The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Cellist: A Novel by Daniel Silva

Episode Date: July 22, 2021

The Cellist: A Novel (Gabriel Allon, 21) by Daniel Silva From Daniel Silva, the internationally acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author, comes a timely and explosive new thriller featuring art restorer and legendary spy Gabriel Allon. Viktor Orlov had a longstanding appointment with death. Once Russia’s richest man, he now resides in splendid exile in London, where he has waged a tireless crusade against the authoritarian kleptocrats who have seized control of the Kremlin. His mansion in Chelsea’s exclusive Cheyne Walk is one of the most heavily protected private dwellings in London. Yet somehow, on a rainy summer evening, in the midst of a global pandemic, Russia’s vengeful president finally manages to cross Orlov’s name off his kill list. Before him was the receiver from his landline telephone, a half-drunk glass of red wine, and a stack of documents.… The documents are contaminated with a deadly nerve agent. The Metropolitan Police determine that they were delivered to Orlov’s home by one of his employees, a prominent investigative reporter from the anti-Kremlin Moskovskaya Gazeta. And when the reporter slips from London hours after the killing, MI6 concludes she is a Moscow Center assassin who has cunningly penetrated Orlov’s formidable defenses. But Gabriel Allon, who owes his very life to Viktor Orlov, believes his friends in British intelligence are dangerously mistaken. His desperate search for the truth will take him from London to Amsterdam and eventually to Geneva, where a private intelligence service controlled by a childhood friend of the Russian president is using KGB-style “active measures” to undermine the West from within. Known as the Haydn Group, the unit is plotting an unspeakable act of violence that will plunge an already divided America into chaos and leave Russia unchallenged. Only Gabriel Allon, with the help of a brilliant young woman employed by the world’s dirtiest bank, can stop it. Elegant and sophisticated, provocative and daring, The Cellist explores one of the preeminent threats facing the West today—the corrupting influence of dirty money wielded by a revanchist and reckless Russia. It is at once a novel of hope and a stark warning about the fragile state of democracy. And it proves once again why Daniel Silva is regarded as his generation’s finest writer of suspense and international intrigue.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we have a wonderful guest on the show today he's an amazing accomplished author he's written a of books. We'll get into that in a second. His name is Daniel Silva, and he's written the book called The Cellist, a novel. This is, to my understanding, number 21 of the Gabriel Alon series. It just came out on July 13th,

2021. You've probably been seeing him do media appearances all over the place. And we'll be talking to him about this wonderful new book that he's got. In the meantime, go to YouTube.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. Hit the bell notification button. And also follow us on all our groups, all over Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different places. And if you're watching us live, submit your questions. They might end up on the show. Also go to Goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. You can see all the wonderful things we're doing over there.

Daniel is an accomplished author. He's got a brilliant resume in what he's done. He has been called his generation's finest writer of international intrigue and one of the greatest American spy novelists ever. Compelling, compassionate, haunting, and brilliant. These are the words that you use to describe the work of award-winning number one New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva. Daniel, welcome to the show. We're honored to have you. Thank you so much for having me. You got it. And congratulations on the new book. Thank you. I think for those of you who don't know you, let's say there's two or three people

still left in the world. How many books have you written? This is, believe it or not, 24. 24? Yeah, I always thought four was a nice number. I thought, if I could write four, if I square even four books, I thought that would be a pretty good little addition to my career as a journalist. I am shocked that I'm now 24 books into a career. Good for you. We're about sending my book to the editors right now. So we're going through that nightmare. It's the very first one. So I'll try and catch up to you. It's going to be self-published. I couldn't wait the 18 months to get it published. And we just went the hell with it. We lost too much time with coronavirus,

but congratulations on your book and give us your plugs where people can find you on the interwebs, find out more about you in order to find books. I am, am. My website is danielsilvabooks.com. And you can see information on all the books there linked through to the online retailers and my social media feed. I'm not a big social media person. In fact, my wife is my secret Twitter manager. But I do a little bit on social media. Wow.

