Through A Mirror, Darkly

Jay Newman’s debut novel, Undermoney, is an espionage and high finance thriller set in a dystopian, post-COVID future. John le Carré spent six years in British intelligence before becoming a spy novelist; long experience with distressed sovereign debt similarly informs Newman’s compelling tale. Like spymasters who run secret agents, successful traders of bankrupt bonds must accurately assess who is lying to whom, and by how much.

Moving between the Middle East, Washington, New York, London, Moscow, Geneva, and Cyprus, the movers and shakers of Undermoney recall folks you see on Fox or MSNBC -- Mika and Joe even make a cameo. Of course Ray Diallo isn’t the inspiration for Industrial Strategies’ Elias Vicker, the misanthropic head of the “world’s biggest” hedge fund at the center of the novel. Described as a “politically-incorrect bad-boy billionaire” in New York Magazine - the cover of which he displays proudly in his office - Vicker is far too visible for Bridgewater’s reticent impresario, who would prefer simply that you buy his book.

But we do meet stand-ins for Hillary Clinton, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, General Stanley McCrystal (or maybe Michael Flynn?), and Lazard’s Felix Rohatyn. And that’s just in the first 30 pages. Descriptions of Old Masters, private jets, luxury apartments, military hardware, super yachts and sex abound. At the Met Gala Vicker air kisses Anna Wintour, shakes hands with Leon Black’s doppelganger, and throws shade on the Archbishop of New York.

The colophon reminds us that even the real characters and events in Undermoney are made up. But Newman asks us to suspend disbelief well beyond what le Carré requires. The billions of dollars that disappear into the Jordanian desert in the opening scene represent about 10% of the CIA’s annual budget. Officers get “walking around” money, and agents are routinely paid, but the covert teams dropped into Northern Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 carried just $1 million. And even that sum, amidst a national crisis, kept policy makers awake at night.

Cell phone cameras and Twitter would quickly expose Vicker’s ‘secret’ bacchanalia at the Pierre, which furthermore no even semi-sane Captain of Industry would get within 20 blocks of. And the idea that malefactors could sink a 250,000-ton Norwegian oil platform in the North Sea using marine drones is nigh impossible. Apart from the challenges of attaching sufficient charges to a massive concrete leg in 12-foot winter seas, remotely, numerous redundancies keep rigs stable even after an explosion. In any case, all the available oil having been extracted, Statfjord was abandoned in 2019.

But just as a never-aging Tom Cruise performs improbable feats and movie goers still hold their breath, the laws of economics and gravity need not spoil Undermoney. In our post-factual, virtual reality world, it’s the story that matters.

A US Presidential election looms – is it 2024 already? - and Maj. General Tommy Taylor, a Stoic-quoting Yale grad raised in Chicago’s most notorious public housing complex, is determined to arrest America’s decline. When he’s not running the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command Taylor and his band of Afghan war comrades are doing whatever it takes to ensure Senator Ben Corn – yes, he’s from Nebraska – wins the Republican primary. Their bitter combat experience binds them as it blinds them.

Beyond the primary, Corn needs money for opposition research, voter databases, and AstroTurf campaigns. The darker the better. In Vicker’s world, politicians, like artwork and second wives, are good investments, if properly hedged. Gretta Webb, a multi-lingual CIA officer who could bed you as easily as kill you – or both – is the scalpel Taylor hopes will cut Industrial Strategies open to his plan.

In 2016 the Kremlin sowed plenty of dissent, even if Vladimir Putin couldn’t quite get a complicit candidate; he won’t make that mistake again. Fyodor Volk, the leader of Parsifal, a mercenary corps, is also eyeing Industrial Strategies. One of his team members attended Princeton with one of Taylor’s guys. Readers may recognize echoes of Ken Follett’s Lie Down with Lions, where a brave heroine is trapped in a spy triangle amidst an earlier Afghan war. With more twists than the Amalfi Coast highway, Undermoney recalls Walter Scott’s line about the tangled webs we weave “When first we practice to deceive."

Corn’s college classmate Pete, who works for Industrial Strategies, gathers the billionaire class at a hip Greenwich Village watering hole to anoint the Nebraska senator. One of Taylor’s deputies observes “it was very like Pete to corral so many vast egos in one place: a Koch, the Mercers, Lauder, Langone, Peter Theil, Betsy DeVos, and a dozen more,” The goal, he explains was to make them ‘believe that they own Ben, or at least a pretty good chunk of him.”

