Levy, Adrian 1965-

PERSONAL:

Born 1965; married Cathy Scott-Clark (a photographer and writer).

CAREER:

Freelance writer, documentary film maker, and broadcaster. Former theater director and theater reviewer; Sunday Times, London, England, began as investigative reporter, became foreign correspondent.

WRITINGS:

(With wife, Cathy Scott-Clark) The Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2002.

(With Cathy Scott-Clark) The Amber Room: The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure, Walker & Co. (New York, NY), 2004.

(With Cathy Scott-Clark) Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, Atlantic (London, England), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Adrian Levy and his wife, photographer and writer Cathy Scott-Clark, were journalists together at the Sunday Times of London, England, before they left to become freelancers. Their work has since appeared in newspapers across the English-speaking world, and in 2002 they published their first book, The Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade.

Not to be confused with common jade—or nephrite—imperial green jade—also known as jadeite—is found in only a few places in the world, primarily in the region of Myanmar known as Upper Burma. In "an ambitious effort that is equal parts history, sensationalized gossip and political exposé," as The Stone of Heaven was described by a Publishers Weekly reviewer, Levy and Scott-Clark trace the history of southeastern Asia through the stone, beginning with an eighteenth-century Chinese emperor named Qianlong who wrote more than 800 poems about jadeite, ate powdered jadeite to improve his health, and threatened to conquer the parts of Burma where it was mined to ensure his continued supply. In the nineteenth century, the Burmese mines were conquered by the British; Levy and Scott-Clark use the Indian National Archives to provide "engrossing first-person accounts" of the British explorers who braved malaria and violent resistance from the native Kachins to acquire the stone, Jay Currie wrote in Christian Science Monitor. In the Second Opium War of 1860, French and British colonialists stole a large portion of the royal Chinese jadeite collection, but such looting was not limited to Westerners. Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist forces during the Chinese Civil War of 1945-49 and later the president of Taiwan, authorized the theft of more imperial jadeite to furnish Taiwan's National Museum and his wife's personal collection. Other rich collectors, including Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, also used underhanded means to acquire irreplaceable historic jadeite treasures.

Although Levy and Scott-Clark are harsh in their treatment of these unscrupulous collectors, their most unsparing treatment is reserved for the current military government of Myanmar. The two had previously been banned from Myanmar because of their earlier exposés of the regime, but in 1998 they used false identities to become the first Western journalists to visit the jadeite mines of Myanmar. What they found was horrendous: hundreds of thousands of emaciated men and women, many addicted to heroin and suffering from HIV or AIDS, working in virtual slavery to extract jadeite from the ground to bankroll the military government. This "compelling story … from the depths of a true circle of hell," as a critic for Kirkus Reviews described it, was praised by many reviewers. Levy and Scott-Clark's description of the suffering of the miners is "powerfully evocative," Barbara Crosette wrote in the New York Times Book Review, and a Publishers Weekly reviewer thought that the "horrifying conclusion" is "the book's strongest point."

In their 2004 book, The Amber Room: The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure, Levy and Scott-Clark set out to uncover what happened to the Amber Room, the famous gift of amber panels that Frederick I of Prus- sia gave to Peter the Great in 1716. The panels were assembled in the Catherine Palace outside Leningrad for centuries until Hitler ordered the panels to be retrieved. In 1941, German soldiers dismantled the room, destroyed the palace, and sent the panels to Konigsberg, in East Prussia. It is widely speculated the Amber Room was burned down four years later, but others disagree and believe the panels to still be hidden somewhere. The authors "battle against obfuscation, disinformation, and plain intransigence, as they comb both Stasi and Russian archives for proof of the room's hiding place and continued existence," claimed Sarah Crowden in her review of the book for Geographical. The Amber Room is full of "episodes of cold-war intrigue, cynicism, amoral betrayal, and bureaucratic stalling that degenerates into absurdity," claimed Booklist critic Jay Freeman. "Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy are two of our most formidable investigative journalists. This is some of their finest work. But its fascination—no shame attached—lies more in the questing than the denouement," asserted the London Observer reviewer Peter Preston. "This engrossing book combines history, detection, and adventure," praised School Library Journal critic Ted Westervelt.

In Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, published in 2007, Levy and Scott-Clark take a look at Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb and nuclear black-market entrepreneur. The pair "present fresh autobiographical insight into Khan's persona," noted an Arms Control Today critic. Hindu critic Kesava Menon felt that in regards to Khan, the authors "draw a picture of a fairly dim-witted but unscrupulous egomaniac who had the street sense to know that Pakistan had to take the low road to become a nuclear power." More importantly, the book delves into the rise of Pakistan's nuclear arms program and the fact that, for thirty years, various American government officials were complicit about the country building up its nuclear arsenal. "The authors demonstrate the lengths to which the U.S. government was prepared to go to play down Pakistan's nuclear machinations," remarked a Foreign Affairs critic. "The arguments in this book, which run along three eventually interlocking lines, are not really new but what makes the work by Levy and Scott-Clark significant is that much of the accumulated evidence on the topics under discussion has been put together in one place," observed Menon. A Publishers Weekly critic remarked of Deception that it "serve[s] a stunning indictment of ‘the nuclear crime of all our lifetimes,’ in which … the U.S. has been an active accessory," according to the authors.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Arms Control Today, December 1, 2007, review of Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, p. 47.

Biography, January 1, 2008, review of Deception, p. 186.

Booklist, December 1, 2001, Margaret Flanagan, review of The Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade, pp. 617-618; June 1, 2004, Jay Freeman, review of The Amber Room: The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure, p. 1690; December 15, 2007, Brendan Driscoll, review of Deception, p. 8.

Christian Science Monitor, March 21, 2002, Jay Currie, review of The Stone of Heaven.

Foreign Affairs, March 1, 2008, Lawrence D. Freedman, review of Deception.

Geographical, September 1, 2004, Sarah Crowden, review of The Amber Room, p. 99.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2001, review of The Stone of Heaven, p. 1468.

Library Journal, June 1, 2004, Robert C. Jones, review of The Amber Room, p. 152.

New York Times Book Review, March 24, 2002, Barbara Crosette, review of The Stone of Heaven, p. 22.

Observer (London, England), July 18, 2004, Peter Preston, review of The Amber Room.

Publishers Weekly, November 19, 2001, review of The Stone of Heaven, p. 55; May 3, 2004, review of The Amber Room, p. 183; July 30, 2007, review of Deception, p. 67.

School Library Journal, November 1, 2004, Ted Westervelt, review of The Amber Room, p. 179.

Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2002, Michael J. Ybarra, review of The Stone of Heaven, p. W6.

ONLINE

BBC Radio 4 Web site,http://www.bbc.co.uk/ (December 1, 2002), "Diary of a Programme Maker."

Democracy Now,http://www.democracynow.org/ (November 19, 2007), Amy Goodman, "Deception: British Reporter Adrian Levy on How the United States Secretly Helped Pakistan Build Its Nuclear Arsenal."

Hindu,http://www.thehindu.com/ (November 12, 2007), Kesava Menon, review of Deception.