Category Archives: Society

Arts, Books, Society

Book Review: Becoming Bulletproof

LITERARY REVIEW

Poumpouras

How to beat fear. She’s protected four U.S. presidents and risked her own life by rescuing people on 9/11. Now this fierce former Secret Service agent is teaching the rest of us how to take on the world.

Evy Poumpouras, a former U.S. Secret Service Agent, is not a woman to mess with. Blessed with spectacular looks, she has worked in the security details of four former American presidents. She knows the subject of what she speaks.

This formidable lady was on duty at the Secret Service’s New York HQ at the World Trade Centre during the 9/11 attacks and became one of only five women to receive the Medal of Valor. She risked her own life – almost dying – dragging people to safety as the towers came down. Her own account of the September 11 attack makes a heart-stopping opening.

This is a diverting book, part memoir, part self-help manual for tough times. The narrative is packed with gripping anecdotes from her many years in the service.

Readers’ of this review may remember the Clint Eastwood character in the movie In The Line Of Fire – the only secret service official who could save the President, running alongside the limo in suit and shades? Ms Poumpouras provides insight into what that’s really like.

Aside from the punishing shifts and the ever-present threat of danger, it would seem there’s an element of fun that such operatives enjoy.

Ms Poumpouras was on protection duty for the First Lady Hillary Clinton when she decided to join the Gay Pride March in New York. As Ms Poumpouras follows behind, the crowd catch sight of her in her dark suit, white shirt, and impenetrable sunglasses (an outfit specifically designed to intimidate, readers are told) and begin to cheer: “Ooooh girl! You go with your bad self, Miss Secret Service thing. You keep our girl Hillary safe.”

 

MS Poumpouras was secretly pleased: “I couldn’t help smiling on the inside. I was proud to be there, to be part of what she was doing.”

Evy is a very likeable person. Agreeably prone to the odd four-letter-word (she is, after all, a Greek-American New Yorker brought up in Queens), and as a former specialist in the polygraph unit for the service, she is very smart on the many subtle verbal clues that should make the antennae twitch of all listeners.

They range from what she refers to as the emphatic denial: “I would never do such a thing” via the catastrophic event: “I’m sorry I couldn’t finish that: my aunt died” – to a matter of trust. “Whenever you hear someone saying ‘Trust me, I know what I’m doing’ – that is usually the last thing you should do.” Her book began with an idea: “How to create inner strength and mental resilience. How to become powerful when we feel powerless. How to protect ourselves mentally and physically. How to harness fear and prevent panic.”

And this is a girl who, as a teenager arriving back at home with her mother, saw there was an intruder inside their house and set off after him. The intruder didn’t stand a chance.

Many readers of this book might feel it is aimed towards a U.S. audience rather than a British one. In America, being quite literally bulletproof might seem sensible; less so in the UK, surely. Do we really need to know how to plan an exit from a restaurant in the event of an attack? (Make sure you know where another entrance is, sit with your back to the wall, and be willing to go against the herd if there’s a rush to the doors: that’s what to do).

Then you remember the recent terrorist attacks on restaurants and bars at London Bridge. So maybe we aren’t so immune after all.

And the lessons are universal: don’t let yourself be bullied – predators (whether on the streets, at work, or even in relationships) like to pick on someone they think they can beat. So make sure they won’t. The predators are usually the ones full of self-doubt and fear.

When we’re out in the world, she advises us, “Present yourself with an air of vigilance and assurance. Walk with your shoulders back and head up. Don’t be afraid to make eye contact with people. And if something doesn’t feel right, don’t neglect it.”

Then if all else fails, learn how to fight, with “a few moves designed to distract or injure an attacker long enough to give a person time to escape. A violent strike to the groin. A swift kick to the shin. A hard punch to the throat. Or jamming a finger in the eye. Swift, violent and fierce – using elbows and knees when possible. Move and strike and run.”

The best advice she can give, she says, is to sign up for a martial arts or boxing class. As I mentioned, she’s not a woman to mess with.

Don’t worry about fear, she says. Fear is a healthy and natural response to a perceived threat. It’s panic that is the danger: panic causes us to lose control of our faculties. “When we panic, we can’t think, reason, process or plan.”

Some fears are natural. “The fear of falling is hard-wired into us from birth; loud noises we equate with danger . . . that’s why we jump when a car backfires.”

Most other fears are learned: in the U.S. more than half of all teenagers were concerned that a shooting would happen at their school.

 

THIS is despite the fact that, remarkably, even in America, the chance of a student being killed by a shooter is about one in 614 million – less likely than the chances of being struck by lightning (one in 1.2 million).

In the same way, people are afraid of flying, though the chances of dying in a plane crash are one in 5.4 million. The chances of dying in a road accident in the U.S. are just over one in 102, but nobody thinks twice about driving to the airport for their flight.

So work out what you are afraid of and deal with it. Above all be aware of the 3Fs of fear – Fight, Flight or Freeze.

This is the body’s physiological response to an unexpected situation. It’s you – but a heightened version of you, more aware and alert.

