The holy grail for a certain genre of narrative nonfiction is a real-life story so fast paced and with such high stakes that it could match the page-turning tension of a fictional work from Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy or Lee Child. This is the terrain in which the Financial Times correspondent Miles Johnson has squarely pitched his debut, Chasing Shadows. To underline the point, the review copy comes with an endorsement from Child himself, who declares Chasing Shadows to be “as breathless, complex, and on-the-edge suspenseful as the finest thriller fiction – but it’s all real, which makes it truly extraordinary”.
The genre, then, feels familiar. This is a Manichean world in which the good guys are very good and the bad guys are extremely, relentlessly, nastily bad. Johnson introduces us to three leading men. The first is Jack Kelly, a hard-bitten agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s elite special operations division – “the Navy Seals of the DEA”, as one witness helpfully puts it – who carries a Glock and drives a Jeep Wrangler, about as macho a set of wheels as it is possible to buy. In the best tradition of heroic Hollywood lawmen, Kelly is a maverick and a loner who walks the mean streets so you don’t have to.
Next up is Mustafa Badreddine, the Lebanese terrorist and co-author of the attack on the US marines barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 Americans, mostly marines. Lastly, we find Salvatore Pititto, a murderous Calabrian mafioso whose ambition in life is to open a spectacular new drug route with the help of a Colombian cartel. Although these three never seem to have met, their stories tell a wider narrative, about the ways in which international terror networks and organised crime groups cooperate, while the cops, hindered by bureaucrats and diplomats and – goddammit – oversight, struggle to keep up.
When we first encounter Kelly he is an undercover agent, drinking alone in a dank New York bar, reflecting on the time two heroin dealers he was tailing tried to crush him to death with their vehicle. After 15 years working the streets, he’s getting too old for this game. He’s burned out, exhausted, divorced. So when his ex-boss calls to offer him a desk job at Special Operations Division, Kelly seizes his moment and moves to Virginia, where he joins SOD’s Counter-Narco Terrorism Operations Center. This is happy hour for the DEA. In the wake of 9/11, the US government has empowered the agency to investigate so-called “narco-terrorists” anywhere they can find them in the world. Now the SOD has almost universal jurisdiction. Agents who spent their careers arresting small-time drug dealers on the streets of Baltimore or the Bronx have licence to roam the globe, chasing “Bond villain-esque supercriminals”, much to the chagrin of their counterparts in foreign intelligence.
Kelly starts to investigate the criminal networks linked to Iran and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah – both of which are fighting to defend the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad from the Free Syrian Army and myriad jihadist groups. Codenames, Kelly’s boss tells him, are important, so Jack picks “Cassandra” out of Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, which he is reading at the time. Soon, the DEA starts to pick up suspicious signals traffic between Colombian drug cartels, European mafias and “rogue” regimes, mainly in Syria and Iran. At the centre of it all, Kelly suspects, is the legendary Lebanese militant Mustafa Badreddine, who at this time is leading Hezbollah commandos fighting in Syria.
Badreddine is a ghostly and lethal enemy – “a killer … who had murdered hundreds of people since he was a teenager”. Growing up in Beirut’s Shia slums, Badreddine was radicalised when he was a teenager by the waves of violent conflict that rocked Lebanon in the late 1970s. He was severely injured during Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982 (which was supported by the Reagan administration), and soon afterwards joined the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s training camps in the Bekaa Valley. This launched him on the bloody trajectory that would make him such a dangerous force in the Middle East, and lead to the Beirut truck bombing, a string of attacks in Kuwait, and the assassination of the Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, among other crimes.
Badreddine is roundly drawn and fascinating – more so, I should say, than Kelly. But the most satisfying story arc is that of mafia man Pititto. Pititto may have believed that he was a “noble criminal bound by a secret code”, but he comes across as incompetent and self-pitying, concerned solely with maintaining his status in the dangerous hierarchy he inhabits. In other words, entirely human. His only redemption is his love for Oksana, the young Ukrainian immigrant he installs as his lover. We see Salvatore’s tragedy unfold through Oksana’s eyes, as she learns the truth about her protector, his life of crime, his dangerous friends, and his inability to recognise bad faith when it slaps him hard in the face.
What do these narratives add up to? With his meticulous research, including more than a hundred interviews and a mountain of intelligence reports and legal documents, Johnson has recreated the most private of criminal moments, including dialogue and even thoughts. He has opened a window on the narco-terror nexus that most observers knew very little about. It was intriguing to discover, for instance, that as Iran was being welcomed into the international fold after negotiating a nuclear deal, and as President Rouhani was on a state visit to Paris, the DEA were about to announce that Hezbollah had been working for years with Colombian cartels to move cocaine into Europe, and were using the proceeds to buy weapons for use in Syria. Unfortunately for Kelly, the DEA announcement was blocked for obvious diplomatic reasons.
Johnson’s writing gallops along – and yet in several ways I found Chasing Shadows frustrating. International organised crime is highly complex, it turns out, and real life, too, tends to be far more complicated than fiction. And yet each of the trio of protagonists here comes with a caravan-full of bag-carriers and sidekicks, some of whom also have noms de guerre, which left me longing for one of Kelly’s sprawling wall charts to remind me who “Babyface” was, or “Taliban”, or “the Colonel”. Too many times, too, I felt I had been sent on a visit to Albania, let’s say, which was entirely unimportant to the narrative. Finally, there was the issue of the conclusion. Having launched his three storylines so colourfully, I anticipated the strands tying neatly together at the end. Not necessarily with a Hollywood denouement, in which Kelly takes Badreddine and Pititto down in a dramatic shoot-out in front of the Paris Ritz, but with a greater sense of the lawman’s role in the latter two’s fates. Then again, perhaps that’s why the tautest political thrillers tend to be works of fiction.
• Charlie English’s latest book, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Art & Hitler’s First Mass-Murder Programme, is out now. Chasing Shadows: A True Story of Drugs, War and the Secret World of International Crime by Miles Johnson is published by Hachette. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
