LONDON'S LITERATE SLEUTH

Sir Ian Blair, the head of London's Metropolitan Police, sounds like a well-read police chief. "Al Qaeda does not act like some classic Graham Greene cell. It has very loose affiliations ..." he told reporters, following the arrest of four suspects, two seen below, in the failed July 21 bombings. I'm not sure which classic cell he was thinking of in which of Greene's books -- the successful terrorist bombers in "The Quiet American" obviously come to mind -- but I'm thinking of the one in "The Honorary Consul" because 1) it was tightly controlled, 2) it involved a major screw-up, and 3) bombing was not the mission.

Photo from Daily Mail, via Zuma Press

In "The Honorary Consul" a handful of Paraguayan terrorists slips into northern Argentina to kidnap the British ambassador during his visit to a sleepy provincial town. The mission -- on orders from El Tigre, a nasty nearly mythological figure who remains hidden in the Paraguayan jungle -- is to hold the ambassador hostage and exchange him for several political prisoners. But the terrorists kidnap the wrong man. Their screw-up results in a much worse tragedy all around than if the operation had been a success. Big contrast there. Not incidentally -- and no surprise coming from Graham Greene -- it is the cell's rigid ideology that compounds the failure and magnifies the tragedy.