How Much of Morton's Fork Is True?

Disclosure: this blog post contains major spoilers about my book, Morton's Fork

I’m often asked, “How much of Morton's Fork actually happened?”

Short answer: The history is real. The conspiracy is fiction. And the financial trickery? Fictional, but uncomfortably plausible.

When I wrote Morton's Fork, I wanted to explore something that has always fascinated me: the enormous influence money exerts over geopolitics, often in ways that never make the headlines.

We hear about wars, sanctions, intelligence operations and the downfall of governments. We hear considerably less about the financial plumbing that makes much of it possible.

Which is a pity, because some of that plumbing is positively diabolical.

The history I didn't have to invent

Morton's Fork unfolds against the geopolitical upheavals of late 2024, particularly the events surrounding Syria, Hezbollah and the extraordinary collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Several important events in the novel happened on precisely the dates depicted.

On 16 October 2024, the US Treasury really did announce sanctions targeting a Hezbollah financing network and individuals involved in Syria's illicit Captagon trade.

On 24 November, Hezbollah really did launch approximately 250 rockets and other projectiles into Israel, in one of its heaviest barrages in months.

Then came the astonishing events in Syria.

On 27 November, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied rebel forces launched a surprise offensive against Assad's regime.

By 30 November, Aleppo had fallen. The rebels advanced south along the M5 highway towards Hama, where Assad's forces mounted a more serious defence.

Hama was strategically critical in real life too. It stood between the rebel advance and Homs, the major city farther south whose loss would threaten the regime's remaining territorial coherence and its connections to the Mediterranean coast.

On 5 December, Hama fell. On 7 December, Homs fell. On 8 December, Damascus fell and Assad fled to Russia. After surviving thirteen years of civil war, Assad had lost his regime in eleven days.

Here's the remarkable part. As late as 3 December, the Economist Intelligence Unit considered the wholesale collapse of Assad's regime unlikely in the near term. Five days later, it was gone.

Imagine submitting that plot to a publisher. They'd probably ask you to make it more believable.

The military context is real

The descriptions of the Assad regime’s torture prisons and its use of sarin gas against Syrian civilians are based on documented historical accounts.

There's an important military element in the novel involving the fearsome Russian-designed BM-30 Smerch, a multiple rocket launcher capable of firing twelve 300mm rockets in a salvo.

I didn't invent that weapon. Nor did I invent its association with Hama.

Syrian government forces had actually deployed Smerch systems around Hama years earlier. And HTS did use reconnaissance drones with similar specs as the one Farid uses in the book.

The geography is real, too. The M5 highway, the northern approaches to Hama, including Tishreen, and the strategically important defensive terrain feature in accounts of the actual 2024 campaign.

Other locations in the novel are real too, including Gaziantep in Turkey and Hermel in northern Lebanon, the latter being a genuine Hezbollah stronghold, close to the Syrian border and the long-established routes linking Hezbollah's Lebanese base with Syria.

What happens at these locations in the novel is fictional. But the weapons, geography and military significance aren't inventions.

The financial world is stranger than fiction

The novel begins with something rather less dramatic: a strategy consultant in Istanbul investigating why certain shipping customers seem remarkably happy to overpay.

Anyone familiar with business knows how suspicious that is. Customers generally regard paying less as one of life's more worthwhile pursuits.

What Oliver Cade eventually stumbles upon is a fictional financial architecture that allows enormous amounts of value to move around the world without conventional bank transfers.

I call it an invisible bank for the underworld.

I invented the particular system and the criminal mastermind behind it, Leon Vassilou. But the underlying principles are very real.

Trade-based money laundering, sanctions evasion, shell companies and the use of physical commodities to transfer value are all well-documented phenomena. International authorities have spent decades trying to understand and disrupt them. And falsifying shipping records to conceal illicit ship-to-ship (STS) oil transfers is no fiction either. There have been documented cases involving sanctions evasion, including one prosecuted in Singapore.

So where does fiction take over?

Primarily in the connections between the historical events.

Oliver Cade is fictional. So is Leon Vassilou and his particular financial network. The investigations, confrontations and operations that draw Oliver into the affairs of governments and intelligence agencies are inventions.

The real collapse of Assad's regime resulted from multiple forces: the successful rebel offensive, years of institutional decay, weakening military capability, and diminished support from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. There is no historical evidence that a specific financial intervention like the one depicted in Morton's Fork occurred or contributed to Assad's downfall.

But the wider question is legitimate.

What happens to military power when the money, fuel and ammunition it depends upon fail to arrive?

That is the territory in which my fiction operates: not rewriting the historical outcome, but exploring a plausible, hidden chain of events that might have influenced it.

Ultimately, Morton's Fork is a geopolitical financial thriller, not a history textbook. Its job is to entertain, surprise and occasionally make readers wonder about the world they inhabit.

And perhaps that's the most intriguing part.

We know what happened in Syria in December 2024. We have a reasonably good understanding of the major forces behind it.

But how much of what happens in world affairs is determined by decisions, transactions and relationships that never become public?

That's a question worth asking.

And, I think, worth writing a thriller about.

Ceejay Penn