Now, so you've published this book out. What made you want to write another book in this series with this person? Compulsion. And I would say to writers, if you want to be writers or aspiring writers, if you don't have this insane drive where you can't not write, you should probably think about something you can do for a living. When I finished the final corrections on The Cellist, maybe a day or two before June 1st or somewhere, I literally started my new book the next day. So the way it works

for me is if all things are firing, all the cylinders are firing, the next book sort of carries around several books in my head. One usually rises up and demands to be written. And that usually happens as I'm finishing the previous book. And so as I'm finishing one book, I'm thinking about the next and I get going on it as soon as possible. Because one of the things I suffer from is just fiddle-itis. I will just keep working and correcting and polishing and trying to make it fix all the little things that bother me. And invariably, there are little things that I just

can't quite get right. I don't think the reader would never really notice them. But I just, every time I read it, I say, gosh, I wish I could do that better. And the only way for me to make that stop is to start a new book. And generally, if I really lose myself in a new project, I have to re-familiarize myself with the book that's about to be published when I'm going on tour. I really can get it out of my thoughts by starting a new book. And how often do you write a new book? It's fairly frequent. I'm a once a year person. Second Tuesday of July now for, oh gosh, about, I have to count them out, but about 15 years I've been in that slot. It's been very successful for me. Keeping my fingers crossed, I'm hopeful of a number one book this year. I think I've had about 13 since moving to

July. And so it's been very good space for me. There you go. There you go. So give us an arcing overview of the book and what it's about. Well, it begins with a murder in London, an assassination. Murder, you say? A murder, you say. It was a difficult scene for me to write because the victim is a beloved character from the series his name is victor orloff he's one of the rich russian oligarchs and he left russia in about 2000 when the new gang came to into power and settled in london and he's really a thorn in

the side of the kremlin he's a dissident he's a critic of the new regime or the current regime. And he also saved Gabriel Alon's life once. And so when he is murdered with a nerve agent, Gabriel undertakes a rapid investigation of his death and soon finds himself in a desperate attempt to stop an attack that could plunge the United States into absolute political chaos and leave Russia unchallenged on the world stage. It's a fast-paced summer read filled with art and music and corrupt Russian oligarchs and dirty European bankers, but it deals with a very important issue, and that is Russia's 20-year war on the institutions of the West and how it is using money in that war against us and how it is using money to undermine our very democracy. So would you say the book plot and stuff that you've

written in the book parlays really closely with some of our current events? Definitely. And which presented me with a dilemma on January 6th. I was writing a book about how Russia is trying to undermine the institutions of the West and democracy, as I said. And I turned on TV on January 6th, about two in the afternoon, and I see that our democracy is hanging by a thread. That a sitting president has incited, encouraged, inspired, whatever verb you want to use his supporters to attack a co-equal branch of government in order to prevent the election from being certified. I was in Washington, a couple of miles from the Capitol in Georgetown. I was sickened by it, angered by it, horrified by it. And I felt compelled to write about it.

And it just did fit really well into what I was already working on. And so I had a completely different ending planned. And the book was due on April 1st. The first draft of the book was due on April 1st. And January 10th or 12th or so, I was actually looking through my files, my old files yesterday to try to figure out exactly when I started changing it, but I rewrote a whole new ending to the book. And it incorporates not only the siege, but the inauguration, which as bad as the siege was, the Capitol insurrection, to me, the inauguration was worse.

To have 45,000 National Guard troops and other security officers on the streets of Washington, the city was under virtual military occupation. We now know that there was a ring of steel surrounding the city. My wife works for CNN, and she had to go through three military checkpoints to get to the office. There were miles and miles of fences and razor wire. Every day when I finished writing, I would walk from Georgetown up to the Capitol as the inauguration got closer, and I could see the city just tightening down. It was awful. I can't imagine what the outgoing president was thinking when he overflew the city for the last time that day. And so that is the backdrop for the climax of the novel.

