Vincent V. Severski: “Zamęt” (Turmoil, 2018)

Work

The Polish Literary Bibliography records “Zamęt” from 2018 (523 pp.) with the subject headings Foreign Intelligence Agency, espionage, Taliban, kidnapping, Polish intelligence, and setting – Pakistan.¹

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesIn Spider’s Web’s review, the kidnapped businessman turns out to be an agent who was the key link in the secret recruitment of a former Russian spy; the Section sets out to rescue him, and the mission is threatened by a traitor working with Russia at the top of Polish intelligence.²

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesIn October 2018 Canal+ bought the screen rights to the novel.³

The real background

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesThe reviewer found the background credible: political changes in Poland, the terrorism of the so-called Islamic State and US–Russian rivalry in the Middle East; he praised the author’s knowledge of the service’s procedures and bureaucracy, shown less glamorously than in films.²

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to wroclaw.pl (2023), the author modelled the protagonist’s Greek adoptive grandfather, Jordanis, on his geography teacher at the Fifth High School (V LO) in Wrocław, Jorthanis Lazopoulos, and on a Greek barber he knew in Wrocław. He used the teacher’s name without asking, but the teacher later accepted it.⁴

What is true and what is invented

The Foreign Intelligence Agency exists and under the Act its tasks include identifying international terrorism. The Section, the kidnapping and the mole are fiction; the reviewer writes that the author knows the inside story of high-profile spy cases, but does not point to any of them.^2,5