The Tehran Triangle

An aging Russian cargo plane descends to a remote airstrip in Kazakhstan. Its mission is a nightmare: exchange 1,300 pounds of gold for an equal amount of weapons-grade uranium—the first crucial step in an Iranian plot to build and detonate a nuclear bomb in the heartland of America. Col. Ashkan Gharabaghi, an officer of Iran’s murderous Quds Force, stands near the runway, studying the aging plane’s lumbering approach. Elizabeth Mallory watches, too. The brilliant young CIA agent has ridden Gunpowder over long stretches of desolate, fallout-poisoned Kazakh countryside to try to stop the export of the black market uranium. Time is short. The sun is setting. The nuclear bomb material sits at the end of the dusty runway, ready for loading. This is how Tom Reed’s frighteningly real thriller, The Tehran Triangle, takes off. In his riveting first novel, Reed, a noted historian, fuses a lifetime’s experience in nuclear weaponry and spy craft to a story deeply wedded to fact. The book’s harrowing outcome will be remembered—and feared—long after it has been read. Reed is a former Secretary of the Air Force under two presidents and the youngest-ever Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, an organization so secret that its very existence was not revealed until the end of the Cold War. He plunges thriller fans into the harrowing chessboard of international surveillance and intelligence gathering. Farsi speaking Agent Mallory emerges as the CIA’s point person on Iran. Gharabaghi rises in the Quds ranks, becoming a powerful colonel, sponsored by his long-time friend Mansoor Alizadeh, the President of the Iranian Republic. Mallory’s perilous investigation of Iranian penetration of the US brings her to a most unlikely hub of terrorist activity—a machine shop servicing the oil and gas industry and owned by retired Air Force Sergeant Bum Bradley and his brother, Hiram. She discovers Col. Gharabaghi’s evil scheme to recruit two American citizens of Iranian descent, engineer Rosincourt Sadr, and his girlfriend, Soroya Assad, to assemble the nuclear bomb. Step by step, Reed reveals how a religion’s most extreme beliefs can drive even comfortable, well-educated American citizens into the fever grip of terrorism. Col. Gharabaghi orchestrates the plot from Chihuahua while Mallory urgently tries to counter his murderous moves from El Paso, right across the border. It is now July 2012. As the plot moves toward its furiously-paced conclusion, Mallory makes increasingly frantic efforts to sabotage the bomb, now rolling down railroad tracks toward the Trinity detonation site in New Mexico. The countdown culminates when Gharabaghi punches a code into his cell phone to set off the biggest terrorist strike in US history, triggering readers to ask, “What if?”

THOMAS C. REED is a former Secretary of the Air Force, who served during Ford and Carter administrations. In the mid-70s he was Director of the Nat'l Reconnaissance Offc responsible for US satellite intelligence systems during the Cold War. In the 80s, he was a Special Ass't to President Reagan for Nat'l Security Policy. His technical background includes nuclear weapon design and low-temperature physics. Reed graduated from Cornell University with an engineering degree and USAF ROTC commission. He began his career at the AF Ballistic Missile Div. in Los Angeles in the 50s, the Sputnik and missile gap years. After earning a graduate degree from the University of S. California, Reed moved to Lawrence Livermore where he designed two thermonuclear devices fired over the Pacific in 1962. He was on Christmas Island at the Bighorn event noted in Prologue. Reed later started a successful superconductor company. In 1973 Reed was recruited to manage intelligence projects at the Pentagon related to the Yom Kippur War. In 1983 he returned to business pursuits, but throughout the Soviet collapse, he advised the Joint Strategic Planning Staff on policy and intelligence matters. Reed’s first book, At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War, was published by Ballantine Books in 2004. The Nuclear Express: a Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation was published by Zenith Press in 2009. Reed was principal authority appearing in the National Geographic Channel’s Secret History of the Atom Bomb, April 15, 2010.

SANDY BAKER graduated from Penn State with a B.A. in English. She began her career as a technical writer and editor with a defense contractor. Later when stationed in Germany with her Army officer husband, she taught English grammar and American History to Army GIs. There followed a stint on a regional NJ newspaper as a reporter and columnist. Baker then spent 12 years as a university development director, writing funding proposals and speeches, plus managing colloquia and other events. A Master Gardener since 2000, Baker writes for the MG website and lectures on basic landscape design, lawn alternatives, drought tolerant gardening, and native California plants. She co-chaired the CA state Master Gardener conference in 2011 at the same time she published her first children’s gardening book. Her second will be published in this year. Also in 2012, Baker chaired the CA Writers Club-Redwood Writers Conference in Santa Rosa.