The Charm School

If you think the "Russian Spies in America" story that's playing out on all the front pages today is stranger than fiction, think again. To me it sounds like the inevitable "end of the story" to one of my absolute favorite novels, "The Charm School," by Nelson DeMille.

Published in 1988, the story takes place entirely in the USSR, where a group of American spies discover that the Soviets are training young Russian men in the art of being American. The trainees spend a year at the so-called "Charm School" learning to walk, talk, eat, think and do everything else like an American so that after graduation they can take up residence in the states, pass as natives and infiltrate our society with nefarious intent. The book was written over 20 years ago and it's now seriously out of date - the Soviet Union no longer exists, for one thing, not to mention the fact that in those days even the CIA agents didn't have cell phones, computers or internet data searches. Still, based on what we're hearing today, DeMille's premise wasn't as far out as it may have seemed at the time and all these years later I'll bet the author's feeling pretty good about his story right now. Maybe he'd like to write a sequel...