David McCloskey on The Persian

I’d originally envisioned my new novel, The Persian, to be about a joint CIA-Mossad operation in Iran, but as I tinkered with that it became clear that the more daring and, importantly, kinetic the operation became, the less likely it was that CIA would be involved. For example, when Mossad ran a targeted killing program aimed at Iranian nuclear scientists, the CIA stayed out of the fray. Most often CIA did not even know these operations were underway.

So this just wasn’t a CIA story. In fact, I was beginning to feel the CIA might not have a role in it at all. This was a novel about the secret shadow war playing out between the intelligence services of Israel and Iran. Why complicate it by injecting an inauthentic American presence? So the CIA went by the wayside for this novel, and what emerged was a rich tapestry of Israelis and Iranians, all of whom are in desperate conflict, all of whom think they are doing what’s best for their families and their countries. 

My starting point is always to get the setting right, and then let the characters and plotlines grow from there. When I began writing The Persian, I tried to nail the current dynamics of the Israel-Iran relationship and how their intelligence services fight in secret. Where might the plot take me from there? I hope this approach gives the book a dose of authenticity and the ability to speak to something true in the present, wherever the headlines may go. 

My principal characters in The Persian – as in my other novels – are intelligence officers and agents, so to depict them authentically I need to deal authentically with their craft, which means getting the tradecraft right, whatever the geopolitical or technological environment. This involves a lot of research. It means drawing on my experience working for the CIA, certainly, including in Stations around the Middle East. It means extensive time spent interviewing former case officers and CIA Chiefs of Station. Discussions with former Mossad officers. A lot of time spent with Iranians. Sessions with former Delta Force operators about special operations and asymmetric warfare. Studying technical drawings and specs for next generation UAVs. Even sitting for a week-long course on what we call the ‘Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance’ environment – how tradecraft can be adapted to operate in a world of phones, cameras, sensors, biometrics, cheap data storage, and AI-powered analytic tools. It’s fun, it’s a lot of work, and it’s all in service of the characters. 

In some ways you might think a dentist, Kamran Esfahani, a Persian Jew living out a dreary existence in Stockholm is an unlikely main character for a spy novel. He’s not an intelligence officer, and he’s certainly not a character in the mould of the Hollywood Superhero Spy. But he’s exactly the sort of person who might get a look from an intelligence service such as the Mossad, because he can move in and out of Iran, fly under the radar (he’s a dentist, after all), and, at a deeper level, he’s got cracks in his heart and soul that make him a viable recruitment target. He’s a dentist, but he’s the perfect dentist to turn into a productive support asset. He’s exactly the sort of nondescript but fascinating player who’s rolling the dice in the spy game. Spies can have a loose relationship with the truth, and Kam’s confession is written in the first person for exactly this reason: he’s been keeping a secret. Throughout the novel we wonder if he is being truthful, or if he’s lying, or if he is plying the borderlands between.

I’m often asked how research for my novels and for The Rest is Classified podcast, which I do with Gordon Corera, inform one another? Because I am attempting to write authentic espionage novels, and because the podcast deals with true spy stories, the two streams are complementary. In particular, I’ve found that the podcast provides a great deal of grist for the novels, everything from ideas for characters, to tradecraft, to the spytech. Turns out the real world of espionage contains a host of wild stories a spy novelist might draw from. 

And I draw inspiration from other writers. I’m a longtime reader of the espionage genre, so the list is long. Le Carré of course. Charles McCarry (who I consider the American answer to le Carré). Graham Greene. David Ignatius, Jason Matthews, Daniel Silva, Tom Clancy, Martin Cruz Smith (though he’s perhaps more of a mystery / crime writer). Dozens of others. Outside the genre the list is even longer, but one of the writers is Quentin Tarantino. I like stories that accelerate madly toward the end, and that usually go out with a bang.

And finally, for those of you worried about Artemis Aphrodite Procter, CIA case officer, five foot ball of ruthless spy craft and inspired profanity, and feature of my first three novels, do not fear. She will return. Her adventures are far from over though, though she may need to dial down her drinking if she wants to stay healthy enough to keep having them…

The Persian by David McCloskey.(Swift Press)

What happens when a spy is forced to reckon with the consequences of his deception? Kamran Esfahani, a Persian Jewish dentist from Stockholm, dreams of starting afresh in California. To finance his new life, he agrees to spy for Mossad in Iran, working with a clandestine unit tasked with sowing chaos and sabotage inside the country. When he’s captured by Iranian security forces, Kamran is compelled to confess his experiences as a spy, in a testimonial dealing not only with the security of nations, but also with revenge, deceit, and the power of love and forgiveness in a world of lies. Mixing suspense with strikingly cinematic action, David McCloskey takes readers deep into the shadow war between Iran and Israel, delivering propulsive storytelling and riveting tradecraft.

