The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Dark Arena: A Frenchman Novel (The Frenchman Series) by Jack Beaumont

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Dark Arena: A Frenchman Novel (The Frenchman Series) by Jack Beaumont https://amzn.to/3HEVD8S Written by a former French spy, Dark Arena is an espionage thriller that takes the reader through an invisible but violent battle for energy supremacy in Europe that led the invasion of Ukraine. February 2022. An officer of the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), the French foreign intelligence agency, delivers a package of top secret Russian military information from Prague to Paris, and is subsequently assassinated. So begins a cat and mouse game across Europe as DGSE agent Alec de Payns races to find the source of what has become regular "drops" of highly sensitive information regarding Russian military operations. De Payns infiltrates the clandestine meeting a of Russian private military company, follows the trail of a shady individual codenamed Starkand, and nearly gets assassinated himself. Meanwhile, de Payns marriage is falling apart and his mental state unraveling as his wife, Romy, pulls away from her increasingly paranoid husband. But as his personal life crumbles, his professional life makes a breakthrough and the DGSE are finally closing in on Starkand and the mysterious head of an American spy network--who is much closer to home than Alec ever imagined. About the author Jack Beaumont joined the French Air Force in his late teens, trained as a fighter pilot on Mirage 2000-5 single seaters for air-to-air combat, and was deployed in various conflicts. After being injured in a flying accident, he subsequently flew clandestine missions for French special forces and intelligence services before joining the DGSE, where he carried out clandestine operations in the field under false identities. He has since retired from the DGSE and is married with children.

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and somehow all you guys set out with New Year's resolutions to listen to the Chris Voss show and the show is up 300%, which is hard to do when you have millions of downloads. It's like, I never thought I'd see us do 300% in a month. But evidently you like us or somebody likes us. Thank you. Refer the show to your family, friends, and

relatives. If you're new, go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, Chris Voss1 on the TikTokity, and ChrisFossFacebook.com. We have an amazing author on the show. He's the author of a two-book series out now. This is the second book that's coming out that's burning hot off the charts. It's called Dark Arena, a Frenchman novel, part of the Frenchman series, book two of two. It comes out February 27th, 2024.

Jack Beaumont is on the show with us today. He'll be talking to us about his latest book and all the cool stuff that went into it. Jack Beaumont is a, he joined the French Air Force in his late teens, trained as a fire pilot on the Mirage 2000-5, or Dash 5, single seaters for air-to-air combat was deployed in various conflicts. After being injured in a flying accident, he subsequently flew clandestine missions for French special forges and intelligence services before joining the DGSE, where he has carried out clandestine operations in the field under false identities. He has since retired from the DGSE and is married with children. Welcome to the show, Jack.

How are you? Good, thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. Do I have the pronunciation of your last name correct? What? Beaumont? Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. Want to make sure we nailed that. Welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs. You can find me especially on Instagram or with the Jack Beaumont underscore official.

And other than that, I mean, the book is on Amazon, Goodreads, everywhere. There you go. So the book, The Frenchman, was a huge hit in the first book in the series and very popular. Tons of reviews on the old Amazon and Goodreads there. Tell us the 30,000 overview of the new book and what's inside. So the new book actually takes the same characters as the first book,

but it's a different mission, different story. And it's very much actual because it's related to what happened between Russia and Ukraine and all the gas battle on the Med Sea at the moment, which leads back to the situation between Russia and Ukraine. There you go. Tell us who the lead character is and how you developed him. Well, actually, I wrote the first one because

I had the PTSD after my several years as an operative in the French Secret Service. So DGSE is the equivalent of the CIA. And I had five different IDs on which I was turning all the time. And I had to do some very, very silly stuff over the day or overnight.

And then I had to come back home and be a father and a husband, which is the hard part, which is not like Jason Bourne or James Bond. So I wanted to write about this and to get rid of my PTSD. So I started to write the book thinking that it was not going to be published and that no one would really care about it. And so basically the main character is based on my real life. So the main character is called Alec and he's married with two kids. And what I really wanted to express in the book is those feelings of being in clandestine operations under false identities, waking up a guy with a gun on his forehead, and then you come back home and you have to be a father and a husband and go and buy the milk.

