By Fred Burton and John Bruning
Palgrave Macmillan, £16.99
An unsolved murder leads quickly to spies and secret agents, assassination, terrorism, obstructive officials and a doggedly persistent investigator. But Chasing Shadows, through thrilling, is not a thriller. Written by an expert in terrorism and a military historian, it is a factual account of actual events.
On June 30 1973, Josef Alon, an Israeli Air Force pilot working at the Israeli embassy in Washington, came home from a party. Following his wife into the house, he was shot five times. He was dead on arrival in hospital.
No foreign diplomat had been killed in DC before and the murderer was never found. Sixteen-year-old Fred Burton, who lived nearby, chose a career in law enforcement as a result of this close encounter with violent death. He became a police officer, then a special agent and was eventually appointed deputy director of counter terrorism at the Diplomatic Security Service.
On and off, during the 35 years of his career Burton worked on the Alon case and, once retired from public service, he "needed closure." This book describes the unofficial investigation he carried out in the face of bureaucratic obstruction and secrets. Finding nothing but dead-ends in the police and FBI files, he re-interviewed witnesses, became friendly with Alon's widow Dvora and her daughters and discovered connections and clues in Egypt, Beirut and Hanoi as well as Israel and the US.
Unfortunately, the book contains repetitions, red herrings and speculations. Several important players are not (or must not be) named. Readers may lose track, or doubt, some of the author's statements. He obviously knows his stuff but that doesn't mean the evidence is reliable, for he and most of his informants have spent their lives dissembling.
Still, in telling Alon's story, Burton has epitomised an aspect of Jewish history. Born in Czechoslovakia, Alon was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. He arrived in Israel in 1948, became a fighter pilot and a war hero. He died a victim to what Burton calls "The Shadow War" when, in what was technically peacetime, hostilities were carried on in other countries, with decades of kidnappings, bombings, aircraft hijackings and assassinations. The Israelis responded with similar ruthlessness. Both sides killed and died and retaliated; both used ingenious and cunning tricks.
New generations of spooks and historians may treat Chasing Shadows as a text book, noting such useful tips as the best way to create an electronic "dead drop." For the general reader it could be fiction, a gripping, well-plotted thriller in occasionally clunky prose.
Burton identified Alon's killer in the end, then "sat and stared into the darkness and thought about what justice really means in a world perpetually on fire."
