25 minute watch, 15 min read.
Hi Friends!
Today on From Fact To Fiction, I am joined by authors and experts David Bruns and J.R. Olson to discuss their new novel Line of Succession, a national security thriller about an attempted assassination on the Russian president.
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READ the transcript below, lightly edited for length and clarity
IF you live near the Twin Cities MEET David and J.R. at the Savage Tap on September 25th for Pilsners and Plotlines.
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Introduction
LINDA: Thank you very much for joining us on From Fact to Fiction, where we unpack the truth behind my favorite specialty thrillers. Think Michael Crichton, John le Carré, Tom Clancy.
And while these works differ in subgenre from medical to military to techno thrillers,each immerses the reader in a new but realistic world.
And the best of these blend fact with fiction so well that it's often hard to tell the difference. You don't know what is, what could be, and what's totally impossible.
It would take an expert to know.
Thus, each time we meet, I'll pair up with an expert or two, and we'll select a new specialty thriller. We'll not only talk about why we love the book, but unpack the truth behind fiction.
Our book today is a 2025 novel, Line of Succession, by David Bruns and J.R. Olson. It's a brand new military thriller out on September 16th. The seventh in the Command and Control series and novel eleven for our two authors writing together.
Our Authors & Experts: David Bruns and J.R. Olson
LINDA: David and J.R. are the perfect pair to write these stories. David spent six years as a U.S Navy submarine officer, which gives me claustrophobia even saying the words. And then you (David) did 20 years in the high-tech private sector.
And J.R. spent 21 years on active duty with the Navy, including years at sea aboard aircraft carriers and large deck amphibious assault ships, which is also very fascinating.
And one other tidbit, which is very relevant to this book, you (J.R.) were trained by the CIA to recruit spies for America, which I'm sure came in handy when writing Line of Succession.
J.R: Yeah.
LINDA: And my favorite quote, I just want to say, came from a review of your series.
“These two guys have lived it. Now they're writing it. Taught, tense, and totally believable, you will be dropped into the midst of a world with which few of us are familiar.” (Don Keith, author of Only the Brave and Final Bearing.)
That's exactly why I love specialty thrillers and why I love your books, including Line of Succession.
So again, welcome to From Fact to Fiction.
DAVID: Thank you.
(David and J.R. have a great site here on Substack, check it out! Or find them on bruns-olson.com)
Introducing Line of Succession
LINDA: OK, so let's talk about Line of Succession. The premise of your book is:
If the Russian president were assassinated, who would be in charge and what would the United States do?
Your story begins with an attempted assassination on the Russian president and the associated fallout. This leads the president to task CIA officer Harrison Cole to lead a covert operation to stop the powerful ultra-nationalist faction from taking control ahead of Russia's impending elections.
So. this book is pretty heavy on HUMINT, or human intelligence, drawing, I guess, on JR's background. There's a lot of spying and secret agents, deceit and betrayal. And also tracking the warring political parties within Russia themselves.
J.R.: Right.
LINDA: As opposed to open warfare, cutting edge technologies, weaponry, etc., this is a lot of up-close-and-personal among a lot of people.
The thing I love about this book and your other books is the characters are very important. They all feel like they're doing the right thing, most of them. They really all think that they're patriots too, right? And they’re also people so that their love for friends and family and their personal relationships all get in the way, which I love.
It makes for great, believable reading and great storytelling.
So I really loved your book. Thank you for writing it.
Is there anything else you guys want to add about what the book is about, but no spoilers, please?
DAVID: No, I think that you covered the basic premise of it. And the attempted assassination is not a spoiler because it literally happens in chapter one.
So you can see how, because you've read others of our books, you can see how this one really hits it out of the gate, right?
And I think your observation about the choices that characters have to make is a good one. As J.R. mentioned, we try to maintain an air of authenticity. So as much as we love James Bond, we're not writing a James Bond novel, right?
These are people that are struggling. They all think they're doing the right thing, but they're struggling between a couple of bad choices. And, you know, that's how real life is most of the time.
I mean, a lot of the people that we base our characters on, we use people we know or people we've met along the way as templates, good and bad.
Because you rarely meet someone who's just evil.