That is crazy. So was that hard? Did you have to go back and change the aspects of the book leading up to it? Oh, the whole front end had to be rewritten to match the new back end. It was difficult. There were many days where I was thinking, why on earth did you do this? What were you thinking? But I got it done. And as a result, I almost six months to the day after the events actually happened, I have a novel out that it's the real thing. One step removed is how I would describe it. Inauguration day. So I incorporate all of the reality of the disputed election, the insurrection and the inauguration as it was with with one edition oh there you go and you won't tell us because it's the ending it's pretty big twist

oh darn it all right everyone you're gonna have to get the book to find out there's the tease if you will but you mentioned your wife at cnn we've had a lot of wonderful cnn people on the show uh tell us about the cover of the book i was on the today show last week and al roker old friend and an old colleague of my wife and and i was joking with him that my that jamie had posed for the very distinctive cover of the book which is which was i guess i said it um too straight so i've been cleaning that up for the last week. My wife is not the cover. She could be though. And it's actually a cover that was done and discarded for a previous book. And it has been sitting there for, I guess, three years now unused. And I've always just been crazy about it. And it fit well with the book and with the title and with character. And it looks like a piece of pop art, the way the cover designer heated up the imagery.

And I'm just crazy about it. Did you have to change that because she wanted royalties? She gets all the royalties. But I saw that Al Roker interview and your interview on Salt and Al Roker's, what a gentleman. I've been losing at least about 60 pounds so far. I hoped at the end of it to look like the before and after of him

and Al Sharpton, so keep my fingers crossed, but working on it. You've got 24 books. This is 21 series. For those, and again, for the five people that don't know who Gabriel is yeah can you give us a little flesh of the character a little bit for them tease the baby something there's the cv the cv of gabriel he is the the son and grandson of two gifted and important artists

and he was supposed to be an artist himself and in 1972 after the munich olympics massacre he was recruited by israeli intelligence to be part of what was known as Operation Wrath of God, the operation to hunt down and kill the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre. He was raised in a his both his parents were German refugees. He was raised in a home to his first language. And even the language of his dreams now remains German. And so he could pass as a European, as many Israelis could back then. And so that begins his career. The experience of killing six human beings at close range with a small caliber Beretta pistol robs him of the ability to produce original work. He studies the craft of restoration, art restoration, and not surprisingly, he's damn good at it.

And he becomes an art restorer posing as an Italian. He adopts an Italian identity and lives for many years in Europe as an Italian art restorer who is actually an Israeli assassin. That's how we find Gabriel at the beginning of the series. Yeah, it's really special forces and soldiers, man. They're no joke. Those guys are tough.

Yeah, they are. Unfortunately, they live in a difficult neighborhood. Difficult neighborhood. Rough neighborhood. Difficult neighborhood. Rough neighborhood. And I spent a lot of time around Israeli soldiers and spies and government officials. And this special operative told me one night after dinner, he says, your books are very exciting and your heroes and your characters do really dangerous things. He said, it is nothing compared to what our special operatives do every single night. Yeah. But this book finds Gabriel.

He is the director general of Israel's secret intelligence service. I never refer to it as the Mossad. I would call it the office, which is how they refer to it. And he is nearing the end of his term as this book opens. Nice. We've gone with him. We found him. His first wife and his first family was destroyed in a car bombing. His son was killed. His wife was gravely wounded. And when we meet Gabriel in the first novel, he is a grieving, broken, reclusive figure. And he has

grown and changed and evolved significantly over the 21 books of the series. Much more character in The Cellist than he started. So who is The Cellist? The Cellist is a woman named Isabel Brenner. She's German. Her mother is a musician.

Isabel started playing the piano at eight. She picked up the cello, took up the cello. 17, she wins an important German prize. She seems destined for a career in music and decides that she doesn't have what it takes to be a professional musician, a soloist of a math genius. She studies applied mathematics in Berlin, does a graduate degree, excuse me, at the London School of Economics and gets recruited to work for Germany's largest bank that I call in the book, Rheinbank. She soon discovers that Rheinbank is a rogue bank, that it is the dirtiest bank in the world, and that it is laundering a great deal of money for Russian oligarchs, including an oligarch who is from the inner circle of Russia's president.

She leaks damaging documents to a Russian investigative reporter. One thing leads to another. Viktor Orlov, who is an owner of a dissident Russian magazine is murdered in London. And what Isabel Brenner soon finds herself working with Gabriel Alon in order to save Western democracy. And this involves some other topical events that have come onto the scene, nerve agents and other such things. Do you want to give us any teasers on that? I was doing an interview with a senior, former senior Israeli diplomat and ambassador, Michael Oren, perhaps the name. He's a historian.

