Coming Soon to a TV Near You

CARL WEBSTER of the Harvard-MIT Research Group devises international worst-case scenarios. His best to date is called GULFSCENE III, in which Pakistan and India put aside centuries of animosity and join forces to conquer the oil-rich southern coast of the Pesian Gulf. Bored with life in Cambridge, Webster allows himself to be captured by the Paks so he can implement the plan. Soon the CIA gets into the act, as well as a Capitol Hill headline-seeker, a KGB mole in the White House, and an ex-leftist ex-CIA agent "with eyes like faded blueberry stains on a white table-cloth." Webster and a CIA killer with a heart of gold decide that GULFSCENE III must be stopped.

If all of this sounds confusing, don't worry. Richard Bulliet's The Gulf Scenario reads like a TV movie, complete with fade-ins, exotic locales, love interests-everything but the words "Place Commercial Here" between chapters. In other words, Bulliet makes no grand assumptions about his readers' intelligence. There's even a map--a simplified one at that--of the Middle East on the flyleaf, for those readers who just can't keep all those Arabian nations straight (though the Persian Gulf itself is confusingly labeled Bahrain.)

It might go over on prime-time TV--but it seems odd in a book about a Harvard genius to have one Muslim say to another: "Our target is the end of Ramadan. When all the Muslims are celebrating the end of the month with fasting, we shall present them with a special gift, Operation Tanzim." Real smooth, Bulliet.

At the same time that he laboriously spells out the quaint customs of the Middle East for ethnocentric Middle America, Bulliet apparently concludes that some things can never be explained to the TV-educated audience for whom he writes. So he doesn't even try. What, for instance, is a "cipher pad"? Why haven't the Soviets flattened the Afghan guerilla-controlled town of Girishk? And do you really expect to take Abu Dhabi with 20 men?

The answers to these and other questions are nowhere to be found. But you can almost forgive Bulliet's condescension--he is, after all, a professor, who teaches Middle East history at Columbia. Moreover, he weaves such an engaging tale of espionage and international whoop-dee-do that the actual details aren't quite as important as the frantic pace and the heart-in-your-throat situations.

One hopes that Bulliet has an extremely active imagination. If not, if the book's plot has some basis in fact, then the machinations of national intelligence communities pose a serious threat to the precariously perched Persian Gulf regimes. Indeed, Bulliet says in the book's jacket notes, "At the present time, the likelihood of a major crisis developing in the Gulf region is very high."

Bulliet traveled to the area to research the book, which is replete with vivid little descriptions of American lushes in "dry" Saudi Arabia, of rebels in Afghanistan, of rich Europeans in Abu Dhabi. But this is the stuff that's easy to write. More impressive is the author's ability to portray everday American life in an entertaining manner. There is a Harvard secretary who moonlights as an amateur detective until she meets a real one. There is the aggressive Congressional aide who draws a little dagger next to the name of the CIA official his boss is about to roast. There is the CIA bureaucrat who lusts for his bosses possessions.

And, of course, the Columbia University professor has to take a few digs at Harvard. Cambridge City cop Pete Grandeville notes early on that "there was at least one French Canadian from North Cambridge who had a touch of class and a Harvard-caliber brain." "Since Pete had not been expecting to leave the tense intellectual environment of Harvard all day, he was delighted to encounter someone who was both relaxed and willing to tell him interesting things," the author remarks later. Columbia University is significantly absent from the novel.

But Harvard stereotypes will go over big on the network TV, where The Gulf Scenario seems-destined to land. What will translate even more easily is the remarkable variety of deaths that Bulliet's characters encounter. A sampling:

"Suddenly the man's hand came up and a small red hole made by a twenty two caliber bullet appeared on--'s forehead."

"The last sound she ever heard was a slight whoosh of air as a lead pipe descended on the back of her skull."

"--felt a painful slap on the back as a rifle bullet severed his spine. Then he felt nothing at all."

First-class, prime-time gore. And where does a Professor of the Middle East History get familiar with this type of thing? One assumes that Bulliet has a vivid imagination--that, or he must watch a lot of TV.