Thoughtful Thursday, 25 November, Yule tide

 

It has already started whether you like it or not... ads of any kind with different Santas preening and prancing on tv, Christmas songs as a part of muzak's repertoite, tinsel-and-mistletoe decorations in shops...If you are preparing for this year's festivity, tell me why do you really celebrate Christmas? Is it the nice atmosphere and extra shopping? For your family and/or children? As a part of your religious tradition? For no reason at all, just because you feel like it and everybody around seems doing the same?

If you don't celebrate Christmas, but enjoy your winter holiday, how do you cope with the annual deluge of shopping crowds, tawdry shop windows and aggressive consumerism calls? Or maybe you actually like it? Why?

Finally why, in your opinion, is  Christmas nowadays so widespread even in countries with no Christian traditions to speak of?

I would love to know your opinions!

As usual, here are some quotes, the food for thoughts, concerning the topic:

"Let's be naughty and save Santa the trip!"

 Garry Allan

“Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.” Norman Vincent Peale

“Christmas itself may be called into question, If carried so far it creates indigestion.” Ralph Bergengren

“I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a note on it saying, toys not included.” Bernard Manning

“From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.”  Katherine Whitehorn

Image via Wikipedia

All for love

Imagine the scene. You live in a big city. You work as a secretary or an assistant of a political figure. One day into your lonely life comes Tom. He chats you up and he always behaves like a perfect gentleman – flowers, chocolates, little gifts, he listens when you need him, has a little nice compliment ready when you are depressed. Of course you fall in love with him – what else are you going to do? He is simply the nicest guy on the planet and he happens to adore you. Truly. And then little by little he asks you to tell him exactly what you work on. He is being curious, that’s all. You are flattered, you show off and  tell him a lot, perhaps a bit more than is wise to tell, all things considering. Nobody likes to be a bore so you want to appear more important than you really are. One day he says he needs a photograph of some documents. By now you will perhaps have got a bit suspicious. “But if you loved me you would do it” he says. “I need them for my work”. Now you guess what  Tom really does - he is perhaps a spy and he is taking your every word back to his masters. So what would you do? Risk exposure, be demoted or even fired and go back to having nobody to love? No, you’d carry on taking the bait. Perhaps he did need only that one document or that photo. Perhaps he still loves you madly. Perhaps he is a cop…In many movies it was exactly the other way round – a sexy female agent was seducing a male loner who happened to have access to interesting documents. The situation is often more fascinating, though, when men act as the Mata Haris and women are their preys. Because women will do anything for love, won’t they?

 One former CIA officer said that while sexual entrapment wasn't generally a good tool to recruit a foreign official, it was sometimes employed successfully to solve short-term problems. Seduction is a classic technique; "swallow" was the KGB tradecraft term for women, and "raven" the term for men; they were trained to seduce intelligence female targets. The whole technique has been known as “honeypot” – an appropriate agent, male or female, usually attractive but it wasn’t a prerequisite, tried to seduce and emotionally bind the target to get access to the information they needed.

One of the most successful “honeypot agents” was a Pole - Jerzy Sosnowski a.k.a Georg von Nałęcz-Sosnowski, active in Germany during the period of 1926-1934. Apparently he was a very handsome guy– rather tall, with dark hair and eyes and impeccable manners; he loved riding horses and he knew several foreign languages, German and Russian among them. While working  in Berlin he single-handedly won the spy war with Germans just because of his unique “honeypot” abilities. 

His career started in an ordinary way, though: Sosnowski promised well as a cavalry officer. However, a woman became almost his downfall - after taking a girlfriend away from his superior he knew he wouldn’t be promoted in the army any time soon. The scandal was too great and his personal enemy - too influenced. Traveling with his new wife around Europe he happened to watch a German movie about a heroic spy – from that time he knew who he wanted to be. Isn’t it rather prophetic that his new career, which supposedly influenced to some extend Ian Fleming and James Bond movies, was kick-started by a film? In 1926 he was recruited to work in the II Department of the General Staff and, because of his fluent German, sent to Berlin, of course without his wife.

