MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
A major challenge for writers of espionage fiction is what happens if your plot gets overtaken by events? Like, what happens if you write a novel where the villain is Russian and the action's all in Moscow, and in the meantime, war breaks out with China and that's where everyone's attention is focused? Well, our next guest has the opposite problem. David McCloskey keeps writing spy thrillers, and the plots keep coming true. David, welcome back.
DAVID MCCLOSKEY: So glad to be back. Thanks for having me.
KELLY: I will open by reminding people that in real life, war between Israel and Iran broke out this past summer, in June. Israel launched a surprise attack, assassinated Iranian military leaders and scientists. Your new novel "The Persian" opens with Israel having just launched a surprise attack and they've just assassinated an Iranian military leader and a scientist. When did you come up with this story?
MCCLOSKEY: Well, I came up with this story well before the most recent sort of round between Israel and Iran. And unlike my last novel, where I wrote a Russia-focused story basically in the middle of Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine, this time, I did not have time to go back and change the story.
KELLY: Ah.
MCCLOSKEY: The book has already - was already written and being printed during the conflict this summer. But the book really tries to kind of scrape beneath the kind of overt conflict and get into the heart of the shadow war between Israel and Iran.
KELLY: Well, I was going to ask you about this because when I last interviewed you, we were talking about one of your previous books, "Moscow X," set in Russia. And you were telling me how, as you were writing, yeah, Russia had launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and you had to redo all kinds of things. This time, you just had to white-knuckle through it and figure...
MCCLOSKEY: (Laughter).
KELLY: ...It's going to be what it's going to be, and this is fiction?
MCCLOSKEY: Well, that's right. And I was at least somewhat encouraged this time that - you know, I think the guts of the shadow war, not necessarily the kind of overt military conflict, are really at the heart of this story. And I really did try to take actual chapters from this conflict between Tel Aviv and Tehran and embed them, you know, in kind of a fictionalized way into the book. So for example, a few years ago, the Israelis assassinated the head of Iran's nuclear program using a remote-operated robotic machine gun. And that, in effect, is the sequence that opens this novel, "The Persian," although, of course, you know, the characters and some of the places have been changed. So this is a case much like Russia, where the actual news, the actual conflict, provides so much fodder for spy novelists kind of seeking to dig around in this terrain.
KELLY: All these details that you couldn't make it up if you tried. You're a former CIA analyst, for people who don't know that. You were posted at stations across the Middle East. How much of that inside knowledge shows up in this fiction?
MCCLOSKEY: A lot of it, I would say. I mean, I dug up characters who are, you know, real intelligence officers, or at least I'm trying to depict them as authentically as possible.
KELLY: Well, and CIA censors, I'll call them - the Publication Review Board - they're required to review everything you publish, as a former CIA staffer, right?
MCCLOSKEY: That's right. Yeah.
KELLY: I mean, I was surprised at some of the details that are in here, and I thought, I don't know if he's making this stuff up.
MCCLOSKEY: Yeah. And, you know, I send every draft through what we call our Publication Review Board, and, you know, I'm oftentimes, frankly, a little bit surprised at what can get through. But in this case, you know, I think there's so much that's actually - in particular on that type of - you know, on this kind of drones, or, frankly, these types of intelligence operations that Mossad conducts in this realm of the shadow war. There's - there actually is a lot out there that you can - you know, as a novelist, you can kind of get the bones of the story. And this is where, much like Russia, the reality is almost stranger than fiction. So once you have the bones of that story, it's almost like you don't always (ph) need to make anything up.
KELLY: Right.
MCCLOSKEY: It's like the Israelis and the Iranians have already written the bones of an insane spy novel. And frankly, at times, I was tempted to tone it down so my editor wouldn't think I was making anything up that's too crazy.
KELLY: Were there any calls that went the other way? A detail you thought was completely innocuous that the CIA Review Board was like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, delete, delete, delete?
MCCLOSKEY: Yeah. So they deleted a reference to an instant messaging program used at the CIA.
KELLY: Hang on. Are you allowed to tell us this if they told you you couldn't publish it?
(LAUGHTER)
MCCLOSKEY: I - I'm not going to give you the name of the program that...
KELLY: (Laughter) OK. All right.
MCCLOSKEY: It wasn't that the CIA uses an instant messaging capability. It was the specific name of the vendor - right? - that provides that. And they deleted that, presumably because the contract is classified or some such.
KELLY: Right.
MCCLOSKEY: But then they left in, of course, relatively granular detail on how to construct an improvised explosive device.
KELLY: Yeah.
MCCLOSKEY: So it's oftentimes hard for this novelist to know exactly what will be redacted.
KELLY: You - I believe it was Chapter 18, and you open it with something fascinating to me. You note that for most of its modern history, Israel has not had diplomatic relations with its near neighbors, which means Mossad, their spy agency, has not been able to operate out of Israeli embassies in the way that the CIA or, say, Britain's MI6 do. And you write - and I'm quoting - "instead, operational teams are cobbled together, surged to where they are needed, then disbanded when the work is done. The plane is built as it flies." Is that true? And if so, how does it impact Mossad tradecraft?
MCCLOSKEY: Yeah, it is true. And it was one of the very interesting pieces or sort of tidbits to come out of the conversations I had with Mossad officers while I was researching this book. Which is because the Israelis have not typically had - or, you know, for much of their history, as that passage says, did not really have an embassy to use, it meant that the types of cover that had to be used to put officers into the location where they might conduct the operation has always been a bit more exotic, in general, than the types of cover that the CIA would use, where, you know, for much of our history you'd have someone who works in an embassy who's under diplomatic cover. The Israelis aren't able to do that. So you have different types of cover.
And you get the sense from interacting with a lot of these Mossad officers that when a problem is identified, a team is sort of put together to then deal with that problem. And that's a very different kind of mentality, I think, to intelligence work than what I experienced at the CIA. So mirror imaging the CIA onto Mossad just didn't work.
KELLY: So what is the thread of your next novel? Have you figured it out? And I guess I ask with some trepidation, given that we noted your fictional plots keep coming true.
(LAUGHTER)
MCCLOSKEY: Well, I - the trepidation might be well-founded in this case, Mary Louise, because it is a story set between Washington and London, and it is, again, set in the very real context of transatlantic relations today. And I started the book with the goal of putting as much stress on the special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. as I could, and whether the sort of relationship could sour to the point where we're all spying on each other again.
KELLY: You have whet my appetite for the next one and given us plenty to chew on in this one. David McCloskey, thank you.
MCCLOSKEY: Mary Louise, thanks so much for having me.
KELLY: That's former CIA analyst David McCloskey. His latest espionage thriller is "The Persian."
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