And he hit upon something in the novel that I referred to Russia as a nuclear-armed gangster state, which is what I think it is. It is not a functioning government the way we think of a government. It is there. It is a kleptocracy. It is there for Putin and the men around him to control everything. They get all the money and they behave in terribly reckless ways, as we have seen, along with intervening in our election in 2016. They've intervened and interfered in elections all across europe

and they have carried out several high-profile assassinations two assassinations one success one successful one unsuccessful in in the united kingdom with weapons of mass destruction which is what things are polonium is a weapon of mass destruction. They scattered polonium all over London. And when they tried to, when after a Skripal a couple of years ago with Novichok, which is what I use in this book, the assassins left behind a container of Novichok in a trash can. Poor innocent civilian, Dawn Sturgis, finds what she thinks is a bottle of perfume, puts it on her wrist, and a few days later is dead. This is the way they can conduct their affairs. And that is

sort of the inspiration for this novel. And Gabriel has been tangling with these guys now for several books. I think this is the, I have a subset of the books, a sub-series dealing with, and Gabriel has been one of the few people in the West to be going toe-to-toe with Putin since about 2008. Nice. At least we've got somebody fighting that guy. I know. Somebody's got to do it. And Gabriel is the guy.

And they've been locked in quite a duel. And Russia is also just a giant gas station, really, when it comes down to it, too. But they have incredible technical capabilities, very smart people, and a willingness to behave recklessly. Tom Friedman, I think, described Vladimir Putin as the ex-boyfriend from hell. It's a really interesting way to describe him. He just wants to be... We always think that each new administration thinks that they can or they used to think that they're going to get along with Russia. We're going to we're going to turn the page. We're going to push a reset button. Everything's going to be OK. It's not going to be OK because Vladimir Putin doesn't want to get along with the West.

He wants to destroy the West. He wants to bring us down to his level. He wants to weaken us to make sure that we pose no threat to him. His greatest fear is what we call in the foreign policy business a color revolution, that the people are going to pour into the streets like they did in Ukraine and elsewhere and just take him down. He has enormous force at his command that he can kill a lot of people if need be but but if millions upon millions of russians pour into the streets he can be brought down and that is his greatest fear hopefully well something will happen it'll be interesting you talk a lot about

dirty money banks of course in the book and this is we've had a few putin biographers and people who talk about the finances and the people that circle around him. This is one of the ways that they operate. And what really fascinates you about that whole process with banks and hiding money and stuff and you put it in your books? I guess that these bankers, wittingly or unwittingly, perhaps I think it's wittingly, they are helping Russia. When you help Kremlin-connected oligarch launder his money and conceal it in the West, you are aiding and abetting this war against us. The British government put out a great report, to their credit, last year, this white paper called the Russia Report.

And they acknowledged publicly, which is quite something, that Russian money had absolutely corrupted British politics and that numerous members of the House of Lords, for example, were doing business with the Russians, either openly or secretly, that Russia was interfering in British politics, that Russian money had turned the British financial services industry into just a giant laundromat that hundreds and hundreds of people were getting rich catering to these rich Russians. And they were, as I said, wittingly or unwittingly helping these rich Russians who are invariably connected to the Kremlin do things that are wearing away, chipping away slowly but surely at our institutions.

Look around you. Okay. British democracy, Britain's politics are messy right now. France is really messy. Obviously in the United States, Russia intervened at many different levels in our election, but they wormed their way into the Trump campaign with money or with a promise of money. And the Senate Intelligence Committee, 1,000-page, five-volume report on the 2016 interference made that very clear. Paul Manafort and who his contact was and who he was making money from, Oleg Deripashka. Money was one major component of that interference.

That's how they got inside that campaign. It's been interesting, inside that campaign. Yeah. It's been interesting, the revelations. I don't know if this is what you're referring to, too, but there was revelations that Putin had met with his people, and they're like green-lighted. Did you refer to the article that appeared in The Guardian last week, the great Luke Harding?