Jerzy Sosnowski

As soon as he arrived there he pretended to be a rich dandy from the East. He lent a luxury apartment in a good quarter and put six of his horses in a horse stable near a horse racing track. He spread the news that he lived off a big landed estate left in Poland and he is an ardent Germanophile and he opposes the current Polish government and the Bolsheviks from Russia as well. The Berlin elite was duly impressed and some of them greeted him simply with open arms, especially a lady called Benita von Falkenhayn, his first German lover and a perfect source of information. Coming from a well-connected family, Benita knew personally many secretaries working in different Ministries. She was swiftly recruited and then she helped to entrap several other women, among them Irene von Jena, an office worker from the War ministry, who brought Sosnowski a dowry in the shape of the entire budget documents of the German state, and Renate von Natxmer, who showed him very important files concerning the cooperation between the Nazis and the Soviets. Small wonder the reports Sosnowski wrote were simply priceless and his efforts were noticed. In 1929 he was awarded the Goden Cross of Merit and two years later he was promoted to a major. It was too good to last forever, though. 

Sosnowski and his net of female spies was finally exposed by a jealous woman – a dancer called Maria Kruse. She was of course his lover too but after a while she found letters in which Sosnowski promised marriage to other of his trophies. Perhaps she didn’t know the guy had been already married as well. Absolutely outraged, she went to the Gestapo with her revelations. Perhaps the clever major hoped that he would manage to outmaneuver the Germans as he had done time and again but his luck ran out. He was arrested with several dozen other people during a party, among them his three most important female agents. Although Sosnowski put all the blame on himself before the jury (and he was perfectly right) two women were sentenced to death just because they fell in love with a spy and did his bidding. He, however, after two years in prison, was exchanged for seven German spies, caught in Poland. After the outbreak of  war Sosnowski was detained as a POW by the Soviets and after that it is rather difficult to find out what really happened to him. Some sources say he died of famine in one of Soviet prisons after a year or so; Russian sources claim that he agreed to cooperate with the famous NKWD - they were intelligent enough to recognize his talents and achievements. In 1943 he was sent undercover to Poland to help creating the Polish People’s Army and spreading Soviet influence. Allegedly he was also seen in the besieged Warsaw in 1944. Some say he was murdered there by Polish right-wing partisans, who would undoubtedly perceive Sosnowski as a traitor, but nobody found his body or any witnesses of his death. Perhaps he survived, and hid himself well under a false identity. I wouldn’t be surprised if a woman helped him to do so. I haven’t found anything about the fate of his first wife, the girl who started it all.

If Sosnowski could be called a brilliant artisan of the honeypot techniques his exploits couldn’t match those of the Stasi officers who worked under  Marcus Wolf. One man, even very handsome and gifted, can’t outperform several dozen men; even if they were a bit less gifted and plain they were perfectly organized and had a bigger budget.

We do not know exactly how many women were duped by Stasi agents during the cold war. But over the course of four decades, around 40 were prosecuted for espionage only in the Federal Republic of Germany, as a result of romantic relationships with undercover officers of the German Democratic Republic. Early on in the cold war, the Russian KGB had perfected the art of sexual blackmail - usually one-off assignations with targeted foreign embassy staff in Moscow. But the Stasi operation was more extensive, with agents assigned to develop long-term relationships with their sources. Women were the principal targets - often secretaries in Bonn's many ministries and other government offices. Wolf believed that just one of these well-placed women could prove infinitely more valuable to the Stasi than five or even 10 male diplomats. After all, women tend to gossip a lot at work; they know everything, and are often also responsible for their bosses' private correspondence. He couldn’t have been more right. In the years following the second world war, Bonn was full of ambitious young women from all over West Germany. They hugely outnumbered single men in the capital. They were hardly even invited to official social functions. It was almost impossible to find a boyfriend and if you found one, almost impossible to keep him – the competition was too great. A perfect playfield for honeypots. Many of these women were delighted to be subject to the attentions of eligible men. Marianne Quoirin, the author of Agentinnen aus Liebe (The Spies Who Did It For Love), a book about Stasi "romeos", sat in on the court cases of a dozen women. She says that a woman pursued by an agent was usually vulnerable in some way. "Perhaps she had been left by her boyfriend, or her mother had recently died, or she didn't have many friends. When the romeo approached her, he already knew everything about her - her likes and dislikes, her history." 

In fact the Stasi did an impressive amount of groundwork before a woman was approached. Scouts were employed to inform officers who might be a good candidate and thousands of deutschmarks were paid for a job well done.