They believe in what they're doing and they probably believe what they're doing is the right thing to do. That doesn't make it right. It just makes it, it just means that they have a motivation to do that thing.
LINDA: Yep, absolutely.
The Facts Behind the Fiction of Line of Succession
LINDA: All right, well, let's jump into the facts behind the fiction for Line of Succession.
What Inspired The Book?
I would love to know if you have any true events, situations, or technologies, or any stories that inspired this particular book.
J.R.: I would say that a lot of the things that I was taught at the farm by the agency, we tried to weave a lot of that stuff into the espionage side here, the recruitment efforts, you know, things like that. That's fairly realistic.
It's also not classified. I mean, there are so many books out there now written by former CIA case officers, retired officers that, you know, talk about the operations that they did.
So we use a lot of stuff that's in the open source world to try and flesh out this story as far as tactics, techniques and procedures go.
The thing that we struggled with that we bounced around for a while was, how do you frame a Russian society that's been under the thumb of somebody like Vladimir Putin for so long?
And I would tell this brief story. Dr. Fiona Hill came to Minnesota and visited Carleton College about a year and a half ago. And she did a phenomenal presentation to the student body.
And then later that afternoon we had a faculty colloquium with her. And so she was answering questions and discussing things about Russian political leadership with a number of the professors at Carleton who are experts on Russia themselves.
And I sort of discovered listening to these experts who speak fluent Russian, that the Russian political leadership today is essentially a bunch of oligarch families with Putin at the middle as the capo de capo, maneuvering the families around and against each other. And some of the family members go in and become, apparatchiks, they run elements of the state governing bodies.
But what really matters is what the oligarchs think of Putin in the middle?
And he plays them off against each other. And he does it very well.
And he also plays the government mechanisms like the FSB and the Ministry of Defense and the Rosgarvia and a bunch of other organizations. He pits them against each other very effectively. So they all orbit around Vladimir Putin.
And in our story, the Command and Control series, we've had Vitaly Luchnik as the Russian president who was overthrown in a coup by his nephew, Nikolai Sokolov.
And so Sokolov is sort of trying to reform Russia, but he's doing it in this system that's really, really difficult to change because the people who have power have so much power. And so he's got to navigate that process.
And the premise of the story is:
What happens if somebody at the center as this capo de capo gets knocked up or just dies of natural causes? What is the succession plan or line of succession in the Russian government today?
Especially since they have 5,500 nuclear weapons at their disposal.
LINDA: They have a prime minister, but he doesn't really have the power.
J.R. No, no, no. And I would say, there are elements even within the families of oligarchs who align with each other. It's almost Melrose Place on steroids for those of us who watched that show.
So it's very dangerous, within the Russian government structure today, to think about what happens if somebody like Putin were to die tomorrow of a heart attack.
Who takes over?
We’re not entirely sure that there is a clear succession plan in Russia today.
We framed this Russian party, the New Dawn Party, this ultra-nationalist group.
In my mind, as a career intelligence officer, what really concerns me is this ultra-nationalist movement that's been around in Russia for quite some time now, since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Believe it or not, Putin is not an ultra-nationalist. He's sort of a traditional, I guess, authoritarian.
But the ultra-nationalists would tell you, no matter what Russia does, it's okay if it results in a better Russia tomorrow. Anything is fine.
And the ultra nationalists like Medvedev, as an example, have been pushing this idea of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
LINDA: And it's terrifying to think that Putin is not the worst thing going on in Russia.
Is the CIA Emerging Threats Group Real?
LINDA: But back to Command and Control. So in your series, you feature a CIA Emerging Threats group, and we have also the CIA Special Activities group.
I know they're fictional, but is there anything like that in our government today where they're looking for these threats across different entities?
J.R. The CIA, every once in a while it goes through sort of a reform movement. You know, they change things around.
One of the things that we learned during the global war on terror was that when you partner up special operations units, the operators–as they call themselves– from the SEAL teams or the Ranger units or whatever, you partner them up with intelligence analysts, you partner them up with, people who can run human intelligence operations, case officers like me.
You bring everybody together. That force multiplier of having everybody together makes the unit much more effective and cohesive because everybody understands what the requirements are.
