An Accidental American

副标题: Accidental American

ISBN: 9780812977080

出版社: Random House Inc

出版年: 2007-4

页数: 228

定价: $ 11.24

装帧: Pap

内容简介

Forced out of a self-imposed exile, one woman faces a lifetime's worth of secrets and betrayal-all in the name of staying alive. Nicole Blake had planned to leave her criminal life in the past. She had done her time in a dank prison in Marseille and relinquished the world of forgery and counterfeiting for an unassuming career as a freelance consultant. Now her world is a small farm in the French Pyrenees, with daily fresh eggs and the companionship of her devoted dog. But when U.S. intelligence operative John Valsamis shows up at her door, Nicole is reminded that she'll always be an ex-con. Valsamis is after Nicole's former lover, Rahim Ali, and soon Nicole finds herself back in Lisbon, tracking down Rahim in all their old haunts. Except now Rahim isn't just a document forger-he's a suspected terrorist. Unwittingly drawn into an international web of fundamentalism, crime, and corruption, Nicole discovers that its threads stretch from the cobbled streets of Lisbon to the once-beautiful city of her birth, Beirut, and to the top levels of the government that sent Valsamis to find her. And as with any good web, the harder Nicole fights to free herself, the tighter it closes around her. "Thought-provoking . . . The gritty atmosphere is perfectly drawn, and complex layers of lies and betrayal keep the reader happily guessing up to the end."-"Publishers Weekly" "Chilling and utterly believable, "An Accidental American" hurls the reader into the dark and forbidding world of espionage. Not to be missed."-Gayle Lynds, author of "The Last Spymaster______________________________________________________________ "THE MORTALIS DOSSIER- ALEX CARR'S NOTE ON THE BOMBING OF THE AMERICAN EMBASSY IN BEIRUT On April 18, 1983, at one o'clock in the afternoon, a van carrying twothousand pounds of explosives blew up outside the American embassyin Beirut, killing sixty-three people. Among the victims wereseventeen Americans, eight of whom represented the Central IntelligenceAgency's entire Middle East contingent. In the years precedingthe bombing, an increasing number of attacks on Western andIsraeli interests had been carried out by Palestinian and Muslim extremists, but the Beirut bombing was widely seen as a watershedevent for American policies in the region. With the exception of theseizure of the American embassy in Tehran four years earlier, an actthat was carried out within the framework of Iran's Islamic revolution, the embassy bombing represented the first time America hadbeen so directly and bloodily targeted by Islamic terrorists for its militaryinvolvement in the Middle East.It's impossible to see why the United States was such an unwelcomeforce without an understanding of the history of Lebanon andthe surrounding region, and of American and Western involvementin the politics of the Middle East in general. Though Lebanon hasexisted in one form or another since the ninth century b.c., the moderncountry of Lebanon was not established until 1920, when it wasgranted to the French as part of a system of mandates established forthe administration of former Turkish and German territories followingWorld War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, almostall of what we think of as the modern Middle East was shapedby these mandates.America's first direct intervention in Lebanese politics came in1946. During World War II, Lebanon had been declared a free statein order to liberate it from Vichy control. But when, after the war, Lebanon eventually moved toward full independence, the Frenchbalked, and the United States, Britain, and several Arab governmentsstepped in to support Lebanese independence. It was at this timethat Lebanon's system of political power sharing was devised. Wellaware of the country's shaky precolonial past and determined to keepLebanon intact, the fledgling nationalist government agreed to splitpower along sectarian lines, based on the numbers of the 1932 census.It was a well-intentioned plan, but one that inadvertently set thestage for decades of strife and civil war.The power-sharing government's first major stumbling block camewith the partitioning of the British Mandate of Palestine in the wakeof World War II, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed. Theensuing influx of some 100,000 Palestinian refugees into Lebanonproved a strain on the carefully crafted power-sharing system. Tensionswere further exacerbated in 1956, when Egyptian presidentGamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, provoking theUnited States, along with Britain, France, and Israel, to respond withmilitary force. While Lebanese Muslims wanted the government toback the newly created United Arab Republic, Christians fought tokeep the nation allied with the West. In 1958, with the country teeteringon the brink of civil war, the United States sent marines intoLebanon to support the government of President Camille Chamoun, thus inextricably linking itself with Christian forces.It was an alliance that would be tested when, nearly two decadeslater, sectarian rivalries finally erupted into full-scale civil war. WhileLebanon had enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity, tensionsbetween the United States and the Soviet Union, and betweenthe United States and Iran, had escalated significantly, as had tensionsbetween the Israelis and the Palestinians. By the spring of1975-when gunmen from the Christian Phalange militia attacked abus in the suburbs of Beirut and massacred twenty-seven Palestinianson board in what is widely agreed to have been the first act of thecivil war-the forces at work in Lebanon were not merely internalones. The Cold War, as well as the larger Arab-Israeli conflict, wereboth being played out in Leban