And what Luke and his team discovered was a document, and they stand by this document, and they showed it to people, thought it would look very authentic, sort of a report that was discussed, the Russian version of the National Security Council. So it's Putin and his senior intelligence officers and policymakers, in effect, green lighting the operation to install Donald Trump or help Donald Trump become the next president of the United States. It says in the document that they know he's mentally unstable, and that's why they want him to be the next president of the United States. And what's interesting is that, to me, you know what, sure, the Russians, it would have been nice to get some deliverables, as we say.

If he can withdraw the United States from NATO, which he wanted to do, that would be nice. If he can weaken NATO, that would be great. What they really wanted Donald Trump to do was to disrupt and destabilize the US political system. And what I do in this book is draw a line that stretches from interference to insurrection. And I can't imagine what they were thinking when they were watching our own people. Think of all the trillions of dollars that we spent trying to protect that building and our other major infrastructure from terrorists almost 20 years. 9-11. Remember on 9-11, the plane was headed toward that building. We think, we assume the lawmakers are fleeing that building because we think a a plane is about to crash into it

and 19 years later almost almost 20 they are fleeing again but this time they're fleeing their own who are threatening to kill them yeah and how did we get there? What happened in those intervening 10 years that a lot of things happened? We got hit on 9-11. We had the failure of the Iraq war. We had a terrible financial crisis. We had a global pandemic, obviously, which was, I think, an accelerant of the political unrest, clearly. And we had a man in the Oval Office who did not want to accept the results of an election and hand over power peacefully to his successor. He seems like a stable genius to me. A very stable genius.

I think I'm referencing Phil Rucker's book and Carol Lennon. You are. Can I tell you a funny story about that? Sure, yeah. So I was sitting pretty at number one on Amazon and Barnes & Noble when the book launched. And last Wednesday night, my wifeey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was so concerned by what he was seeing that he feared we were about to have a coup attempt. We were going to have a Reichstag moment, that this was the gospel according to the Fuhrer. This is what he was seeing. And so he starts putting in place, working with other senior, the Joint Chiefs, other senior generals to put in place a plan to suppress a coup if necessary.

He also vowed to, he was going to land the plane as he, how he referred to the transition of power. And we're going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis and the brown shirts aren't going to get in here and think of the language that he used yeah hitler reichstag nazis brown shirts can you imagine what we how far we have sunk it's awful just watching the confederate flag alone being in the rotunda or whatever yeah that was i i i referenced that specifically that is a ignoble first and um i was i did a program with the smithsonian last week hosted by the great john meacham perhaps he's been on the show a historian and and he feels as i do that that the fact that the capital was breached, it fell, okay? Despite the heroism

of the police officers who defended it, the Capitol did fall. The two chambers were evacuated and the sessions were adjourned. We did not certify the results on January 6th. It didn't happen until January 7th. And I'm trying to be positive and hopeful. Great countries don't lose their capital buildings, their parliament buildings to their own people. I think it was a turning point that it's going to be very difficult for us to recover from. That is my fear. What do you think?

That was one of the setups I had for you. I'm very concerned as well. It's the Reichstag moment, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, the Beer Hall, the Beer Tavern moment in Germany. Shortly after January 6th, we had a famous radio guy, Tom Hartman, on the show. And at the end of the show or somewhere in the show, he says to me, hey, Chris, you know what they call January 6th? And I go, I don't know what. He goes, rehearsal. Rehearsal. Okay. So that's what the authors of How Democracies Die, Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Steadlott. And by the way, oh gosh, I can't remember, Professor Snyder from Yale. I'm blanking on his first name. Help me. Timothy Snyder. Along with those guys,

these are the three leading thinkers on how democracies die and the rise of authoritarianism. And yeah, he would say the same thing, that it was not the end. It was the beginning. It was a dress rehearsal for the next coup attempt. And I can't believe we're talking about this, but I fear that is the case. And remember, yes, sometimes we have coups in third world or developing countries or African countries, but democracies die constitutionally. Democracies die at the ballot box. Democracies die when they get worn down by situations or a demagogic leader. And Hitler prevailed in that election in 1933. He was handed power by Hindenburg and von Papen. Here, you take it. And we had the Reichstag fire.

