Research for the Marten Fane story

In  my last blog I referred to the amount of research I do for my novels, including the Marten Fane story. The controversial issue that underlies Pacific Heights, and the novels to follow, and that consumed so much of my research, is the astonishing growth of the “intelligence-industrial complex”, a term that the Washington Post has used to describe the explosion of intelligence contractors that occurred in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Despite the fact that there have been many books and articles written about this subject, most people are still unaware of  the hidden changes that have taken place in the structure of the United States intelligence community. By outsourcing our national intelligence responsibilities to private, for-profit enterprises, the government has fundamentally altered the structure and behavior of the business of spying. The Cold War era of cloak-and-dagger spying that drove fifty years of wonderful espionage novels, has changed forever. Those changes will have profound consequences for our lives.

For a fiction writer, these seismic shifts present a rich story-telling opportunity. Change is always a personal and cultural agent of anxiety, and that is especially true when that change deals with an issue that is at the deepest essence of our personalities, and our national well-being: our secrets.

Never before in history have our personal and  national secrets been so closely intertwined. Until now our national security secrets have been closely held. They have been centralized, the purview of the federal government, on our behalf, in the national interest. Now however, those secrets have been de-centralized, scattered far and wide throughout a network of private companies, for-profit contractors who have sold their services to the federal government and have been given many of the responsibilities formerly held by the government alone.

A year ago this month the Washington Post published a series of investigative pieces by the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Dana Priest and William M. Arkin that explores this startling new world. The series, “Top Secret America: A hidden world, growing out of control,” was two years in the making. Nearly a dozen Washington Post journalists were involved in developing the series, and its extraordinary website. Here is a link to the Washington Post series, and to its accompanying website topsecretamerica.com.

This Fall, PBS television’s Front Line series will air their inside story of the making of the Washington Post series. Here is a link to the website for the PBS Frontline program.

The Washington Post series and its website are great places to start if you want to understand the backdrop against which the Marten Fane story will be told.

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