In the course of her research, Quoirin was struck by how ordinary - even physically unattractive - some of the Stasi romeos were. "The women definitely weren't going for good looks. It was the old-fashioned manners ... flowers, wining and dining, and, most importantly, these men listened to women. Men often don't, so that was very attractive. Sex didn't play a major role. It was important for Gabriele and a couple of the other women, but actually, it mattered rarely." 

Gabriele Kliem remembers everything about the day Frank Dietzel walked into her life. It was a sweltering summer's evening in Bonn in July 1977. As she sat on the banks of the Rhine waiting for a male friend, a tall, blond, blue-eyed man strolled towards her. "He looked like my dream man," she recalls, "and I thought, if I could ever meet such a man I would be so, so happy. I fell in love with him the minute he came towards me." Dietzel introduced himself and told her he was a friend of the man she was waiting for, who was sick. Would she like to come to dinner with him instead? "My first reaction was that I should get up and walk away as fast as I could, because a relationship with a man that good-looking would be disastrous. But I didn't, I just didn't." 

Dietzel was, in fact, a Stasi spy. He had been sent by East Germany across the border to Bonn, on a mission to seduce Kliem, a 32-year-old translator and interpreter at the American embassy. He told her he was a physicist working for an international research company committed to world peace; beyond that, he remained vague. Three months later, in October 1977, the couple got engaged. And, over the course of their seven-year relationship, Kliem supplied Dietzel with hundreds of secret documents from the embassy - furthering, or so she thought, his noble aims. It was only in 1991, when she was arrested for espionage, that she discovered her former fiance had been a married, East German Stasi officer, who had been awarded a medal for his "work" with her. In spite of an advertising campaign by the federal government warning women of Stasi tactics, she says that she never asked her lover who else was looking at the material she collected. Too fearful of losing him, she lived instead for the days they spent together, when they shopped endlessly for the life she believed they would one day share. It was only at her trial for espionage in 1996, that Kliem discovered her fiance had given most of these consumer goods to his wife in East Germany. More shocking was the revelation that he had passed all her love letters to the Stasi's psychologists. "So they would sit and read and laugh and analyse and see how they could hurt me some more," she says. "To them I was just a laboratory rat or worse - and to him, I was just a tool." She was treated rather leniently - the judges clearly took into account the fact that she was also a victim.

Although there were romeos who married their targets the large amount of paperwork needed to marry in West Germany meant an undercover officer risked exposure. But the Stasi were not beyond arranging mock marriages if it ensured the compliance of a useful source. A secretary and former nun refused to have sex with her romeo before they were married; she was obliged with a wedding in a small church in Copenhagen. "A Stasi officer played the priest, and took her confession," says Quoirin, "and later on another officer played her mother-in-law at a small reception." I bet they had the time of their lives.

I would like to finish this essay with something positive but honestly the best thing that comes to my mind is: “be careful what you wish for…” and “trust no one”. 

My sources:

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Sosnowski_%28oficer_wywiadu%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clandestine_HUMINT_asset_recruiting#Love.2C_honeypots_and_recruitment

http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov8/16.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20071027183634/http://www.spymuseum.org/programs/educate/loe.php

Review: The Ring of Solomon by Jonathan Stroud

Hardcover: 448 pages

Genre: YA fantasy

Publisher: Doubleday Childrens (14 Oct 2010)

ISBN-13: 978-0385619158

Synopsis:

Remember the naughty djinn Bartimaeus? He is back. This book is a  prequel to the bestselling BARTIMAEUS TRILOGY, reviewed by me not so long ago.

In the novel we are transported in time to the court of the king Solomon in 950 BC Jerusalem. The said king rules because he owns a very powerful artifact – a golden ring, hiding a strong entity from the Other Place. No one has been as strong as him so far. He is surrounded by seventeen of the most powerful magicians from different countries – each and every one of them would like to bask in the glory of the famous king and also to cut a piece of this appetizing cake for him/herself. Magicians are, as usual, a very greedy, very selfish and very ambitious lot.