Take out the garbage. It's probably quite the head spin. I mean, especially having five identities it's wow yeah yeah i have five identities but they're mostly personalities one says kill kill kill all the time judge says i can't use that anymore but yeah minor personalities instead of identities so they're still working through it though the psychiatrist will figure it out so give us a little bit of background more on you you know how did you up? How did you get into the spy craft? Well, I think actually I saw the other day a TV show about John Le Carre, the famous spy author.

And he was saying in the interview that he thinks he became a spy when he was a kid. I think it's roughly the same for me. So I grew up in a very old traditional French family. So my great-grandfather was one of the main generals of Napoleon. And my grandfather was one of the only few French, three French forces who made the D-Day in Normandy with the American forces. And he was the first Frenchman to enter the Eagle Nest in Berchtesgaden in the house of Hitler. Oh, wow. So I was raised in this very traditional old family with this lineage coming from my ancestors. And my parents were fighting, heavily fighting. Their couple was not very successful. So they were heavily fighting

and mom tried to suicide a few times, this kind of stuff. So the childhood was a bit traumatic. And so I guess to save myself and preserve myself, I quickly had to go in intelligence and anticipate their moves before it did happen. So it was the only way I could survive. And then I registered myself in a boarding school when I was 15 without telling them because it was the only way I could escape home. And then after the boarding school, I joined the military at 18, after doing some mathematics and physics engineering,

and became one of the youngest fighter pilots in the French Air Force, flying single-seaters for dogfight. And then I did this for a few years, 9, 10 years. Then I had a flying accident. I injured my back. I couldn't eject. So I crashed with the plane. It was in a training. So the crash was a bit intense and it took the fireman a bit more than two hours to take me out of the car. Wow. Yeah, I was very lucky. So I had all the

left side broken. I was knocked out and everything. And then I was retrained as a military pilot for special forces slash intelligence, but I didn't know it yet. So I was sent in the Balkans and I did the hunt of the Serbian war criminals for three years. There you go. And it was good fun flying lower than the trees by night with my goggles, landing on roads, on fields, this kind of stuff. Wow. And then actually the guys I was carrying in the back, some of them were DGSEs or French CIA and became mates. And then I had a survival training in high altitude mountain to go and do the same for Ben Laden in Afghanistan at that time. and one of my discs popped out again in the spine so i had a

second surgery in the back and i've lost my medical ability to fly in the military and i didn't want to go and no offense to commercial pilots i didn't want to go and fly a bus after being a fighter pilot and special forces and and one of my mates from dgse, why don't you try to join us? And so I did the test, I was selected, joined, and internally selected to be on the field as an operative. But I guess that the mindset you need to do this kind of job

came clearly from my... There you go. There you go. Well, it's interesting how the arc of our childhood shapes the arc of our lives. There you go. So it sounds like you did some James Bond-ish sort of stuff,

where you were working different identities and being in the script. And probably, I guess, like the CIA does, they develop different other spies and targets or counter-spies and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, in the French Secret Service, you replace the Aston Martin of James Bond by a Peugeot. But except from that, no, no, it's very much so. You have different identities.

The idea is to, of course, do some human intelligence and recruit some human, some person of interest and grab what they have in their mind. The way you do it, the manipulation. So you have to manipulate people, as you know. And the way you manipulate is through what we call the mice. So M-I-C-E. So there are the four leverages to manipulate someone. M is for money. I is for ideology.