Ms Poumpouras’s go-to response is, she cheerfully admits, to fight; to run towards danger rather than away.

One of the incidental pleasures of this book is that like all good Greeks, Ms Poumpouras is immensely proud of her heritage.

“Of course I was groomed from birth to believe that everything in the world originated from Greece,” she says, only partly tongue in cheek – and decorates each chapter with a punchy homily from one of her ancestral homeland’s ancient big shots.

Typical is this from Plato: “Courage is knowing what not to fear.” But whether it is advice from ancient philosophers or a modern Secret Service woman, there’s plenty in this book to stiffen the sinews in what I am afraid is becoming an over-fearful and risk-averse world.

– Becoming Bulletproof by Evy Poumpouras is published by Icon, 336pp

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Arts, Films, Society

Film Review: The Assistant cert 15

REVIEW

The-Assistant-Share

The Assistant follows one day in the life of Jane (Julia Garner), a recent college graduate and aspiring film producer, who has recently landed her dream job as a junior assistant to a powerful entertainment mogul.

THE Assistant is not the first film to broach the subject of sexual harassment by powerful men in the entertainment industry, which spawned the #MeToo movement, and it certainly won’t be the last. But it will always be one of the best.

Last year’s Bombshell, which starred Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie, which chronicled the downfall of Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, who was eventually forced to resign not because of his long history of sexual advances, but rather because they had been made public, made headlines in equally pressing fashion for a number of film critics.

The Assistant is much less starry and takes a very different, far subtler approach, fictionalising events over the course of a single day in a New York City workplace that is unmistakably modelled on the offices of producer Harvey Weinstein’s company Miramax.

Film trailer –

Nor, at risk of giving away spoilers, is there any comeuppance in this story. The unnamed and unseen Weinstein-type character is omnipotent: everyone in the organisation dances to his tune.

Another way in which Australian screenwriter-director Kitty Green’s excellent film differs from Bombshell is that it’s told not from the perspective of a victim – at least, she’s not a victim yet – but from that of a bright young assistant only five weeks into the job.

Gradually, she has learnt that one of her many tasks, along with answering the phone, visiting the photocopier and booking flights, is enabling her boss’s trysts with much younger women, and sometimes literally scrubbing the “casting couch” after them.

She is wonderfully played by Julia Garner, recognisable to anyone who watches the brilliant Netflix series Ozark as that drama’s hard-as-nails hillybilly Ruth.

Here, she’s Jane, not that anyone deigns to call her by her name. As the junior – and as a woman – she is treated dismissively even by her fellow (male) assistants. She works such long hours that she forgets her father’s birthday.

But in what often seems almost like a fly-on-the-office-wall documentary and runs to only 87 minutes (significantly, Green’s background is mostly in factual film-making), she accepts all this as the price of an entry-level job in an exciting industry.

Jane is in almost every shot but doesn’t say much. Her thought processes are what matters here, and both Green and Garner deserve enormous credit for somehow making them so eloquent.

The picture’s best and most important scene comes when she decides she needs to raise some kind of alarm, and goes to see the head of human resources, exquisitely played (in little more than a cameo) by Matthew Macfadyen.

I felt it best not to describe that encounter here because it is pivotal to the film, and by extension highly enlightening in explaining why and how some influential men managed to get away with such ugly behaviour for so long.

– The Assistant is streamed on various platforms, including Curzon Home Cinema, certificate 15.

Verdict: Subtle but a powerful production. Eerily effective. ★★★★

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Arts, Books, Russia, Society

Book Review: Putin’s People

LITERARY REVIEW

Belton

HEGEMONY

IN Russia, the national referendum to extend Vladimir Putin’s stay in office for another 12 years has been postponed.

The proposal that he was to continue for two more six-year terms after his present mandate ends in 2024 was due to be put to the people on Wednesday, 22 April. But due to coronavirus, or Covid-19, the vote was deferred.

Given his vice-like grip on the levers of power of that vast country and the muted opposition to him, there can be little doubt which way it would have gone. He would effectively have been endorsed as president for life.

But now there is a pause – if a brief one – in his relentless pursuit of an unchallenged and supreme autocracy.

That even tough gut Vlad – “The Papa” or “The Number One” as his cronies call him – must bow to the virus is almost a relief. Because in the twenty years since he grabbed the presidency, no one at home has managed to stand in his way without being rolled over, removed, imprisoned, killed, cowed or bribed into submission.

At the same time, he has turned a clapped-out post-communist nation going nowhere into an aggressive and much feared international power. Putin’s Russia now has its insidious fingers in every political, diplomatic, military and financial pie around the world – with deeply worrying implications for all of us.

How this man seemingly from nowhere managed his Napoleonic rise from mere deputy mayor of St Petersburg to absolute power is arguably the biggest story of the 21st century so far.

In forensically unravelling it, journalist Catherine Belton, former Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, has done a great service, producing a book that western experts on modern Russia acknowledge as vital to our understanding of the Putin phenomenon.

