Triple

An Israeli agent is ordered by his government to obtain radioactive materials so Israel could build its own bomb. The bosses don't know where and how to get it. The agent should figure it out by himself. To make matters worse, he should steal the stuff in a way no one would ever suspect Israel has the materials. Of course, the bad guys and the Americans are also around, to complicate the plot even more. An extremely intelligent premise, brilliantly carried out by the agent, against all odds. A digression: I rate this Follett's book second only to Pillars of The Earth or The Eye of the Needle, and side by side with The Man from St. Petersburg. In addition to being (in my view) his best plots, each of these four books inaugurated a formula, later somehow repeated by Follett in other books. (For example, The Key to Rebecca or Lie Down with Lions follow the steps of The Eye of the Needle). In this sense, Triple, although a spy story like The Eye... it is also very original.

Follett intertwines history with imagination and tells the story of how Israeli secret service agents out-conned the Soviets, Arabs, and just about everybody else, to get the nuclear weapons technology needed for their nation's survival. Set in the time between the 1967 and 1973 Mid-East wars and revolving primarily around an Israeli agent and concentration camp survivor named Nat Dickstein, Triple is big on thrills and carefully-presented plot twists, and nowhere is it even for a moment boring. Nat Dickstein is one of Follett's best and most sympathetic creations. Entirely human, no whisperings of James Bond or Superman within him, the emotionally-vulnerable Dickstein falls in love with the daughter of a western intellectual whose sympathies lie with the Arab cause. Opposing Dickstein are Palestinians sworn to Israel's destruction, and elite KGB agents with special dispensation from none other than Yuri Andropov to do whatever it takes to keep plutonium out of Jewish hands. The story slips in and out of a number of settings, from the "neutral ground" of western Europe, to mafia family strongholds in New York, to the killing grounds of the Middle East, and in a few cases it even returns in flashback form to the horrors of Nazi death camps in the 1940's. Triple, though written a generation ago and set a decade before that, by no means seems like historical fiction. Its stories of a small-scale nuclear arms race, espionage, and passionate hatred threatening liberty, are every bit as pressingly current today as they were almost forty years ago.

Ken Follett once again writes an incredibly compelling novel. "Triple" begins at protagonist Nat Dickstein's release from the concentration camps, and goes ahead to 1968. Of three groups - Dickstein representing Israel, as well as spies from the KGB and Egypt - who will ultimately wind up with the uranium to build a nuclear weapon?The way Follett recreates history, the book COULD be true. He does a marvelous job, even when the point of view goes from one spy to another. This is NOT a "light read" but it's intriguing... captivating... and worth your time.

Making an atomic bomb is easy to do if you have a nuclear plant and the raw material (yellowcake) to make the uranium needed. Egypt has been successful in building the plant but now they need the yellowcake. Israel also has a plant and is in dire need of the same raw material.The Russians are backing the Arabs in this race so we have the agents from the Mossad, the KBG, and the Arabs and a double agent thrown in for an advantage to which nation? Ken Follett is a great writer of suspense and keeps you guessing thru the entire book as to who is going to steal and keep the stolen goods. Schoolmates from Oxford and one of their professors from ten years ago seek to favor one country over the other. We know the prof favors one country but who does his daughter favor? Who comes up with a reasonable way to transport thethousands of tons of yellowcake and who figures out a way to steal it from them? You won't want to put this book down until the end so plan on loosing some sleep. After you finish this book you may want to catch your breath before you start another of Follett's books, "Eye of the Needle" which is another suspensful spy story of WW II vintage. Both deserve more than a five star rating.