Though he is almost unknown in the United States, de Villiers’s publishers estimate that the S.A.S. “The Israelis knew it was going to happen,” he said, “and did nothing.” When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. The novel, “Les Fous de Benghazi,” came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. Other pop novelists, like John le Carré and Tom Clancy, may flavor their work with a few real-world scenarios and some spy lingo, but de Villiers’s books are ahead of the news and sometimes even ahead of events themselves. De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, who seem to enjoy seeing themselves and their secrets transfigured into pop fiction (with their own names carefully disguised), and his books regularly contain information about terror plots, espionage and wars that has never appeared elsewhere. The books are strange hybrids: top-selling pulp-fiction vehicles that also serve as intelligence drop boxes for spy agencies around the world.
GERARD DE VILLIERS SAS SERIES
espionage series at the rate of four or five books a year for nearly 50 years. The book was the latest by Gérard de Villiers, an 83-year-old Frenchman who has been turning out the S.A.S. “It really gave you a sense of the atmosphere inside the regime, of the way these people operate, in a way I hadn’t seen before.” “It was prophetic,” I was told by one veteran Middle East analyst who knows Syria well and preferred to remain nameless. And most striking of all, it described an attack on one of the Syrian regime’s command centers, near the presidential palace in Damascus, a month before an attack in the same place killed several of the regime’s top figures. It detailed a botched coup attempt secretly supported by the American and Israeli intelligence agencies. Set in the midst of Syria’s civil war, the book offered vivid character sketches of that country’s embattled ruler, Bashar al-Assad, and his brother Maher, along with several little-known lieutenants and allies. Unlike most paperbacks, though, this one attracted the attention of intelligence officers and diplomats on three continents. Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was published in Paris under the title “Le Chemin de Damas.” Its lurid green-and-black cover featured a busty woman clutching a pistol, and its plot included the requisite car chases, explosions and sexual conquests.
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