Who is Tom Tinker?

My debut novel, Columbia, is available for pre-order now on Publishizer. 

The pre-order campaign lasts thirty days, and during that time, I am going to use my blog to post responses to frequently asked questions about the book, its inspiration and its development.

Please click SUBSCRIBE on the campaign page to get updates sent automatically about each new post.

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Day One - #WhoisTomTinker

Columbia is a spy thriller based on my own experience working in intelligence and counter-terrorism between 2001 and 2006. But, you may not realize that Columbia's earliest historical inspiration reaches much farther into history.

In Columbia, Sami is an off-the-books intelligence operative who is pulled into an investigation that implicates his estranged grandfather, a well-known DC-area imam. Sami quickly realized that while his grandfather may be involved, the operation has all the hallmarks of a false flag being run by a mysterious person who is connected to the White House, and calls himself Tom Tinker. 

"Off-the-books?" "False flag?" If you are interested in those terms, and other tradecraft and real-life experiences from the intelligence community ("IC") that made it into Columbia, come back here for future posts.

But Who is Tom Tinker?

To find out more about the Tom Tinker who is Sami's adversary, you'll have to pre-order Columbia, but the inspiration for the character comes from a real American insurgent (or group of them) who sought to topple the United States before we ever had a White House, and whose primary enemy was an American founding father whose reputation has had a make-over - courtesy of Broadway's most popular musical - that would make Queer Eye's Fab Five jealous.

The Whiskey Rebellion was a 1790s tax protest centered in Washington County, Pennsylvania in the uncertain days immediately following the ratification of the Constitution and the formation of the fledgling United States of America. 

Whiskey was currency in the far-flung areas of Appalachia, especially after farmers who served as Continental soldiers had been convinced that the rebel paper in which they were paid during the war would never be honored by the newly-formed government. Most of the veterans sold their Continental paper to speculators for pennies on the dollar.  

Many of those speculators had funded the war effort and were putting immense pressure on the government to repay the debt. Realizing that the pleadings of well-heeled speculators were not the most sympathetic case for a fledgling nation with empty coffers, they got their hands on as much Continental paper as they could from war veterans and proposed a solution: the first tax in US history.

The tax would repay the war debt, especially that owed to the soldiers (whose paper they now held) and would be levied against manufacture and sale of the only commodity in reliable trade throughout the former colonies: whiskey. It was a double-whammy for veterans.

Fortunately for the speculators, they had a friend in a very high place: Alexander Hamilton, hip hop hero of Broadway and the first Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton shepherded the tax through the new Congress.

The farmers in Washington County, Pennsylvania were displeased. They protested Hamiton's tax collectors, ran them out of the county on a rail, tarred-and-feathered others, and hung still others in effigy. They detailed their objection to the tax in broadsheet papers that circulated throughout the young country, always signing their articles "Tom the Tinker."

Eager to be spending any free time from his duties as President rebuilding Mount Vernon after years away at battle, George Washington instead saddled his old war horse Blueskin and rode into Washington County to suppress the rebellion. 

In Columbia, Sami finds a new insurrection rising from Washington County's mountains. Led by a man calling himself Tom Tinker, recently enriched by an influx of speculative cash from the Marcellus Shale fracking boom in Western PA, Tinker knows what he wants to do with the cash: make America hate Muslims. 

But who is he? And how is he connected to Sami's grandfather?

JAW 

Davidson, NC, US