In a stump speech he’s practiced until it seems spontaneous, Corn fans fears of terrorism and malign Chinese interests. Embittered by his experiences in the Hindu Kush, seeing an ever-more divided America, and amplifying his supporters’ frustrations, Corn channels a Soviet dictator named Vladimir, asking “What is to be done?”

Taylor soldiers read many important works while they patrolled the Koh-i-Baba mountains, Corn explains, but foremost was “Urban Civilization and its Discontents,” a lecture by Irving Kristol. It again strains credibility that a 52-year-old speech by the father of neo-conservatism informs the thinking of a US senator, but whatever Kristol’s impact, Corn limits his domestic policy pronouncements to promoting ‘principle’ and ‘order’ over ‘justice’ and ‘equity.’ His focus is abroad.

First, Corn says, he’ll end transatlantic alliances. He envisions a world where “Europe would cease to matter as a geopolitical player … becom[ing] a chip, something to add to or take out of the pot” in an America First poker game. Done with pesky partners who never pay their share, and expensive ships that are easily sunk, Corn envisions more asymmetric warfare: ‘“Be afraid,” he warns America’s enemies, “because we will make mistakes. And …we…don’t…care.” “Pseudo-ethicists” and “self-styled social philosophers” – the kinds who recently revealed the Pentagon’s seven yearlong cover-up of mistaken drone attacks – will not be welcome in his White House. The crowd “listened, and now were applauding enthusiastically.”

Having served as a US diplomat, including a year in Sarajevo during the Yugoslav civil war, I understand Newman’s view that “America is lousy at international statecraft.” As the edifice of the Soviet Union collapsed, Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned Russians to take care “not to be crushed beneath its rubble.” Three decades later, his warning ignored, Russia denies the horror of its Stalinist past, menaces its neighbors, imprisons its citizens, and ties US policy makers in knots. Our career diplomats are often dedicated, thoughtful experts but they cannot do more than our politics will allow.

At a chance meeting at the Four Seasons hotel in Cyprus, the US Ambassador, fluent in five languages including Russian, publicly upbraids Putin’s factotum, Volk and his colleagues. To ingratiate himself with the Kremlin thugs, Vickers says that “people who work in government are weak.” As if this wasn’t already Putin’s view of America, let alone that of a goodly number of American voters.

Servile leadership could arise from putting self-interest before common interest. Or it could cause it. Either way, Newman’s characters represent our era. His descriptions of financial perfidy and political corruption could run in Mother Jones or The Nation, but instead it’s a one percenter exposing them. Describing the end of a financial scandal that took place in Undermoney’s past, Newman writes that Rudy Giuliani, then the US Attorney was “wildly ambitious” but even he “knew better than to take on the financial elite.” So why Jay Newman? And why now?

Perhaps, like Kristol, Newman believes that cosmopolitan globalists undermine republican virtue and fatally damn the American experiment. Perhaps, like James Grant, whose Interest Rate Observer is devoured by savvy investors, he believes “the world of international high finance doesn’t need the SEC – it needs an exorcism.” At a time when 70% of Republicans believe Joe Biden lost the 2020 election, and their party seems ready to re-nominate a Queens grifter as their candidate for President, it’s easy to sink into depression about the nation an earlier Republican called “The last best hope of earth.”

Looking at the decline of Rome, the poet Juvenal wrote of voters abdicating their duties to choose wise leaders. “The People …now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” With its A-list characters, explosions, and sex, Apple or Netflix will surely see the appeal of a screen adaptation of this next House of Cards. With the money we’ve saved from our $1.9 trillion in stimulus payments we can order plenty of take out while we watch, sheltering from yet another COVID variant.

But for titans wondering who Newman is limning, a more profound question arises: Does the right to worry where you sit at the next celebrity gala rest on your fellow citizens seeing the game as worth playing? Or can the 99% be safely ignored? A year after a sitting President encouraged the first armed insurrection since Shays’ Rebellion, it’s not an idle question.

Having toiled in the finance mines for decades, Newman approaches with his headlamp on, bearing a canary whose death adumbrates an explosion. We can continue to engage in Manichean squabbles over who is responsible for our broken system. Or we can chart a middle course. As Gretta Webb trenchantly admits, “I don’t know who is going to save us.”

Aiming too high?

All About The Benjamins?