So those were important lessons that were learned during the war on terror.
And the CIA director, John Brennan, do you remember him from a few years ago during the Obama administration? He did a major reorganization at the CIA and got rid of the traditional stovepipe structures that existed in the organization.
Now, I never served in the CIA. I worked with a lot of people who were case officers from the agency and whatnot.
But Brennan was a career intel analyst, not the case officer. And he became the chief of station in Saudi Arabia.
So he had a very interesting career perspective on things in and out of government and then appointed as the head of CIA.
So he said, look, let's take these lessons learned from the war on terror and let's create mission centers. So these mission centers are either focused on like a geographic challenge like China or some sort of a transnational threat like terrorism.
And so you bring together case officers and paramilitary officers and intel analysts and the technical people, cyber operations folks, et cetera. You put them all together and you say, have at it, go after this mission.
Now, within the Directorate of Operations, there's also still this thing called the Special Activity Center. It's sort of a catch-all for lots of things that go on in the covert action arena.
And there's a whole set of rules and laws that apply for covert action that the CIA would execute.
So there are some things that are very real. The Special Activity Center is absolutely real. It's a real place.
The Emerging Threats Group was sort of a fictional creation that David and I adopted to say, okay, look, we have these mission centers. We have a lot of collaboration between the different members of the U.S. intelligence community.
But the creation of Emerging Threats Group was to say, what's out there that, you know, let's try and pick up on things as far in advance as possible of what might become a threat to the United States or U.S. national security interests over time.
So as a mechanism for fiction, the beautiful thing about having a notional group constructed the way we did it is they can partner up with U.S. Cyber Command or U.S. Special Operations Command or the Defense Intelligence Agency or you name it, they can do whatever they need to do.
And it doesn't take that much time and energy within a story for them to get the authority to reach out and coordinate with those other bodies.
So from a storytelling perspective, it gives us a mechanism we can use that's very freeing. A lot of possibilities. Lots of possibilities.
LINDA: Okay, I'm going to take us to Russia now.
Do Russian politicians, oligarchs, and military spy on themselves?
LINDA: In your book, there was a lot of surveillance going on in Russia by the Russians themselves and all the different groups. They were spying amongst themselves, and spying on themselves.
Does that happen, do you think?
DAVID: So there are some real things which we incorporated that are going on now, like the Rosgvardiya, which is their equivalent of the National Guard, but essentially now it's like Putin's special police force.
So that entity, which is in the book, which is doing a lot of dirty work behind the scenes is a real thing, and does report to the president and is used in those ways.
The surveillance, like that at the White Rabbit restaurant–which is actually a restaurant there–based off of the Alice in Wonderland book.
I mean, those are certainly fictionalized, but I don't think we're too far from the truth.
If you talk to Dr. Hill, like J.R. and I've done, it's a pretty paranoid society, and they're using whatever means they need to gather information to keep their own.
If you think of a society that's, power wise, constantly shifting like a mafia type organization. I mean, you're looking for every advantage you can find.
J.R.: Yeah, I would just say the Rosgvardiya as an example, Putin created that as sort of like a National Guard, as David said.
But interestingly enough, manpower wise, how big it is, it's like 400,000 people.
And it's meant to be sort of the homeland security side of things and a counterweight, as I see it, to the Ministry of Defense.
Because if you're going to have a military coup, what better entity to address that potential than to have a group that is literally beholden directly to Vladimir Putin as the president of the Russian Federation.
So there's a lot of influence, like I mentioned earlier, the Capo de Capo approach in the apparatchiks of state, that's where the counterbalance is to the Ministry of Defense. And it's also a counterbalance to the FSB.
It's really interesting how Putin has crafted the design of the Russian government today.
But I think it's safe to say that there is paranoia across the entire country. There's always been a lot of that in Russia, certainly throughout the Soviet period. And now in the Russian Federation period, they've moved more and more towards true authoritarianism.
Authoritarians spend all of their time and energy worrying about the threat from within much more than they worry about the threat from without.
As an example of that, this is true, is the intelligence that was crafted to give to the Russian political leadership like Putin and even the Ministry of Defense before the invasion into Ukraine.