Bartimaeus is of course in trouble: not only had he eaten his previous master, which was considered a huge breach of good manners on the court, but he also managed to antagonize the new one, Khaba the Cruel, an Egyptian priest who took Bartimaeus as a servant soon afterwardsas a form of punishment. The insolent but witty djinn is now employed as a builder of the famous Jerusalem temple and then, because he offends the king even further portraying one of his many wives as a hippo in a skirt,  he is sent with other spirits to chase desert robbers. During that mission he saves the life of Asmira, a beautiful but deadly hereditary guard of the queen of Sheba. Asmira was sent by her queen to do the unthinkable - to kill king Solomon and steal the source of his power. It is a suicidal plan indeed - several marids had planned and failed to do so. She has to risk her life only because Solomon dared to propose to the queen for the fourth time in a row and then he asked for a very high tribute to be paid in frankincense. Is it really a good reason to die for? Bartimaeus thinks he should have eaten the girl and made her choices for her. Asmira will have to rethink her personal priorities and change her mind several times and Bartimaeus will help her throwing witty and sometimes philosophical remarks as he tries to save her from the worst - losing her personality.

What I liked:

As usual the book was written in a vibrant, fast-paced way; I wasn’t bored one single minute. Perhaps the plot was a bit predictable, especially for those who had read the trilogy before, but still each individual scene was a hoot. Bartimaeus's pranks and attempts to escape his magician controllers were very funny, especially those snarky footnotes scattered in-between. The sense of humour is always a very welcome feature, no matter what genre, and Mr. Stroud knows how to make you smile.

 I also liked Asmira - she reminded me a little of Kitty from the BARTIMAEUS TRILOGY – she was portrayed as one strong-willed, intelligent, passionate girl with sad experiences, a thoughtless superior and a hopeless mission. Stroud uses her to ask questions about the right choices in your own life, slavery and control. Her personal journey is well depicted and her changes are very subtle and real. What a pity not every suicidal assassin is paired with an intelligent and witty djinni.

What I didn’t like:

Although The Ring of Solomon is head and shoulders above the other young adult fiction I've read recently, I found it shallower than the original trilogy. Due to its length - it is just a single volume instead of three - The Ring of Solomon  simply feels like a watered down version of the previous series. I would like to read more about Solomon and his famous verdicts. I would like to know more about  the main baddie, Khaba and his past. In short, I would like more historical background. You can’t have it all, though…

The final verdict:

This novel can be enjoyed as a stand alone read or as an addition to the trilogy, mentioned before. I highly recommend it to those with children as something you can read together and discuss, or just as an exhilarating light read which will make these long black evenings pass by in a wink.

Silent Sunday

The new design is here...

I must admit sometimes I am a bit clumsy - fat fingers syndrome and all that. Due to unpredictable circumstances I somehow managed to change the whole design again. It wasn't intentional at all but after it had been done I couldn't reverse it. I hope you still like it - I did try to make it more interesting than the lost one. If something  annoys you just leave me a comment.

What were they thinking?

This meme was started and hosted by Alayne from the Crowded Leaf.

Now, have a look at this cover:

What have you noticed? Can you say what this book is about? Could you see the title? No? Let's consult the blurb then:



What if everything you always thought you wanted could be yours simply by saying "I do"? Billionaire Jordon Bennett needs to find a wife, now, to secure his position as CEO of B.H. Holdings. Reed Mohr could use a miracle to help pay for her alternative elder care facility, Potters Woods. Inside and out of the dojo, can these two survive sparring with each other?  

Look at the cover again- what would you think this book was about? Gardens? Gnomes? Gardens and gnomes? Dogs? Country live? No. It is a romance story. Go figure.

ETA: Apparently the publishers are laready thinking of changing it. Wise move.

Review: Nightshade by Andrea Cremer

Genre: YA fantasy romance

Publisher: Philomel; 1 edition (October 19, 2010)
ISBN-13: 978-0399254826
pages:440

Synopsis:

The main character, 17-year-old Calla Tor, a golden-eyed platinum blond beauty, is a young werewolf Alfa female. In her world werewolves are called the Guardians because of their social function – they help the Keepers, also known as witches, to guard normal people against evil Searchers. The Keepers provide the Guardians with all the luxuries – free houses, cars, clothes and human helpers who will clean and wash and buy your food – but they demand the ultimate submission. Guardians can’t marry a person if their Keeper objects. They must live in the area their Keeper has chosen or move out if it is the Keeper’s will. A Keeper might decide they fancy a Guardian and then that Guardian ends up in their bed. If you are not obediend, you will be culled. Each pack has one Keeper and two Alphas – male and female.

