REVIEW: “Breathtaking, compelling, intensely personal throughout – and terrifyingly true – The Cut-Out is probably the most important spy novel I’ve ever read.” Richard Collins, Onside Review.
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NOTE: The identities of some of the characters in this book have been changed to preserve their anonymity. And my life. Several locations, and several events, and to some small extent the chronology of events, have also been changed. Everything else is true.
CUT-OUT: A mechanism or person used to pass information from one agent to another; to create a compartment between members of a covert operation via which material or information can be passed. An intermediary. A go-between. A courier. In more general terms a cut-out is a person or agency used as an unwitting pawn by intelligence services.
LOGLINE: When the American called me up and said he wanted to talk, I never imagined he would tell me what he did: that someone of global renown, “within days from now”, would be assassinated. Why tell me? A low-key conspiracy journalist? I didn’t know. And quite frankly, I didn’t believe him, either—until the assassination happened…
SYNOPSIS: Britain in the nineties was obsessed with the X-Files. The high street was awash with X-Files type magazines, and as senior editor of the biggest selling one on the market, I was accustomed to receiving phone calls from anonymous sources promising inside information. So when the American called me up and said he wanted to talk, I took it in my stride. Why wouldn’t I? He was a former Special Forces Green Beret, he said. A CIA runner. He also said that the information he had was best not divulged over the telephone. So we arranged to meet. Nothing unusual in that.
What was unusual, though, was what the American told me, not at our first meeting, but at a subsequent one some months later. On this occasion he said he’d been made aware of an imminent prime-target assassination, that “one of the most prominent figures on the world stage” was about to be taken out, “within days from now”, though he claimed he was unable to reveal who the target was.
“Watch the news networks,” was all he said. “You’ll know who it is soon enough.” He added: “The media will tell you it was an accident. You’ll know it wasn’t.”
I came away not knowing if I’d been fed a line or let in on the world’s most terrible secret. And I had no way of finding out, either, other than to wait, and watch the news.
I didn’t have to wait long. Because a week later the news told me that Princess Diana had been killed in a highly suspicious car crash in Paris—“an accident”. At which point the terrifying truth kicked in. What the American had told me was true, I all at once realized. The assassination he’d forewarned me about had happened.
Of course, at this stage I had no idea I was being set up. Only that I’d been told something I wished I’d never been told. And that, because I had, I now faced the most terrifying challenge of my life—to get to the truth before the intelligence agencies got to me…
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Set mainly in London and Paris, The Cut-Out is an autobiographical spy novel of immense personal ordeal and chilling consequence. It is based on a true story.
