The Charm School

Nelson DeMille, “The Charm School,” Kindle Version, 1988, 533 pp.

Linda read this book, twice—it’s her kind of genre: MIA’s, conspiracy, spies, and a murder here and there.  So, with the current pandemic raging and this book already on our Kindle’s, I decided to read it as well.  The author, DeMille, served in Vietnam and has written seventeen other books including “The General’s Daughter.” 

The book’s hero in The Charm School is U.S Air Force Colonel Sam Hollis, a former pilot who fought in Vietnam. Hollis was shot down during the war and was later transferred to US Air Force Intelligence and then served as an intelligence officer and air attaché at the American embassy in Moscow. 

A young American MBA graduate, Greg Fisher, driving in the Russian countryside near the famous Borodino Battlefield, encounters another American, Dodson, claiming to be an American POW that escaped a secret Russian camp—leaving three-hundred others behind who are still captive and being used to "Americanize" Soviet spies that infiltrate the US as fully Americanized.  About 3,000 of these “Americanized” fifth-columnists have already been inserted into US institutions. Hollis begins to investigate and discovers a secret so dangerous that it might cost him his life.

My Notes:

Loc 34:  The Charm School is set in the old Soviet Union (1988) just before the Soviet Union crumbles. (This crumbling was, of course, unknown to the author in 1988 but he makes many observations that it will happen—just not so fast).   The premise, in a nutshell, is: American Embassy personnel in Moscow learn of the existence of a Soviet spy school (the Charm School) that trains KGB agents to talk, act, look, and think like Americans.  The trainers are captured American pilots that the Vietnamese traded to the Russians for SAM missiles.

Pg. 420:  Colonel Burov said, “In this country there is only one master. Us. The KGB. We are known as the sword and shield of the Party, but in reality, we serve neither the Party nor the State, and certainly not the people. We serve ourselves. Even the military fears us, and they have guns too. But we’ve discovered that the ultimate weapon is illusion. We give the illusion that we are everywhere, so people dare not even whisper our name.