C is for coercion. And E is for ego. Each time you do the environment of someone and being like a ghost around this person, entering this person's house, his life, his wife, kids, everything, then you will detect the mice. From that moment on, with a false ID, you will enter this person's life and get close to this person and start to manipulate this person and take this person closer to the

edge of the cliff until he starts or she starts to give some intelligence, which proves that the mice works. If the mice doesn't work, you change, or if there is no mice, because sometimes you have great people, very honest and faithful and not interested by money, it does happen. That's good. But then you have to create the mice so you have to destabilize their lives so that you have a leverage and then you will grab the intelligence so that's for the human intelligence and of course

only on bad usually bad people so a lot of counterterrorism all this kind of stuff and sometimes you have to do pure operational intelligence which is grabbing the intelligence very quickly without having the time to recruit someone, a human source. So you have to enter someone's house, offices, hotel room, grab the encrypted hard drive, grab the computer. And then at the end of the chain, you have the direct threat and everything or potentially, you know, exploding a car, this kind of stuff.

And so to do so in other countries, you need false identities. And of course, you must never be linked to France or to the DGSE. So if something bad happens, you're by yourself, you're on your own. And the way you enter the country sometimes especially nowadays with biometric systems the way you enter the country can be very james bondy by jumping out of an aircraft all this kind of stuff wow that sounds it sounds very james bondy and very mission impossible so if you're if you're caught in this mission we'll deny deny any. Yeah, well, the level of risk, I guess, is not the same. But it's

the issue, I guess, with that is that you see the worst of the human nature because, by definition, the people you have to approach and recruit are especially a bit evil sometimes. And you can't fight the evil by being an angel. So

you have to develop your own dark side as much as you can to be able to be on the same level as those people you have to recruit. And that's where bad things happen is that you end up losing yourself. And that's why you need generally to be married, actually, when you are recruited, so that something is hooking you back and grounding you back to your real life. But it's very hard. And usually a divorce is the rule. And unfortunately, suicide is also quite a high percentage in the company.

Yeah, that's crazy. But you guys stand in the precipice between us and the darkest parts of the world. You know, sometimes we don't even hear about how you guys stand in between things and change the course of history. You know, they did a test on me to see if that mice worked and money and all that stuff. None of it worked. You know what worked? They call it the T.

Tacos. Tacos. I can be bribed with tacos to do anything. Yeah. So I have to be very careful. There you go. there's a lot of mexican spies that infiltrate me so there's that so so this all translates into how you've written the books shape them the characterization of the people in them and of course probably you know

different plot lines you know you know how the guns work you know how all the different aspects of the the spycraft trade works what what tell us more about some of the players that are in the new novel. Players, you mean in the character side of the book? Characters, the good, the bad, and the uglies. Well, actually, you know what? It's very funny that you say that. The title I wanted, the working title I had for Dark Arena was the good, the bad, and Zelensky.

There you go. So was Putin and Zelensky characters in this book then? Yeah. Given the current war and stuff that's going on. There you go. Putin, Zelensky, Kolomoisky, which is a well-known Ukrainian oligarch who sponsored

the campaign of Zelensky for him to become a president. And it's, I mean, the thing is, what I try to do is to base my books on, based on real experiences and real missions. Of course, the idea is not to reveal high state secrets and put myself in any trouble or put my mates who are still on the field in any trouble. So that's absolutely not the case. And clearly, that's why it's a novel and it's not an autobiography in any sort, in any kind. But basically, what I do is I mix a few experiences in different missions.

Basically, the Frenchman is based on, let's say, three, four real experiences, missions. And I did, personally, I did a bit more than 100 different missions. You got a lot of books in you. Well, except that, you know, the methodology we use is kind of always the same. So I don't want it to be, you know, boring for the readers. So I guess I've got a few books more,

but I clearly can't write 100. Otherwise it's going to be the same kind of spy craft and everything. So the first one is more about biological weapons in Pakistan and the relationship of course, with the neighbors, neighbor countries, and with the main terrorist plot to poison some water supplies of a massive city. Oh, wow. Which was a real threat, actually. And in the second book, it's more about the gas battle with Nord Stream 1, Nord Stream 2, East Medgas Pipeline, Turkey Stream. So who is feeding Europe in gas and why all those guys are fighting?