Her study and thesis is chilling indeed. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 and communism gave way to a makeshift form of democracy, the KGB, Moscow’s underground army of spies, crooks and secret policemen, disappeared from the radar. But they hadn’t gone for good. They weren’t defeated, only biding their time.

Their moment came when the oligarchs, who in effect ran Russia after making vast fortunes from oil, gas and mineral rights amid the economic and political chaos of the Yeltsin years, catapulted the seemingly pliable Putin into the presidency.

They promoted him as their man to sort the country out and bring it to some semblance of liberal democracy. They didn’t expect him to last more than one four-year term.

What they didn’t reckon on was that Putin was KGB to the core. He’d cut his teeth spying on the West in the old communist days, subverting Western businessmen, stealing industrial secrets, and smuggling. And it was with his old pals that his true allegiance lay.

With Putin in the driving seat, Belton argues, the KGB was back in control of Russia and its grip on the country is as strong now as it ever was in the Soviet days.

His agenda – eagerly taken up by the so-called siloviki (the word means “strongmen”) he recruited from the old ranks – was to make the nation all-powerful again, a top-down, state-run force not to be trifled with at home or abroad.

Along the way they would feather their own nests, through money-laundering, bribery, fraud, rake-offs, slush funds and theft. Putin’s Russia would become not just an autocracy but a kleptocracy.

He turned the tables on the oligarchs who’d sponsored him, strong-arming them into acquiescence. They worked for him now, not the other way round.

What emerged, writes Belton, was “a system in which all businesses of any scale were dependent on the Kremlin. Tycoons had to serve the state in order to preserve their standing and wealth”.

Those who resisted found the police knocking on their doors with arrest warrants for tax evasion, fraud or other serious crime. Backed by the state, he had them at his mercy.

Some ran – like media magnate Boris Berezovsky, only to end up dying mysteriously in England. Some went to prison – Russia’s richest man, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said to be worth £12 billion, was boarding his private jet in Siberia when commandos arrested him. Most caved in and did as they were told – Roman Abramovich, says Belton, purchased Chelsea FC on Putin’s instructions, as a way of enhancing Russian prestige in the West.

CROOKED

EVEN those closest to him weren’t safe, especially if they got too big for their boots. Sergei Pugachev made billions as Putin’s favourite banker before “Papa” turned on him and looted his vast assets.

In exile, Moscow mafia thugs turned up, took him out to a yacht in the Mediterranean and demanded £280 million to guarantee the “safety” of his family.

Belton draws on published sources and deep-throat contacts to plot a course through the maze of crooked financial manoeuvres – the sleights of hand, the backroom deals, the “loans” from state banks, the kick-backs on contracts – that Putin and his courtiers got up to as they systematically drew the wealth to themselves as inexorably as iron fillings to a magnet.

They stashed their ill-gotten gains overseas, their so-called “black cash” amounting to a staggering £640 billion in all, according to one estimate, while at home they flaunted their riches, kitting themselves out with yachts and private planes and vast palaces. One of these had a garage for 15 cars and a storeroom for fur coats.

All the while, human rights, freedom and the rule of law went increasingly by the board. Local governors were stripped of their authority. Dissent was suppressed. The courts acted as an arm of the Kremlin. Judges toed the line.

Though Russia was ostensibly a democracy, the reality was that power emanated from the top down, with Putin as a feudal monarch, a tyrant, a tsar like Peter the Great, surrounded by his henchmen, his boyars, who owed their fealty and their vast riches to him.

Belton finds it shameful that the West – which had worked for and then welcomed the demise of communist rule in Russia – connived in this return to autocracy.

Bankers and brokers in London, in particular, fell over themselves to get a slice of the financial action, happy to look the other way as fortunes were hidden in offshore havens.

Peers of the realm lined up to lend their apparent respectability to the boardrooms of Russian ventures. Russian money swirling around London earned the capital the nickname of “Londongrad” or Moskva-na-Thames. In the United States, Donald Trump, before he became president, did deals with the Russians to bail out and expand his property empire.CROOKED

WEALTHY POWER-BROKER

GREED triumphed over principle, with the result that the West, by slavishly following its own money-making instincts, has allowed itself to be infiltrated. Belton warns: “The weakness of the Western capitalist system, in which money ultimately outweighs all other considerations, has left it wide open for the Kremlin to manipulate.”

Making matters worse is that the siloviki were on a mission, not just to get very rich, but to use that wealth to undermine the West. Under communism, the KGB had seen the West as its enemy. Its successors, led by Putin, feel the same way.

Under him, Russia, once a busted flush on the world stage, has become the world’s power broker again, whether openly, as in Ukraine and the Middle East, or covertly.

In its new guise, the KGB has adopted the tricks of the old KGB, causing disruption in the West wherever it can.

Its money backs political extremists, Right or Left – the cause isn’t important, only the confusion they cause. It gets up to all sorts of mischief to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Europe. It encourages unrest and dissension just to stir the pot.

In the eyes of Putin and his cronies, the Cold War has never ended, just moved into a new phase. We have clearly been warned.

– Putin’s People by Catherine Belton is published by William Collins, 640pp

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