Been there. Done that. Wrote that.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Let’s talk about…perspective. History. And what we can learn from it.

Do you know Otho Eskin?

Before he turned to writing fiction, he served in the U.S. Army and in the United States Foreign Service in Washington and in Syria, Yugoslavia, Iceland and Berlin (then the capital of the German Democratic Republic) as a lawyer and diplomat. 

He was Vice-Chairman of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, participated in the negotiations on the International Space Station, was principal U.S. negotiator of several international agreements on seabed mining and was the U.S. representative to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. He speaks French, German, and Serbo-Croatian. He was a frequent speaker at conferences and has testified before the U.S. Congress and commissions.

While stationed in East Berlin during the cold war, the East German intelligence service (Stasi) operating on behalf of their Soviet masters, Otho says, published a book entitled Who’s who in CIA, translated into several languages and with wide distribution. This propaganda effort listed Otho and was intended to claim that he was a U.S. spy. 

This was part of the East German and ultimately Soviet disinformation campaign to make the work of U.S. Foreign Service officers serving abroad more difficult.   Now, Otho writes political thrillers. And, as you can imagine, they are about as authentic as a thriller can be. 

Writing a Political Thriller as a Real-life Witness to History

By Otho Eskin

 

I have always been fascinated by the world around me, reading everything that I could get my hands on. I didn’t have any conscious aspirations of becoming a writer when I was young, but looking back it has become clear to me that the wheels were already turning in that direction, even if it would be much later in life that I first published my first book.

 

I spent much of my early professional life traveling. I went to school in Paris for a year and later joined the United States Foreign Service. While abroad, I encountered people who spoke other languages and held customs very different than mine in America. It was exciting to see and hear the way other humans lived. 

 

I witnessed a few societies collapse into chaos and authoritarianism, and these memories now inform my fiction.

 

For my first overseas assignment, I was sent to Damascus, Syria, where I saw an attempted coup. It was 1963, and while I was being shown around the city, there came over the radio news of upheaval and total curfew. Tanks rolled through the streets, and military jets flew at rooftop level. As a young diplomat, I had not experienced political violence, I was stunned.

 

From 1977 to 1979, I was stationed in Berlin, then the capital of East Germany. As a senior embassy officer, my job was to cultivate sources and report on political and social developments. Life in this police state meant constant surveillance. My phone was tapped, my home watched, and my neighbors interrogated.

 

East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, was then one of the world’s most feared organizations, and a special department tracked foreign diplomats, including me. The Stasi  produced Who’s Who in CIA, listing 3,000 supposed intelligence agents—many actually Foreign Service officers. One agent was killed after his name was published in this book. 

Ever since my time abroad, I have wondered about the political and historical conditions that give rise to authoritarianism. Admittedly, I was one of the many American diplomats to imagine that democracy would never fall in my own country. “It can’t happen here,” I thought, to quote the title of a novel by satirist Sinclair Lewis.

 

But in recent years, I’ve seen what many experts describe as the fascist creep—a rollback of civil liberties, including the right to free speech. My latest novel, Black Sun Rising, explores the rise of a neo-Nazi movement in Washington, DC. The book depicts homicide detective Marko Zorn infiltrating a white supremacist group in order to avenge the death of his partner and stop the despots before they succeed in destroying American institutions. 

 

Now in my nineties, I am no longer out in the streets. Rather, I read the newspapers to know what is unfolding in my own country or even neighborhood. But I can vividly remember having once been a firsthand witness to history, finding ways to combine past memories and current events to write a compelling tale for readers today. 

 

I often tell people that I know early on how a story begins and how it ends. It’s the middle that requires imagination. For all its harrowing parallels to actual goings-on, Black Sun Rising ends on a hopeful note, which is to say that I still believe in America’s promise. No matter how bad things get, I believe and hope that justice and the rule of law will prevail. Just as I once sang in school, this is “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It belongs to the dreamers, young and old.

 

Question: What history have you witnessed, either here or abroad, and how does it give you a greater perspective on the world today?

HANK: What an amazing life. And an amazing imagination. What do you think, Reds and Readers? And a copy of BLACK SUN RISING to one lucky commenter.