Libya, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Gaza Strip, Cyprus, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, you name it, and Europe. And of course, U.S. are very involved to export their liquefied gas. So it's all this geopolitical situation in which you have the spy plot. And then what I try to do is to put the real techniques because you were talking about the gun. Actually, you hope, you really hope that you won't have to use a gun

if you do well your job. Normally, you are meant to be someone else. If you take a gun out, it means you are a spy. Yeah. It would be a giveaway, wouldn't it?

So we communicate, like for example, in clandestine communication, we communicate with little stickers that we stick in different places, which they mean different things. All those spycraft, how you check if you're followed, how you drop the tail, all this kind of stuff.

And of course, a bit of action, because there is a bit of action in the real job. Yeah, definitely. And you've seen it. How does your portrayal of espionage differ from the common, you know, this Hollywood narrative that we have over here for Spy Stories? Well, the real espionage is, first of all, as I was saying, I mean, 90% of us are married with kids because that's a sign of mental stability. you are recruited thanks to the fact or because you're married when actually what the company is going to ask you or the job is going to ask you to do is going to clearly push you away from that equilibrium and in your yin and yang you're going to develop the dark side clearly more than the light the white side and you're going to become all dark and usually the cost is the marriage

so that's that's the main difference and the second difference is that it's a very slow job very dark very very dark you have to befriend some some people who are really evil in in the first book there is the bad guy and i really really met him met him and give you an idea, I was trying to create the empathy with him. I mean, you know the drill with your background. And I was trying to create the empathy. And I said, oh, you have kids, you know, and you're married and everything. And he looked at me and he went like, with what I intend to do of the world, I prefer not to have kids.

Wow. And he was the top boss of the new of the biological weapon of his countries of his country yeah he just wanted to you know destroy the whole world basically watch the world yeah yeah yeah and so and so you have to face this kind of people there is a lot of weight observation weight following people observing putting some mics putting cameras, following the wife, following the kids, following the mistress, following everything. So it's much, much slower.

And you have to plan ahead everything. It's not like in James Bond, you just decide at the last moment, I'm going to do this and it's going to work. It suddenly works. Yeah. decide at the last moment, I'm going to do this and it's going to work. You need to plan all the what if. What if this happened? What if this happened? You have to be ready for any kind of

situation. You have to be prepared. Hollywood has to create a movie and cram it into two hours. Sometimes you see stuff like the James Bond thing. It's a little too fantastical. Are you serious? I saw the And sometimes you see stuff that like sometimes the James Bond thing, it's a little too fantastical. Like, yeah,

it's serious. Like, I sold the, I sold the, the rights of the Frenchman, the first one to the sons of John Le Carre, actually. They are the one who made the night manager and,

and little drummer girl. So, and the script writer adapting the book, he's Nick Pizzolatto, the guy who, the one who created and wrote True Detective with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Yeah, it was a good series.

Yeah, and he's an amazing guy. He's really great. So he really gets it. He really gets the spirit of that job. So if he makes something like True Detective for espionage, it would be amazing. Do you have any Hollywood stars or French stars that you think would be good playing your characters?

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it's very hard. And especially, you know, you had the strike for, what, eight to ten months in Hollywood. So everything was on hold. And so now the producers are re-approaching some actors. So we'll see what happens.

But you need to line up so many planets. I mean, yeah. I guess Gerard Depardieu is probably out for being in the character. He's probably at one too many or something, probably. Maybe one too many. Maybe one too many. I mean, he was a great actor when he was at Yard. But I think the booze kind of hit him hard.

But he seems like a great guy. There's that one French actor who was in Ronin that I really love. Ah, Jean Reno. Jean Reno. I love that guy. Yeah, he's good. And he was in that other movie with the young girl who ended up in Star Wars. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Léon, the professional. Dude, he was so good in that movie. Oh, my God. I don't know if he's maybe too old for the role, but maybe. Yeah, too old now. Yeah. Yeah, you have to find somebody, some young Frenchman or someone who can play it.

You know, maybe Johnny Depp. He played... He'd kind of be Frenchman with that little mustache. Look, I don't have any. I don't have any. We don't. We don't have a baguette and a mustache each time you see a French person. What? Is that true?

