WRITING ABOUT LOCALES: SYRIA. Guest Post by Howard Kaplan

Howard Kaplan: WRITING ABOUT LOCALES: SYRIA
 
Pictured is the boutique Talisman Hotel in Damascus, Syria in the former Jewish quarter, the home transformed after its owners fled the country.  In my new historical novel, THE SYRIAN SUNSET, I note that in 2007, Nancy Pelosi had lunch in the Talisman courtyard with President Bashar al-Assad and his British born wife, Asma. Asma is a looker, spreads in VOGUE, think Princess Diana; in fact she wanted to be the Princess Di of the Middle East. Asma met the ophthalmologist Bashar in London and soon chose to marry him and forego her admission to Harvard Business School, in order to modernize Syria. Once there though it seems shocked, she sat silent, had kids, and watched Bashar crush the country. She did though host Nancy Pelosi and her entourage; politicians far and near regularly were charmed by the wiles of Bashar and Asma and their British lilts. 
 
President Bashar al-Assad has a kinship with Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. They were both second sons of far more talented older brothers, each preferred by their fathers. Both elder brothers were killed at an early age. A poet-soldier, Yonatan Netanyahu commanded the successful 1976 Operation Entebbe in Uganda that rescued the 248 passengers of the Air France airbus hijacked on its way from Tel-Aviv to Paris. Yoni, as he was known, the first on the ground was the sole Israeli casualty. Early on a shy, squeamish Bashar who never served in the Syrian military had decamped to London. His older brother, Bassel--colonel, equestrian, politician--racing in 1994 to Damascus Airport in the fog, late for a flight to skiing in the Alps, and declining to buckle his seatbelt, plowed fatally into a barrier. In fact, both second sons are insecure, bent on living up to papa's preference for their elder siblings and have left havoc in their wakes. In one of Asma’s Vogue interviews, Bashar confided to the interviewer that he had chosen ophthalmology because there was little blood in eye surgery.
 
Though I know the outlines of the above paragraph, and all of it is in my latest novel, I have in fact, just now looked up every detail on the internet to assure accuracy.

 
I wrote my first novel of Syria, THE DAMASCUS COVER, not only before the internet but before computers. I actually trained on my first computer, in those days nobody knew how to turn one on, at the Writers Computer Store in Los Angeles which had a classroom in the back. I sat next to Wes Craven, who was the sweetest guy in the world, though known for writing and directing films like NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. 
 
After Dutton bought THE DAMASCUS COVER, I flew to NY to meet my editor. He soon handed me a copy of HARRY'S GAME, a novel of Northern Ireland. He said when you read this you feel like you're in Belfast, the scents, the sights. I want a rewrite; do that for Damascus. So I wrote the tourist office in Syria and they sent me a fabulous huge street map so my characters would know where they were going. Lucky for me the British have been everywhere, written about it, and in English even, so I found such a travel memoir called MIRROR TO DAMASCUS and cribbed crazily from it for the rewrite. I had been in Damascus once for a day, was followed by the secret police, left the country quickly and returned to Beirut. I remembered little of those hours other than my appetite for the vast and pulsating country.
 
I learned a lot from HARRY'S GAME. I used to travel often to places with my pad, preferred scribbling sensations and geography there rather than photographing as it was one step closer to the manuscript page. In the 1980s, the Israel Defense Forces took me into Lebanon on a press junket during the First Lebanon War, and a lot of what was in my pad entered my novel BULLETS OF PALESTINE. 

 
About The Damascus Cover:
Chicago Daily News "Exceedingly rich in color about the Syrian capital."
Los Angeles Times "Kaplan's grasp of history and scene creates a genuine reality. He seems to know every back alley of Damascus and Cyprus."
 
Forty years later someone filmed THE DAMASCUS COVER as Sir John Hurt's final picture with Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the lead. In this sleight of hand, the picture was shot in Casablanca, with some scenes without the actors, budget constraints, filmed in Jerusalem and then spliced with the Moroccan footage.
 
Enter the internet. I needed to describe the Talisman Hotel for the above scene in my novel. Not only did a whole lot of photos come up but when I needed to recreate the Syrian checkpoint in the desert between Jordan and Syria I found a photo online of that too. The low concrete barriers across the road there to slow vehicles had freshly painted Syrian flags on it, not a detail I'd have conjured from my imagination. The Talisman was fun to describe.

***

Howard Kaplan, a native of Los Angeles, has lived in Israel and traveled extensively through Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. At the age of 21, he was sent on a mission into the Soviet Union to smuggle a dissident’s manuscript on microfilm to London. His first trip was a success.