And by April, the Enabling Act had passed. And Germany was, for all intents and purposes, a totalitarian state. So it died at the ballot box and constitutionally. Hitler tried his Beer Hall Putsch in the 20s and ended up in jail. Too bad they didn't keep him there a little bit longer. And by April of 1933, Germany was no longer a democracy. But that actually helped propel him, that Beer Hall thing,

because he wrote Mein Kampf in jail, and he became more popular from that he did yeah the time in jail was a formative time he came out of jail and he was much more dangerous figure yeah i think 2022 and 2024 really are a dangerous two dangerous elections for us so that we've got to you know go the other way hopefully we'll we've got michael bender on the show on Friday, and I believe we'll have Carol Lennon gone again, hopefully with Phil for their new book. We had her on for the Secret Service book she did, Zero Fail, I believe, if I recall correctly. But yeah, it's just extraordinary. And if you really study history and strongmen and fascist governments, authoritarian overthrow, we're right on the track. We're just going right down the

track. And we're not getting any better. We're just going right down the track. And we're not getting any better with the January 6th commission and this whole denial thing. And it's just sweet. But look at it this way, Daniel. You'll have another book for whatever. I got a taste of how divided the country is. Silly me. I thought surely seeing our capital overrun by that bloodthirsty mob who

are calling the police, they're supposed to be the supporters of the police, the N-word over and over again, nearly beating people to death, that I thought that might be a wake-up call. Like, this is all gone on. This is too much. Okay, let's dial this down. Let's see if we can lower the temperature. And I think what, what they discovered is that there's a core of the party. Now this polling, I believe was reach for my book here. Excuse my audio dropout. I think it was 30 American enterprise Institute poll found. I think 39% of Republicans support the use of violence to achieve their political goals. A friend of mine is a member of Congress, and I'm going to disguise the member's gender here. The member was in the member's home state and a businessman from a prominent family gave them this member

of Congress, a sort of commemorative coin. And on the coin was, it was stamped point of no return. And the point of no return is a reference to the coming civil war. Oh my God. We've had a lot of people. Yeah. Good. That's scary stuff. It is scary. We had Ruth Bengade on who wrote the book Strongman, and she profiled all the right-wing fascist people, Mussolini, Hitler, Duterte, Pinochet, the whole thing.

And she mapped out the same patterns, Hitler. They mapped out the same patterns that they used. And we're like just right on the train tracks, like right there. And you're right, the fact that they're willing to use violence. You've got the Federalist Society and the Betsy DeVos Organization, Centers for National Policy, I think it is, who want a theocracy. And a lot of those 40% that you mentioned, they want a theocracy too. So they don't. Democracy is dead to them. And the fact that we've reached this point in America is chilling.

I should have added Ruth to my list. Get her with, she is a very smart, gifted writer. She actually wrote a column just the other day, a can of sandwich papers, and it's a must read about where we're headed, in her opinion. Since we're on this topic, we'll stay on it. We can go back to the book if you want. There are, my wife is a reporter, as we've talked about.

Because of COVID, she goes to the office only when necessary. So I can hear her on the phone and I can hear her talking to members of Congress. And I can hear her talking to these Republicans who really wanted to vote to impeach Trump both times, but were physically afraid of his supporters. Wow. That's the same thing. They were afraid of their own voters. That's why the chancellor of Germany handed power to Hitler, is because he was afraid. So they, Donald Trump, groomed this army of white nationalists, militia types.

He snapped their fingers. They came and the Capitol fell. And for some reason, he chickened out. I don't know. I think he feared arrest. You can talk to Carol and Phil when you have them on. They've got some interesting details about what those hours were like in terms of his White House lawyers telling him, you could be arrested here. You've got to get this under control. And I don't know what's to prevent us from having another

act of violence like that. I can tell you that there are people in the FBI who breathe a huge sigh of relief that we got through January, excuse me, July 4th without any violence. We were anticipating some kind of violence around Independence Day. We did have a nice march in Philadelphia. Did you see those guys? I didn't. Oh, my God. You missed the brown shirts and Nazis parading through Philadelphia? Which time?