Now, in a normal government, you'd say that's probably the military intelligence or the foreign intelligence body, the SVR in the case of the Russian Federation, they would be gathering that information to make sure that the military operation was executed as effectively as possible.
But in the Russian Federation, the FSB [Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation], which is sort of like the FBI in the United States, they have the responsibility for the Russian Federation and all of the former Soviet states.
So the FSB was supposed to be the one gathering all the intel on Ukraine and reporting it back to Vladimir Putin.
And one of the things you learn in an authoritarian state is you never give bad news to the boss. So they failed abysmally in making sure the Russian military, the Russian political leadership really understood the capabilities that the Ukrainians had built in the way of being able to defend their country.
And now we're three plus years into this war and the Russians are losing a thousand kids a day.
LINDA: Wow.
Does the US use private citizens and foreign mercenaries to support covert operations?
LINDA: I have one last question, and I'm going to bring it back home for this one.
So in your book, the CIA uses a billionaire private citizen to bribe a powerful Russian politician. And they also do a little outsourcing to some foreign mercenaries for an operation that they couldn't do themselves.
Would the u.s ever do these kinds of things would we bring in private people to broker introductions or arrange bribes? Would things like that actually happen? Would we get people involved who are not part of our military and law enforcement?
J.R. So I'll ask the question, Linda, what do you think? Do you think those things happen?
LINDA: I'm sort of a cynical person by nature, so… I don't know. I don't know.
DAVID: So if you think of the movie with Tom Hanks, Bridge of Spies, where they use the businessman to broker a deal, right?
I mean, it's sort of along those lines.
I mean, clearly we had a lot of fun writing our billionaire character and he is a character with a capital C. I don't think it's a stretch to look at the possible template for that particular gentleman.
Though nothing occurred to me off the top of my head, using foreign mercenaries to help us with a covert action, I know there's precedent for that.
I don't think it's normal, but I also don't think it's out of the range of possibility.
Is that fair, J.R.?
J.R.: Yeah, and I would say, look, we've got a long history in the United States in the world of covert action of the CIA, training and funding and equipping foreign fighters.
We've done that many times in the real world.
So taking that as a bit of a stretch and applying some of the characters that we had from earlier books and bringing them in was a very simple, easy thing to do, especially with the relationships that we had crafted within these national security thriller stories. You could sort of tap into those relationships in a fictional sense, and it would all make a lot of sense inside of a fictional story.
LINDA: Awesome.
Well, thank you guys so much. And to wrap it all up, in a nutshell, the premise behind Line of Succession. Could the shakeup happen as presented? Is it fact, fiction or somewhere in between? Seems like it's fact.
If Putin died tomorrow of a heart attack, there would be no clear line of succession and there would be a lot of infighting and political shakeup.
That’s a Wrap!
Well, thank you both so much for joining me today. This has been so fun and so enlightening.
Y'all have so much information. Thank you so much for sharing it with me and with our readers and our listeners.
I do want to mention that you guys, your book is coming out on September 16th, just around the time we drop this.
DAVID: Oh, great.
LINDA: But also, if you happen to live in the Twin Cities—and i have a bunch of friends that live in the Twin Cities —you're having a party on September 25th?
David: Thursday, September 25th. We realized earlier this year that 2025 was the 10-year anniversary of our first published book and as we started talking about it, we said, why don't we do something big?
Then we talked a little more, and we figured, well, this book comes out in September. So why don't we plan something around September? So it's a 10 year co-writing anniversary and book launch.
We're going to do it at a local brewery, which is a couple of miles from my house.
And we're partnering with a local veterans organization. It's called Believe It Canine Service Providers, which provides service dogs for veterans with PTSD, free of charge. So it's a great cause.
It'll be a great night. So far, we're two plus weeks out, and we've got about 100 people coming.
So it should be a really, really great evening.
J.R.: Savage Tap is the name of the brewery.
LINDA: Great. Well, I'll make sure to put that out there so people can find the link.
And thank you again, J.R. and David, very much. And thank you to my readers and listeners.
And see you on the next episode of From Fact to Fiction.
