I don’t know what’s going on but it seems I can’t escape my job even during seemingly harmless activities.   I watched the excellent AMC/BBC miniseries The Night Manager and it turns out to be about an illegal arms deal, and one of the major characters is from, get this, the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls.   DDTC on TV?  Really?  Who knew?

So now I’m reading Before the Fall, a mystery/thriller by Noah Hawley, best known, perhaps, for his role as the screenwriter for the television miniseries Fargo.  The novel, which has been well-reviewed and which is hard to put down, has, as a plot point . . .

CAUTION:  VERY MINOR SPOILERS AFTER THIS

. . . has, as a plot point, an investigation of sanctions violations by the Office of Foreign Assets Control.  But, sadly, popular novels are poorly edited these days, and there is an unfortunate whopper of an error.   The whopper is not the hilarious and continual references to “the OFAC” as in “Agent Hex and his superiors at the OFAC.”  (I suspect that Hawley is thinking that you say O-F-A-C and not OFAC.  Sigh).

No the whopper is that, in 2015, OFAC still thinks that Libya is sanctioned.   An indictment at issue involves a character engaging in financial transactions with Libya, even though those sanctions were lifted in 2011 with the only remnants remaining being the blocking of certain people who were once part of the Muammar Gaddafi regime.  Still, although I haven’t finished the book, it’s an enjoyable read.  Perhaps I’ll learn as I read further on that it’s actually an alternative history novel like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

Permalink


Copyright © 2016 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)