A couple of weeks ago. I missed it. Yeah, I've been writing. That's where we are. The divisions in this country are real, okay? They are real. I call them the three R's. It's race, religion, and real estate.

The parties are very starkly divided. But that doesn't mean that Russia hasn't been fanning the flames. These companies are very good at manipulating, intelligence services, I should say, are very good at manipulating opinion on this. We gave them a great weapon when we created social media. Back 100 years ago, they were trying to plant propaganda and misinformation in magazines and newspapers in the West. Now it's just a click.

And hundreds of thousands of people, you put out a fake news story that Hillary Clinton has AIDS, and 300,000 people or 500,000 people view it and click it and like it just like that. They know how to spread it. They know how to get it into the right nodes and the right accounts to make it explode. They're very good at it. Yeah. It would have been interesting too. Last week we had the CNN, Ailey Honig on for his book, Hatchet Man. And if Bill Barr decided to stand with Trump and do a seize of power, that would have been the key. That would have been one of the key people to have on there. That would have been interesting. Yeah, I don't think that they he it wasn't hardly surprising where Donald Trump is concerned, but it really wasn't very well organized.

But that does not mean that there weren't, that there wasn't something afoot. A lot of us, including obviously Mark Milley, when they started putting these flunkies into senior positions at the Pentagon, and there's talk about firing the CIA director and making a flunky the CIA director. And frankly, we had two flunkies that were running the office of director of national intelligence for the last couple of years of the administration. These were troubling signs that something was afoot. It did not come to fruition this time, but he must not run again. Because I'm convinced that if he runs for president again, we'll have election violence. We'll have violence during the election season.

I was going to make a point earlier. My wife hears from these members, Republican members, all the time that they will use the constitutional power that they have, if necessary, to throw it into the House and choose the next president of the United States in the House of Representatives. That's what they wanted to do. And that's when democracy dies. That's when the country becomes ungovernable. That's when millions of people go into the streets. That's when soldiers go into the streets. It does not take a creative mind, doesn't take my brain to spin that out into, in a very short period of time, things could go really sideways very quickly. And Putin wins and smiles all the time.

Oh, he's loving it. He's loving it. Do you think that if Vladimir moved into, grabbed more of Ukraine or took the whole damn thing, do you think that we're in a position to to go our countries go to war to to get the russians out of ukraine i don't think so i don't think so either if we were to suffer another catastrophic attack could we muster the political will to unite and send a force abroad again um gosh i don. Yeah. And he almost doesn't have to with the sabotage they're doing with the ransomware hacking. They ran up gas prices. And now I see all the Trumpers running around going, Biden raised my gas prices. I believe that was, I've said it publicly. I'll say it again. I believe that they are waging war on us right now with these hacks. Think of Putin as the Don. Okay? So he controls a

neighborhood or a borough of New York City. You don't go commit a crime on his territory without getting permission of the Don and giving the Don his cut. That's the way it works in organized crime. It's at the street level. I believe that he is tacitly or actually greenlighting these attacks to try to weaken Biden, to try to further divide us, and that it's part of a broader plan to just keep this pot boiling. I'll give you an example of what they so ruthlessly did a few years ago in Europe. So they intervene in Syria to help their friend Assad, okay. They want Assad to survive, to keep their naval base, keep their presence in the Middle East. So they start working with Assad doing really cruel, indiscriminate bombing of civilians. Remember?

So that's what starts that refugee flow from Syria into Europe. That refugee flow soon starts to destabilize Europe. Russia jumps in with their bots and their social media manipulation and stirs the pot in Europe further. And then on the battlefield, they commit more atrocities, more indiscriminate bombing, kill more civilians, which feeds more refugees into the pipelines, which further destabilizes Germany and Europe and Italy. So they have, in effect, weaponized the refugee flow that they themselves created. That is how ruthless these guys are playing. That is the level, that's the three-dimensional chess that they're playing against.

