What Did W.E.B Griffin Know And When Did He Know It?
In the fallout from the hijacking of Malaysia Flight 307 there nothing being said about the uncanny resemblance the affairs bears to the plot of W.E.B Griffin’s Presidential Agent series blockbuster By Order Of The President. In this great read, a Boeing aircraft is hijacked from a strip in Africa by Somali Jihadists, flown to an abandoned strip elsewhere on the continent where the pilot is murdered, the plane is loaded with fuel bladders, repainted in the colors of a South America carrier and moved to Central America from where it will be crashed with tons of extra fuel aboard into a target in Philadelphia.
Meanwhile the CIA mishandles the world-wide search for the plane while evil female CIA operatives, one of whom is easily identifiable as Valerie Plame, pursue their own vendetta against yes - Presidential Agent Charley Castillo who yes locates the plane and leads the Special Forces capture of the craft before the public is aware of the extreme danger it faced. There’s undercover police work in Philly, a Russian arms dealer, a rogue FBI agent, beautiful women, an eccentric Hungarian newspaper publisher, Castillo’s tragic but romantic background all woven together by a master story teller.
But the essential plot, the mysterious hijacking of a Boeing aircraft and the world-wide search for it before something very bad can happen could have been plucked from today’s headlines. So I believe W.E.B Griffin should be interrogated by the FBI – what did he know and when did he know it? And while they have him in that basement room in the J. Edgar Hoover building in D.C. they can find out about this rogue agent of theirs.