On his second trip, he transferred a manuscript to the Dutch Ambassador inside his Moscow embassy. A week later, he was arrested in Khartiv in the Ukraine and interrogated for two days there and then two days in Moscow, before being expelled from the USSR. The KGB had picked him up for meeting dissidents and did not know about the manuscript transfers.

He holds a BA in Middle East History from UC Berkeley and an MA in Philosophy of Education from UCLA.

 

 

       

The Damascus Cover: Guest Post by Howard Kaplan

Nearly 40 years after Howard Kaplan's spy thriller, The Damascus Cover, was published, it's making a comeback. Not only is it available as an ebook, but The Damascus Cover is going to be a major motion picture, coming out in 2016. The book and subject matter have not aged at all. That says a lot both for the book, but also for the Middle-East situation. Thanks, Howard, for stopping by Mystery Fanfare. I've read the book, now I can't wait to see the film!
 

Howard Kaplan: 
The Damascus Cover

Nearly forty years after it was first published, my spy novel, The Damascus Cover, recently wrapped as a feature film starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Sir John Hurt, Olivia Thirlby (Juno), Jurgen Prochnow (Das Boot) and Navid Negahban (Abu Wazir in Homeland.) This qualifies as rather lucky. I think of success, in all aspects of life, as a combination of skill and luck. At times either one can play the crucial role. As a writer, I’ve had my share of good fortune, as well as that other thing.

The film came about through a chance meeting. The director wanted to do a Middle East picture, mentioned this to a mutual friend and she gave him The Damascus Cover. He read it that night, called me in the morning—I live in Los Angeles--we met at Peets Coffee in Beverly Hills and by the second cup the deal was done. It took several years to secure financing which catapulted forward when the producer of Gosford Park came aboard. The script follows the spine of the novel, with some changes, which I like.

The book, maybe surprisingly maybe skillfully, is timelier than when originally released. In its secret depths it’s a story of reconciliation, of which there’s been a dearth in the Middle East. The theme broadly is about how secret services and the military—both in Syria and Israel—can circumvent the politicians and clandestinely work together to achieve a greater good. Played out, of course, with the requisite action, betrayals and romance. Two-thirds of the way through writing, I suddenly realized that I could create a significant twist at the story’s end. Not sure if that one was luck or competence but I did not originally have it in mind. I’m particularly pleased at the thriller’s detailed depiction of the streets, sounds and life of Damascus especially since so much of it has been devastated by Civil War.

To my formula for achievement, I add the willingness to risk. I came from a family focused on money and security so rather than suffocate, which I did for a good long while, I fled. While traveling with a friend, we flew to Beirut then took a shared taxi to Damascus, where visas were routinely granted at the border. I fell in love with this fabulous city, where underground Lebanese rivers rose in the desert to create an apricot tree rung oasis, and the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth.

In London, again through a friend of a friend, I was recruited to fly to Moscow and retrieve a manuscript on microfilm. In the USSR, all unpublished work was considered property of the State so potential émigrés could not leave with it. On my first trip I brought this microfilm +out, and the following year transferred a manuscript to the Dutch Ambassador in his embassy. Outside the embassy, the KGB guard has scrutinized my passport and allowed me to enter with my story that I was a friend of the ambassador’s son. Later on my fourteen day tour, I was arrested in Kharkov (now Kharkiv in Ukrainian) after meeting with dissidents. The KGB interrogated me for two days there and two more in Moscow. They were most interested in who had sent me. I convinced them my only way to reach my contact was that he was meeting my scheduled flight to Heathrow. I was expelled in a formal ceremony in my hotel room and taken to that flight. The two men following me in London were later found naked tied to trees in Epping Forest. All of it, some skill and considerable luck. My recent college graduate son is just home from backpacking for two months in Asia and I recall how when I told him this story when he was seven, he was excited about my daring do but suddenly worriedly asked if the two men tied to trees had died. Like lots of things in my life, I didn’t see that coming and assured them they had not but did not add that some months later as my handler was walking home, a car burst onto the sidewalk, smashed into him and sped away. The KGB were very skillful themselves and sent a message; after several weeks in the hospital, he was fine. He remains among my closest friends.

The film adaptation of The Damascus Cover will be in theaters in early 2016. I was on set in Casablanca this spring for an amazing week. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is a consummate actor who throws himself headlong and deeply into every scene and every line of dialog. His cover is as a German, Hans Hoffman, and he does the entire film with a German accent, hair dyed blonde. At breakfast I asked the German actor, Jurgen Prochnow, how Rhys Meyers accent sounded. He smiled and said, “Very familiar.” And then there’s Sir John Hurt in the film. So these days I’m entirely lucky.