Yeah, it was quite extraordinary. I think there's a term for what, in Russians, what they do. They're not really, they create chaos, but they're not really they create chaos but they're not like it's not it's just dropping bombs everywhere basically i think there's a term or hybrid warfare there's a wonderful documentary two-part four-hour frontline documentary on putin a couple of years ago and jake sullivan the current national security advisor explained that during the obama administration they could see that the Russians were moving into Ukraine. They could see it happening, but it was all done with, you know, guys without proper uniforms. And they would tell the Russians, what the hell's going on?

Nothing's going on. We're not doing anything. And Crimea falls and we couldn't do a thing about it because they're using it for a bit of warfare. They refer to it as hybrid warfare. They're not going to challenge us militarily directly,. They're not going to challenge us militarily directly, but they're just going to keep these indirect attacks on us, cyber assassinations, destabilize, destabilize. And a key part of that is funding and supporting politicians. Doesn't matter what side, left or right, who are anti-establishment disruptive destabilizing figures and look steve bannon promised that's what we're they were going to be they're going to disrupt washington yeah make a blowtorch to the elites they were going to destroy

the existing global economic order and the global security order well Well, who might be interested in helping to facilitate the destruction of NATO and the global security, post-war global order? Let's think, who might want to help them achieve that goal? And China. And China, Russia, most certainly. And part of it is just good old-fashioned paranoia. Weaker West and weakened NATO poses no threat to him.

He can do whatever he wants in the old republics and satellites of Eastern Europe. The near abroad, as the Russians refer to it. He wants his empire back. It's not going to be a territorial empire like it was in the Soviet Union, but to be the dominant influence over all of the old Soviet republics and the old eastern countries. That's crazy.

Warsaw Pact. This has been a wonderful discussion, Daniel. Let me take you back to your book so we can lead out with that. I heard you say that you have a favorite character in this book. Who would it be? A favorite character in the book? Would it be the name title? the book the would it be the uh name title i love isabel brenner i think she's one of the best characters i've ever created i did

in many respects isabel i created isabel so i could bring back a character that i've always wanted to bring back it's a violinist that who appears in in the second Gabriel Lahn book as a way to come back onto the page and tell us her name is Anna Rolfe. Chapter 31 of the book is one of my favorite chapters, one of my favorite scenes I've written in a very long time. It's a reunion of Gabriel Lahn and Anna Rolfe. I won't say it. There you go. There you go. So anything more you want to tease out or plug on the book before we go out? No. As I said, it is a work of entertainment. It is fast, a relatively easy reading. It's going to take you inside the world of corrupt banking.

I'm going to do it my way, and you're not going to be wading through facts and figures. I do my banking in a very entertaining way. And you're going to learn some things about money laundering. It depends on whether you like classical music or not, but you might also learn one thing or two about classical music and art. And so I write my books in a much different way than the typical international thriller, spy thriller writer does. I go about it a different way.

And that's a reflection of Gabriel Law and the sort of two sides of his character. Have you, has Amazon or anybody approached you to make a whole series out of these? Sold it a couple of times. It's back on the block right now. And actually, when I was in New York, I had a very productive meeting. I can't say anything about it. But to quote a line from Seinfeld, wheels are in motion. There you go.

I think it would make a great series. They do so much of that work now. It would indeed. There you go. There you go. Daniel, it would make a great series. They do so much of that work now. It would indeed. There you go. There you go. Daniel, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and order up that great book. DanielSilvaBooks.com.

Everything is there. One word, DanielSilvaBooks.com. There you go. And guys, order the book wherever fine books are sold, but only go to the bookstores where the fine books are sold. And if you can, help your local bookseller. They have really had to struggle mightily to make it through COVID. They had to figure out how to sell books without having anyone in the store. And all of my favorite bookstores around the country managed to come through it with some really creative, innovative things that were done on the fly. But help them if you can.

Yeah, definitely. Most definitely. Support your local booksellers. Daniel, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. A very insightful discussion and an honor to have you as well. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

There you go. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, Fortuna's Chris Foss. You can see the video version of our whole discussion here. You can go to Goodreads.com, Fortuna's Chris Foss. See all the books we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to all our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, all those places the kids are at nowadays. We're at, so you can check out the Chris Foss Show there. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be sure to be good to each other, and we'll

see you guys next time.