David McCloskey's new novel The Persian is published as a £20 hardback on 29 January by Swift Press.

More information about David McCloskey and his books can be found on his website. He can also be found on Facebook, on X, Instagram and Tik Tok @mccloskeybooks, 

David is also co-hosts The Rest is Classified Podcast.

 

The Gray, dilemma-choked World in The Peacock and the Sparrow by I S Berry

When most people think of spies, they think of glamor, sex appeal, clear-cut good and bad guys. The reality is quite different. I served as a CIA case officer (fancy term for “spy”) for six years, including one year in wartime Baghdad, and found the profession to be murky, gruelling, at times debilitating. Many of the people—sources and case officers alike—were cut from a morally uneven cloth. Failures often outnumbered successes, and both were sometimes hard to define. We wrestled with questions—whether an informant was telling the truth, what kind of risks to take, whether ends justified means, what constituted “right”—and were frequently left without answers. These often-unpleasant truths form the basis of my debut novel, The Peacock and the Sparrow. One experience in particular informed my novel.

In autumn of 2004, I arrived as a first-tour case officer to Baghdad—at that time, the most dangerous place on earth. Over 800 American soldiers, and countless Iraqis, allies, and innocents of all nationalities, had been killed. Every hour, mortars and rockets pelted the Green Zone, military convoys were attacked, locals were terrorized. We had limited defences—body armour, weapons, the fleeting shelter of bunkers—which mostly just served to underscore the danger. My mission was to recruit sources who could identify and dismantle the network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQIZ). But we were making little progress, and morale was low.

Amid what felt like a hopeless war, I discovered that one of my sources was distantly connected to an alleged AQIZ terrorist, “Qasim.” A top military target, Qasim was suspected of participating in the 2003 “Canal Hotel” bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad. Lo and behold, against all odds, my informant helped track Qasim down. Finally, I felt I’d achieved a small victory.

But when we questioned Qasim, he denied the allegations. Of course, we expected this: detainees often kept mum, knowing we couldn’t typically hold them more than 72 hours without sufficient evidence. At the end of the interview, no confession on the table, the military nevertheless cuffed Qasim, ushered him into a helicopter, flew him to a detention facility. Surely, we all thought, he’d eventually confess, or the necessary evidence would materialize. In some form, the truth would take shape.

When my tour ended, I returned to D.C. I learned that a colleague at Langley had questioned Qasim at a different detention facility. Qasim still hadn’t confessed. For the first time, I started to doubt his guilt.

My doubt only grew over the years. I wondered whether, amid the mess and chaos of war and espionage, we’d gotten it wrong. The uncertainty plagued me.

In 2012, I returned to the Middle East—Bahrain. Manama, its capital, was a sight to behold, full of vivid, profound contrasts: palaces and luxury hotels alongside slums; heavily armed riot police battling street urchins. The Arab Spring had been simmering for nearly a year. It was a proxy war: Bahrain’s Shiite majority, which reputedly received support from Iran, was revolting against the Saudi-backed Sunni monarchy. The U.S., whose Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain, was caught in the middle of the conflict, torn between defending against Iran and supporting an often-repressive government. This murky landscape, where there was no clear “right” side or easy answer, brought to mind the conundrums I’d faced as a spy. It was a perfect prism for a tale about espionage. I began writing.

My novel, The Peacock and the Sparrow, is based on these gray, dilemma-choked worlds. When my protagonist, an aging spy named Shane Collins, is caught in the crosswinds of the Arab Spring, he becomes embroiled in murder, consuming love, and an unpredictable revolution. He’s forced to choose sides. Ultimately, he’s haunted by his decisions—“the tangle of mistakes, promises, and defeats that grips a man’s heels.” Spying is a “profession of ghosts,” Collins finds, “the culmination of actions taken or not taken, ends swallowed by means.”