At birth, Calla's parents were told that their Keeper arranged her marriage to fellow shapeshifter, the son of an Alfa of another pack. She and Renier Laroche are duly bound to get married on Samhain, the night of Oct. 31. Together, they're supposed to bear werewolf pups and rule a new pack with a special mission – they will guard the sacred cave of witches. With their marriage fast approaching, Calla hasn't yet experienced her first kiss as she is expected to enter the union as a complete virgin. Her future mate, however, is a gadabout who's dated, and possibly bedded, half her graduating class.

"Nightshade" opens with the scene that could prove to be Calla's eventual undoing: she saves a human boy in the midst of a grizzly bear mauling instead of leaving him to die on a hiking trail. The boy was simply too hot to die that young. That human boy is named Shay Doran. He lives with his uncle, Bosque, who happens to be a kind of uber-Keeper, called the Regent. Soon enough one of the Keepers demands that Shay be protected, watched and looked after; it becomes Calla's duty to comply. It is through Shay, that Calla learns just how much the ties that bind her and her family can chafe. But Shay is not all that he appears. Surrounded by secrets and forbidden knowledge, Shay and Calla set out to find the truth about the world around them. The truth is hidden in an old book written in Latin. As a result, their lives, and the lives of those whom Calla loves, will never be the same.

What I liked:

The plot is readable, even un-putdown-able; I burned through it in about two days (I had to have breaks due to my work) so it certainly can boast of possessing and addictive quality that makes it difficult for the reader to cast it aside. It's also very well paced - there really isn't a stopping point. Once you start, you have to finish. At least I did.

The cover looks really nice.

What I didn’t like:

I already feel these red-black horns sprouting and the tail growing. Prepare yourself.

I must admit I hate romantic trios – it’s something akin to allergy! When will they stop haunting me in YA books? It seems the answer is never. Well, at least I have plenty to mock. That is the question: who will the divine Calla choose? Will it be the intellectual Shay with excellent abs and lovely mouth, uttering Latin words of comfort and wisdom, or the smoldering playboy Ren who, although pretty much lascivious, in fact, is not as full of himself as you might think at first? Honestly I don’t care. I never will, as long as character development is lacking to make place for those scenes full of saliva-dripping, lips-crushing and other thrilling activities connected with forbidden love. Done to death elsewhere. Yawn.

Calla, while initially strong, became less and less so across the book, especially when she fell to mush around her love interests. Her inability to control her hormones was absolutely ridiculous. The touch of a finger or a brush of a boy’s well-muscled body sends this girl into nervous convulsions, making her incapable of coherent thought or action. She shows more character retaliating against her mother's attempts to improve her clothes than toward the cruel men using her pack mates as sex slaves. By the way, these powerful witches who might be even fallen angels don’t seem to be a well-thought-out idea. How come they can control a bunch of nasty wraiths and other ugly winged creatures but not a pair of teenagers? Tsk, tsk.

What’s more? Some climactic scenes were resolved too quickly, and in my view the major plot twist lacked suspense. The werewolf mythology I found rather confusing, and it remained totally muddled at the end. Perhaps it will improve.

Last but not least: the novel concluded with neither resolution nor an extreme cliffhanger that will require readers to pick up the sequel to see what happens next.

By the way I really wonder what our lovely Calla would do  if  Shay was not such a hottie but, say, an overweight, round-shouldered bespectacled individual with face full of pimples...Perhaps she would tell the bear, attacking him: "Be careful what you eat, my dear animal, this boy might cause you a serious indigestion, so much fat and all..." and took to her heels.

The final verdict:

"Nightshade" is a book for hopeless romantics who like their heroines conflicted, their love interests smoldering and their passions triangulated and torrid, yet unfulfilled. To tell you the truth the book was too similar to “Twilight” to turn me into one of its fans - it didn't contain anything spectacular. If you're addicted to the YA paranormal genre, I'm sure you'll be content to add this new series to your shelves, if not, you may not enjoy "Nightshade". I won’t probably follow it as the next part isn't a release I would be on edge about