Publications
The Andropov Deception
John Rossiter
(Sherwood Press, London 1984)
‘John Rossiter’ is Brian Crozier, long-time asset of British and American intelligence agencies. (see Times 29 October 1984), and this is quite the worst – and worst written – thriller I’ve read (even worse than The Spike).
Rather like The Spike, The Andropov Deception is supposed to be a kind of roman ‘a clef, revealing, in fictional form, information the author is unable or unwilling to reveal overtly. In this instance, from what I picked up from a nose-holding skim, Crozier is trying to tell us about a high-placed Soviet mole within the West German government (wow!), KGB control of “world terrorism”,and KGB influence in the West European “peace movement”.
Sadly, Crozier has nothing of interest to say on these subjects you couldn’t pick up from reading the Daily Telegraph, and succeeds merely in suggesting things about himself and his ilk.
Before the 1970s feminist movement appropriated the expression “sexual politics”, it was shorthand for a collection of ideas – loosely post-Freudian, essentially Reichian – which claimed a connection between political beliefs and personality structure. For example, crudely, authoritarian beliefs reflected an “authoritarian character”, which, in turn, was the product of particular psycho-sexual experiences.
This is a very complex subject which really has no place here. However, at some level “sexual politics” does seem to me to be true, does describe something real. Some kinds of generalisations about your average British Movement thug’s sexual/emotional capabilities and inclinations just are going to be true.
In this kind of framework, what would we expect from someone like Crozier, currently among the prominent exponents of the Soviet Union – source-of-all-terrorism line, and general apologist for US (and UK) support for some of the most obnoxious regimes in the “free world”?
Crozier’s “hero”, a NATO agent called Peter Lock (is Crozier telling us NATO has its own Intelligence service?) is. an emotionless psychopath for whom “killing caused a sexual swelling”. (p. 6) (Notice the beautiful prose!) Lock gets the first of several blow-jobs 4 pages into the book from a (female) Soviet agent who then dies in his bed, the victim of a delayed-action poison pill inserted in her anus by a KGB big-wig. (There is a good deal of interest in women’s anal passages throughout the book.)
Further on, another of Lock’s women gets gang-raped, tortured, and (of course) anally raped, before Lock arrives on the scene to enact his revenge. He murders the six people involved after castrating three of them. Lock, in short, is a caricature of the sexual sadist, the macho “action man” of every right-wing fantasy.
Crozier is an honoured, if apparently minor member of the coterie now gathered around the bloody foreign policies of America’s resurgent right-wing. All of them, like Crozier, are apologists, directly or indirectly, for mass murder in the name of “freedom” and “democracy” in places like Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala.
It is, of course, possible that Crozier is a wonderful chap, tender-hearted with the best of them and not remotely like the the sadistic thug he has created. If so, why has he written this revolting trash?
Robin Ramsay