Word: russian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. What distinguishes Cussler's attempt from a genuinely good mystery a la Holmes or Poirot is the author's singular inability to create any distinctively human characters. Cussler's figures are worse than wooden: the neurotic physicist, dashing American agent, villainous Russian spy and confused but loving heroine are all solid concrete stereotypes that wouldn't even pass muster in a remake of "The Adventures of Superman." And the dialogue, which seems borrowed from a 1952 State Department propaganda pamphlet, doesn't help--one hardly knows whether to laugh...
Ironically, Norway arrested and tried a woman for espionage in 1965, after a KGB defector had told how Soviet intelligence in the 1950s secured information from "a female employee [in the Moscow embassy] who enjoyed Russian male companionship." But the authorities picked up the wrong woman -one Ingeborg Lygren-and had to pay her $5,700 in false-arrest damages, while Gunvor Haavik continued her career...
Within days of her arrest, the Oslo government expelled six Russians, including the Soviet embassy's third secretary, A.K. Printsipalov, the KGB operative who was caught passing documents to Haavik. Last week still another Russian departed on a one-way trip to Moscow. He was G.F. Titov, officially a counselor in the Soviet embassy in Oslo but in fact the KGB spy master for the entire Norwegian operation...
First Affair. The recruitment of Haavik as a Soviet agent evidently stemmed from her lifelong infatuation with everything Russian-especially men. Her first affair, in the 1930s, was innocent enough: it involved a refugee Soviet artist who left her with fluent Russian. Then, at the end of World War II, Haavik was recruited by Norwegian forces to work as a nurse and interpreter with Soviet prisoners who had been held by the Nazis in local P.O.W. camps. There she fell in love again...
That is a little like describing Tolstoy as the Russian exponent of land reform...