I don't know. Sure know. So there you go. Let's see, what other questions I have for you. What are your favorite spy novels, authors, or books, and have they maybe influenced your writing? So I guess it's, yeah, clearly John Le Carre. I mean, John Le Carre, for me, he's like, you know, the spy who comes from the cold, Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy.

That's real espionage. That's very deep. Then you have Frederick Forsythe, The Day of the Jackal. These kind of books are really good. And I really loved I Am Pilgrim from, I think, Terry Hayes. I Am Pilgrim is really, really good. It's quite a recent one.

And I read some Jack Giles as well, of course. But yeah. I don't know if Gary Oldman is French, but he could probably pull off French. He's a hell of an actor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's fantastic. But he's in Slow Horses, the TV series Slow Horses.

Yeah. But he might be too old as well. Yeah. We got to find some young French guys for this movie because I'd love to see it. I think it'd be great. And I love realism in movies. And to me, I think it makes it better. Like, you know, you can always sell when they're using like a montage or some sort of thing.

They're stalling for time. You're like, you didn't have a script for this part, did you? But I like movies like Ronan's one of my favorite movies. Yeah, yeah. Ronan is really good. It's such a great movie. And, you know, you don't see anything coming. It's really hard to tell.

That's just one of my, I could watch Ronan. I think I probably watched it like a hundred freaking times. Like I just love that movie. And then, of course, it's all over the place in different places in Europe, which gives it that real spy feel. To me, it doesn't feel, maybe I'm just James Bond spoiled, but it just doesn't feel very spy-y in America. Like Europe and stuff, that feels very spy-y.

It feels very, you know, where I grew up with the Cold War and the spycraft that went on with all that stuff. Anything more you want to tease out about the book? What's inside of it for readers? Well, I think it's, I mean, it's a real, you know, dive into the real world of espionage, as you just said. And of course, you have, I mean, it's an enjoyable moment and you can just read it as a spy novel, you know, and it's still entertaining. But if you want to dive into it, all the methodologies are real. The story itself is very real and all the geopolitical

plot is highly accurate. So if you want to dig on the net on everything I'm saying, you will realize that you will find some truth behind it and it's a bit scary. There you go. That'll keep you up at night. Have you started work on the

third book in the series yet or what's your plan? Yes, sir. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm writing it. The topic of the third book is basically cyber attack from China. There you go. So I hope that the computer of the screen won't shut down now because of what I just said. But I also had some issues when I wrote Dark Arena, the second one.

I started writing it like maybe three years ago. And it was about, you know, so this gas battle on the Med Sea and then the situation in Russia, Ukraine. And then my ending was Putin invading Ukraine. And then it did happen. And so the publisher calls me and says, well, you have to change the ending. You have to write a new ending.

So I wrote a new ending, which was almost one year ago. And I don't want to spoil. It's not like the ending of the book, but globally, generally speaking, the new ending I wrote is a planned attack on Israel set up by Russian services using the Hamas and Hezbollah as a front. Oh, wow.

And then the book was printed and it did happen. So I might end up with a bullet in my back at some point. But I'll try not to do the same for book three. I'm going to be like in The Simpsons, you know, everything I write. Everything you write comes true. Yeah, it comes true. I'm going to read your books

just to find out how it all turns out because I'm always wondering about all the stuff that's going on right now. There you go. Well, Jack,

it's been wonderful to be on the show. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yes, it's Jack Beaumont official for Instagram

and I'm on LinkedIn as well And I'm on LinkedIn as well. I'm on X as well. And then for Dark Arena and the Frenchman, you can order them on Amazon.com or Goodreads.com. Looking for Dark Arena or the Frenchman written by Jack Beaumont. There you go. Thank you very much, Jack, for coming on the show. Please come back for the next one. Thanks for having me.

Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to back for the next one. Thanks for having me. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Voss,

Chris Voss, one on the TikTokity, and chrisfossfacebook.com. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.