Since The Peacock and the Sparrow was first published in the U.S. in 2023, dozens of current and former intelligence officers have reached out to me. The dilemmas, knots, and question marks woven into the book resonate, they tell me. Wraiths of decisions, betrayals, mistakes, the toll of manipulation—these are the things that remain after coming in from the cold. I set out to write the most realistic spy novel I could, to convey a visceral sense of the profession, and I’m gratified that people have connected with my story, that it captures these quiet consequences of espionage.

This year, The Peacock and the Sparrow also received the Edgar, Barry, and International Thriller Writers awards for Best First Novel, which has been an unspeakable honour. Writing is my second profession, and second acts are always a gamble. But, as I’ve come to realize, I find writing about spying far more rewarding than doing it.

The Peacock and The Sparrow by I S |Berry (Bedford Square Publishers (Out Now)

Shane Collins, a world-weary CIA spy, is ready to come in from the cold. Stationed in Bahrain for his final tour, he's anxious to dispense with his mission — uncovering Iranian support for the insurgency. But then he meets Almaisa, an enigmatic artist, and his eyes are opened to a side of Bahrain most expats never experience, to questions he never thought to ask. When his trusted informant becomes embroiled in a murder, Collins finds himself drawn deep into the conflict, his romance and loyalties upended. In an instant, he's caught in the crosswinds of a revolution. He sets out to learn the truth behind the Arab Spring, win Almaisa's love, and uncover the murky border where Bahrain's secrets end and America's begin.

 I.S. Berry’s The Peacock and the Sparrow will be published in the UK for the first time on 24 October 2024 as £9.99 paperback original from No Exit Press, part of Bedford Square Publishers.

More information about I S berry can be found on her website.  You can also find her on Facebook. You can also follow her on X  and on Instagram @isberryauthor

 

 

Dan Fesperman on the Return of Claire Saylor

 

Claire Saylor, the American protagonist of my new spy novel, The Cover Wife, is the sort of character who is always pushing boundaries and breaking rules to find out things she's not supposed to know. She can sneak up on you that way. Give her a small role to play and she'll turn it into a bigger one, even if you're the writer who created her.

My initial authorly assumption about Claire was that she would be a minor character in my previous novel, Safe Houses. I figured she'd be useful for a few key scenes in her home city of Paris, where she was a CIA operative in 1979. Then I'd say goodbye, dispatching her to that vague netherworld where underused characters go to wait -- usually in vain -- for their next casting call. For many authors, that's a crowded place that we don't often care to visit, lest we do something embarrassing like forget someone's name, or the time when we first encountered them.

"What do you mean you don't remember me? I saved your ass on that climactic scene in your first novel!"

"Yes, well, can I get you a drink, maybe? Oh, and have you met this lovely person over here, uh, his name's right on the tip of my tongue..."

Claire refused to go to that room. Much in the same way she takes advantage of her dismissive station chiefs, exploiting their lack of attention, she began insinuating herself into one additional scene after another. I warmed to her company. She was enjoyable to write, smart and witty, and the next thing I knew she had become a full-blown sidekick. She even forced her way into the final scenes of the book's other plot line, a sequence of events occurring thirty-five years later.

Her performance was so compelling that I decided she'd earned a starring role in The Cover Wife, so here she is, working a case (or maybe, as she soon learns, two of them at once, with layers of meaning that must be unpeeled one at a time) in Hamburg in 1999, at a time when a few impassioned young Islamic radicals were just beginning to think big and bold about the mark they might be able to make in the West, as long as no one found out what they were up to.

You'll also find her in my next book, Winter Work, in which shell be working for the CIA in Berlin in 1990, four months after the Wall came down. But that, as they say, is another story. (I've only completed the first draft, with plenty of work remaining, so please be patient with me).

Yet, I certainly don't see Claire as a "series" character. In fact, it feels like a bit of a stretch to even characterize these books as a Claire Saylor Trilogy. That's partly because, for all her success in claiming a bigger role in Safe Houses, she still wasn't the main character. Those roles belonged to a young CIA operative named Helen Abell (who, by the way, has an important cameo in The Cover Wife), and to a couple of other folks. And in the book yet to come, Winter Work, she will share center stage with a scene-stealing old hand from the Stasi's foreign intelligence branch, a fellow named Emil Grimm.Also, it isn't as if these books are chronological. If you were to plot out Claire Saylor's life as portrayed in these three successive novels, you'd realize that they cover four parts of her career, and do quite a bit of jumping around in the process. Safe Houses, set in 1979 and 2014, gives you Parts 1 and 4, The Cover Wife (1999), gives you Part 3. Winter Work (1990), will give you Part 2.

