It occurred to me while musing over my first three novels featuring Jack Brandon and his team that the story of Jack’s father, Peter, had been neglected. Here was a man who was a fast-track KGB officer who escaped from his masters and re-established the Brandon family in America. How did he manage to flee the KGB? How did he come to live in the U.S.? What was his life like in the Soviet Union? Who was Jack’s mother? What was she like? Where did the name Brandon come from?

Run to Freedom is the beginning of the Brandon family story.

Has anyone ever written a fiction novel that was 100 percent fiction? I doubt it. Some truth always makes its way onto the pages the readers see. My characters are a combination of truth and imagination. None are actual people.

My novels contain a lot of detail. In the worlds of espionage, detail is king. Without it, any operations plan is useless. You may have to ignore pieces of the plan to deal with reality but scrambling from a plan is better than no plan at all. Detail also is necessary when devising and using aliases. Knowing when to change an alias is a learned skill. Bear with me as my hero changes identities multiple times over his journey.

For the intelligence operative, changing identities often requires a matching change in behavior. It is not easy to keep all this change straight. I’ve personally used many identities. Some lasted only a few hours, others months. The longer you use an alias, the more you slide into being someone else and the greater the impact on the real you.

I try to take few deviations from the truth when dealing with geography, distance, travel time, and various hardware items. Weapons used by the Brandon team and their capabilities are real. Distance shooting scenes are probable. Hand-to-hand combat is from my own training in Hapkido and the choreography of those scenes is correct. The firefights are plausible. Serving with CIA in I Corps Vietnam in 1968 and ‘69 gave me some experience with small-scale firefights.

The operational planning is real as is the casing of targets. The execution is based upon first-hand knowledge with a varying amount of fiction. Knowledge of the KGB is from study and two years in Moscow as the CIA Station Chief. The KGB is a worthy opponent and I added to my lore of tradecraft by that experience. Whatever skills I have in planning operations, I owe to excellent training by the CIA.

I want my readers to follow along with Peter Brandon as he tries to escape the KGB and feel they too are in the action. There are no superhuman actions. Many of you with the proper training could turn the clock back and face the same challenges.

My knowledge of the Irish Republic Army is slight. I hope I haven’t used too much imagination and too little fact in writing about it as it existed in the 1970s.

Buckle your seat belt and enjoy the action!

All of Barry Kelly’s novels are available in print in digital formats from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore. Visit www.factsandfictions.com for more by the author.

“When the time comes, the way will be clear.”