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This message comes from Carvana. Why spend time wondering what your car is worth? Instantly track its value on Carvana Value Tracker, answer a few quick questions, and stay up to speed on your car's value. Track your car's value@carvana.com it's almost like you don't need to make anything up. 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.
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David McCloskey is a CIA analyst turned spy novelist. His books are fiction, but they contain real tradecraft from his very real experience working with the CIA. And he has a knack for creating storylines that wind up coming true in the real world. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. This is Sources and Methods from npr. Just to set up our show for a minute in case you are new here, welcome. Every Thursday I sit down with reporters on the national security beat for NPR and break down the biggest NATSAC news of the week. We will do that as usual in a couple of days, but right now we have a different kind of episode, a kind of bonus where I talk one on one with a NATSAC expert who has knowledge to share from the inside. Today. That's David McCloskey, ex CIA. These days he writes spy novels about which I have interviewed him for NPR before. His new novel is the Persian, and it takes readers deep into the shadow war between Iran and Israel. David, welcome to Sources and Methods.
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Mary Louise, thanks for having me.
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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?
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A lot of it, I would say. I mean, the way I develop a story is I start with a setting and I try for that setting to be as authentic as possible. So in this case, I was going back to a region of the world that I had worked on extensively when I was at the CIA and know a lot about. And I dug up characters who are, you know, real intelligence officers. Or at least I'm I'm trying to depict them as authentically as possible. And because they're real intelligence officers, be they in this novel, Israeli or Iranian, you know, I'm trying to layer on top of this authentic tradecraft, authentic lingo and vocabulary.
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Can you give me an example, something that a civilian wouldn't know that you do and you were able to put in these pages?
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Yeah. There's a great Example of this in the very specific way that the protagonist of this novel, Kamran Isfahani, who's an Iranian who's been recruited by Mossad, Israeli Foreign Intelligence Service, to work in Iran, he and his team are conducting extensive surveillance of a potential target location in Iran that might get hit by an Israeli team. And the way that that surveillance is conducted, the specific technologies, the kind of things that they are collecting, is based off of essentially exactly how it would happen in reality. And that's sort of coming from my experience and coming from conversations that I was fortun enough to have with CIA officers and with officers of the Mossad.
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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.
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That's right.
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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, but the granular details about some of those drones being piloted remotely by Mossad from Tel Aviv, I knew that was happening. But the detail to which Mossad could see what was happening on the ground, I thought, huh, I'm kind of surprised to see that.
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Yeah, you know, it's something that I kind of. I send every draft through the. 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 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 the reality is almost stranger than fiction. So once you have the bones of that story, it's almost like, you know, you don't need to make anything up. 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.
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Were there any calls that went the other way? A detail you thought was completely innocuous? That the CIA Review Board was like, delete, delete, delete.
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Yeah. So they deleted a reference to an instant messaging program used at the CIA.
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Hang on. Are you allowed to tell us this? If they told you, you couldn't publish it.
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I'm not going to give you the I'm not going to give you the name of the program. It wasn't that the CIA uses an instant messaging capability. It was the specific name of the vendor. Right. That that provides that. And they deleted that, presumably because the contract is classified or some such. But then they left in, of course, you know, relatively granular detail on how to construct an improvised explosive device. So it's oftentimes hard for this novelist to know exactly what will what will be redacted.
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The news quiz from npr. What's made you happy as of late? On Pop Culture Happy Hour, we've been talking about the things that have made us happy in the pop culture universe for the past 15 years, whether it's a blockbuster or deliciously bad reality TV, the newest shows, dramas and reboots. We're here to keep your spirits high. Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast. So 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?
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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. 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.
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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 it's going to be what it's going to be. And this is fiction.
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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 in 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, in this terrain, all these.
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Details that you couldn't make it up if you tried. 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?
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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 for much of their history, as that passage says, did not really have an embassy to use. It meant that the types of COVID 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 COVID that the CIA would use. Where 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 COVID You have, frankly, different types of officers who are put in to conduct these kinds of operations. And you get the sense from interacting with a lot of these Mossad officers that instead of having sort of a persistent, like a country team that's covering Turkey or Syria or whatever, 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 it was one of several examples where mirror imaging the CIA onto Mossad just didn't work.
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Yeah. So what is the threat 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.
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Well, trepidation might be well founded in this case, Mary Louise, because the next one 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 US and the UK as I could to see if I could break it and get the CIA to the point where it might spy on the Brits and the Brits to the point where they might spy on us. And so I don't, don't yet have I have a working title for the book, but my track record with working titles is so atrocious, I won't, I won't share it here, but it is, it is all about us and the Brits and whether the sort of relationship could sour to the point where we're all spying on each other. Again.
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David McCloskey, his new book is the Persian. As always, we would love your thoughts, your feedback. You can email us at sources and methodspr.org or leave us a comment or review on the platform. Wherever you listen, we're back with our regular episode on Thursday, breaking down the biggest Nat sex stories this week. That episode usually drops by 6pm Eastern. We'll talk to you then. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Thanks for listening to Sources and Methods from npr.
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A lot of short daily news podcasts.
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Focus on just one story, but right now you probably need more on up first from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes because no one story can capture all that's happening in this big crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the Upverse podcast from NPR.
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On NPR's Wild Card podcast, actor Matthew.
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McConaughey says it's important not to over commit creatively.
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What can happen. And where ambition is led me astray is you end up with a bunch of fricking campfires and no bonfires.
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Listen or watch that Wild card conversation.
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On YouTube, the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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