Haphazard? Not really. It's simply the way her life's story evolved in the telling of these tales. I think of the non-chronological nature of these books as being more in the way that longtime friends, seated at a bar, will swap memorable old tales from their past as they drink, hopping inevitably from one year to the other, in no fixed order.

In Claire's case, at least she still has a place at the table, instead of moldering in that back room with all those characters whose names I've forgotten. Because, obviously, I'm intrigued by her. My hope now is that you'll enjoy her company as much as I have.

‘The Cover Wife’ by Dan Fesperman is published by Head of Zeus on 6th July

Paris, October 1999. CIA agent Claire Saylor's career has stalled, thanks to unorthodox behaviour in her past. So when she's told she'll be going undercover in Hamburg to pose as the wife of an academic who has published a controversial interpretation of the Quran's promise to martyrs, she assumes the job is a punishment. But when she discovers her team leader is Paul Bridger, another Agency maverick, she realises there may be more to this mission than meets the eye - and not just for professional reasons.  Meanwhile, Mahmoud, a recent Moroccan émigré in Hamburg, has become involved with a group of radicals at his local mosque. The deeper he's drawn into the group, the more he is torn between his obligations to them and his feelings toward a beautiful westernized Muslim woman. As Claire learns the truth about her mission, and Mahmoud grows closer to the radicals, their paths are on a collision course that could have disastrous repercussions far beyond the CIA.

More information about Dan Fesperman and his books can be found on his website. You can also follow him on Twitter @DanFesperman

Who is Vera Kelly - The Short Version? by Rosalie Knecht

 

My interest in Cold War intelligence came from a real-life beginning. My maternal grandfather was hired by the Office of Strategic Services after World War II and stayed there as it became the Central Intelligence Agency, in a non-covert post, analyzing Soviet radio broadcasts. He and my grandmother settled down in the inner-ring suburbs of Washington, DC in the early 1950s to raise their family. Then history intruded in the form of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthy made his bones on the claim that a secret Communist conspiracy had infiltrated the U.S. government. As McCarthy’s accusations of Communist spies in the civil service grew broader and wilder, my grandfather’s bosses at the CIA began a review of all personnel files. In 1955, internal investigators turned up a number of things in my grandfather’s background that they found troubling. 

Decades later, the memoranda they wrote detailing their findings, and the letters my grandfather wrote responding to them, are still in my family’s papers. The memos listed seventeen charges. He was accused of being friends, twenty years before and a thousand miles away in South Dakota, with a list of named Communists; visiting local party headquarters; handing out Communist pamphlets; and on one occasion, giving a known Communist a lift from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis. He was further accused of hanging around with two named women, also Communists, in Greenwich Village in 1943, and attending a Communist meeting there. More charges: he had founded a leftist newspaper in Sioux Falls, had started a local chapter of the Workers’ Alliance, and finally—this last one jarring with the more mundane activities around it—had joined the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War and been interned in France. 

He responded meticulously to these accusations. In 1935, when he was twenty years old, he had been a socialist, not a communist, he said. He had known some of the people mentioned but could not recall others. He had never handed out any pamphlets. He admitted to the drive from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis. He had no recollection of visiting any party headquarters, unless—he began to speculate here, and his fatigue and anxiety is palpable on the page, all these years later—unless perhaps the Sioux Falls Communist Party was headquartered in the Communist bookstore operated by his friend, the one he drove to Minneapolis, which he had visited several times and where it was possible he might have bought some Communist literature, but probably not, because he was “poverty-stricken at the time.” He knew the two women in Greenwich Village, he said, but his relations with them were “entirely personal,” and they had never tried to convert him to their cause.

The rest—the Workers’ Alliance, the leftist newspaper, the Spanish Civil War? He confessed that he had made those things up in 1943 in an application for a journalism fellowship. He had been told that a leftist resume would help him get it. He deeply regretted the mistake. He had apparently been polygraphed already during the investigation; he referred to this in his statement, and repeatedly offered to be polygraphed again to confirm this or that part of his sworn testimony.

As he sat writing this defense in 1955, he was forty years old and had three young children to support. The charges that were true, he wrote, came down to one charge: that he was friends with Communists a long time ago, and had been a socialist himself. He was fired.

