Chaos in Kabul -- Gérard de Villiers, translated by William Rodarmor

George Kelley reviewed this the other day, and I was tempted, not having read a book by Gérard de Villiers before, though I remember seeing some of them in print here in the '70s. 

You might think things are bad in Kabul, and you'd be right.  They might even be worse than you imagine.  Gérard de Villiers had a reputation for knowing just about all there was to know about spies and spying.  You can read all about it in this quite interesting article.  It makes me suspect that pretty much everything in Chaos in Kabul is close to the truth.

De Villiers wrote 200 or so books about Malko Linge, Knight of the Order of the Black Eagle, Margrave of Lower Lusitia, Knight of the Royal Order of Seraphim, etc.  In addition to all his titles, Malko is an contract operative for the CIA, and in this adventure he's asked to go to Kabul and arrange for the assassination of Hamid Karzai, who's become something of a drag on U.S. policy.  An advantageous deal has been cut with the Taliban, who would like to see the assassination happen.

Complications ensue.  Lots of them.  Since you already know that Karzai is still alive, you know that the assassination fails.  Everybody is betraying everybody else, and before long just about everybody wants to eliminate Malko, who is kidnapped (a couple of times), shot at, dumped in a well, and chased all over Kabul (and out of it).  De Villiers' local color is as authentic as his information, as he visited all the sites of his novels for research.  Besides the action, local color, and betrayals, there's lots of graphic sex, a feature of the novels, that goes way beyond anything dreamed up by Ian Fleming.  

Reading this won't make you feel one bit better about our policies in Kabul, but it's entertaining to take a peek behind the scenes and wonder how much is true and how many of the characters are based on actual people.