a forgotten but irresistible character from the dustbin of Civil War history, and bringing him back to life with painstaking research and bravura literary flair. This irresistible book opens new windows onto the complicated worlds of wartime diplomacy, intelligence-gathering and outright intrigue, and the result is fresh history and page-turning excitement." —Harold Holzer, author of Lincoln and the Power of the Press and winner of the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
"A long-needed study of Robert Bunch, British consul in Charleston—a secret agent for the Crown in the Civil War era who outwardly praised the city and its people while privately loathing both, and who discouraged diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy by keeping his superiors abreast of its determination to continue importing slaves. Elegantly written, well researched, an engrossing story." —Howard Jones, author of Blue and Grey Diplomacy