In 1961, my grandfather fell from the roof of the family home while making repairs. He died of his injuries. Sixty years is a lot of silence. It was partly to sound out this lacuna that I began to write about the professional middle classes ringing Washington, DC at midcentury, the intelligence services where they worked, and the way people lived and continued to live with lies—big lies and small lies, public lies and personal lies. What stands out more in his story—the socialist politics of a young man coming out of rural poverty in the midst of the Depression, clearly interested in the radical organizing happening all around him in Sioux Falls, South Dakota? Or is it the extravagant lies for personal gain—the fictitious service in a bloody war from which most volunteers did not come back? Was it about fantasy, glamor, social cache? Was it about justice for the injuries of poverty? Was it both? Who was he? What does any of it tell me about this person I never met, whom even my mother barely remembers? I have only this very small window into his life, this brief instant when he sat sweating over a typewriter with his career on the line, admitting to humiliating deceptions, wracking his brain for the names of passing acquaintances, summoning up a dingy Greenwich Village function hall filled with earnest young people hoping for a better future in the middle of a world war. I can feel him trying to make contact with that younger self, trying to remember what he wanted, who he told people he was, what he believed and when he stopped believing it. He confesses it all. It’s not enough.

Who is Vera Kelly by Rosalie Knecht (Verve Books) Published 21 January 2021

"New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she's forced to take extreme measures to save herself.

The CIA and MK-ULTRA by Alan Glynn

In popular culture, the CIA has traditionally been portrayed as a sinister outfit. But in today’s looking-glass political climate, where the ‘deep state’ may be expected to rein in the excesses of a rogue executive, the agency has taken on a mantle – almost - of sainthood. So it is timely to recall one of the CIA’s earliest, and most nefarious, of projects - MK-ULTRA

This was a program set up by the CIA’s first civilian director, Allen Dulles. It was in response to what he believed were Russian attempts to militarise the study of human psychology. According to Dulles, the Soviets were using mind-control techniques as a weapon in their prosecution of the Cold War. In a speech he made in 1953, he declared this to be a very sophisticated form of “brain warfare”. But as it would later transpire, what the Soviets were doing, in terms of interrogation techniques, was about as traditional and unsophisticated as you could get – beatings, torture, sleep deprivation. There was no “brain washing”, there was no “sick science”, no mass production of “Manchurian candidates”. That was all a paranoid fantasy. But just to be sure, Dulles set up his own program, which would involve dozens of university, hospital and pharmaceutical company research departments, not to mention hundreds, if not thousands, of test subjects, many of them unwilling or unwitting participants. Over a period of twenty years, the whole thing ballooned into a vast, drug-fuelled apparatus of mind-control and behaviour modification, a state-sponsored program that crossed all ethical boundaries.

It wasn’t until 1975, when the post-Watergate Church Committee hearings exposed the inner workings of the CIA, that people heard of Project MK-ULTRA for the first time. The initial reaction was incredulity, then abhorrence, but over time public awareness of the program faded and it more or less became a sort of science-fiction or even comic-book trope – something synonymous, in most people’s minds, with crackpot conspiracy theories.

It was real, however, and for some people it was more than that – it was a devastating, irreversible eruption into their lives of unimaginable chaos and disorder.

Under The Night by Alan Glynn published by Faber & Faber (4 October 2018)

In 1950s Manhattan, the CIA carry out a covert study of psychoactive drugs. When they dose ad man Ned Sweeney with MDT-48, he finds his horizons dramatically expand as he is hurtled through the corridors of the rich and powerful, all the way to the government's nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll. But what of Ned's colleague who was also dosed that night - last seen running half-naked and screaming into the Broadway traffic - and for how long can Ned maintain the extraordinary pace and trajectory of his new life? Over sixty years later, the only fact Ray Sweeney knows about his grandfather's life is that it ended when he jumped out of a hotel window in Manhattan, an event which scarred his family thereafter. But then Ray meets a retired government official, ninety-two-year-old Clay Proctor, who claims he can illuminate not only Ned's life and death, but also the truth behind the mysterious drug. Under The Night is both a sequel and prequel to Alan Glynn's classic debut, The Dark Fields.  Under the Night is an irresistible thriller about the seductive power and dangers of unlocking the potential of the human mind.

More information about Alan Glynn can be found on his website.  You can find him on Twitter @alanglynnbooks