He is, I think, what you would expect from a former CIA officer. A Minnesota-born boy who now lives in a suburb of Dallas with his wife and two children. Clean-shaven, side-parted, handsome, with an icy gaze that suggests efficiency and intelligence, but also with an easy, relaxed manner. You can imagine him chugging a few beers with the guys after work.
His name is David McCloskey, and he’s formerly of the CIA because he’s now a writer of thrillers. The two jobs, though hugely different, are very much connected. McCloskey’s first novel, Damascus Station—published in the UK earlier this year—was informed by his time as one of the US spy agency’s analysts on Syria, where he worked for six years up to 2014, compiling briefings as the country tilted into civil war.
“It’s sort of like clandestine journalism,” says McCloskey of his work back then. “You’re writing on a topic that your readership cares about, because they are the president or because they are the National Security Council’s senior director for the Middle East and North Africa.”
The fruits of McCloskey’s clandestine reporting are in Damascus Station; although, it should be noted, nothing seriously, operationally secret is included in the book—the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board made sure of that. The writing process began, years ago, in an abortive first draft, as “a way for me to process what I had seen and what others had been through”. The end result is a superior thriller, praised by the likes of former CIA chief David Petraeus (“The best spy novel that I have ever read”) and containing more insights than a dozen nonfiction books.
“I picked up a friend from the airport, and literally the first thing he asked me was: is there really a hotdog vending machine at the headquarters of the CIA?” laughs McCloskey, referring to one of the insights that has really stoked readers’ and reviewers’ imaginations. (The answer: yes, there is.)
But Damascus Station gets into the guts of the CIA in other ways. “I would want to read a novel that deals realistically with what the CIA actually is,” he continues, “which is an amazing place where crazy stuff happens all the time, but also a dry bureaucracy.” So that is what McCloskey’s novel delivers: a mix of explosions and humdrum realities.
Even more striking, perhaps, is Damascus Station’s perspective on Syria itself. Into its tale of a CIA officer falling for a Syrian asset, McCloskey weaves the experiences of those operating within Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime—and those crushed by it. “I tried my best to render a humane version of this place,” he says. “The Syrian people in the book are, in many cases, composites of people that I interacted with or people I knew through the reporting.”
If all this reminds you of another David—David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, who began writing thrillers while still an officer in the British intelligence agency MI5—then you’re not the first to make the connection. McCloskey has been rereading le Carré’s The Russia House as he finishes his second book, Moscow X, which is slated for publication in October and takes place in the same not-quite-our-own universe as Damascus Station.
Well, the same, but also crucially—and, for McCloskey, challengingly—different. “When it came to, say, the US embassy in Damascus,” he explains, “I knew what it smelled like, I knew what the food tasted like, I knew what the air conditioning sounded like. But for Russia, where this new book is set, it took a tremendous amount of figuring out.” He has, accordingly, done a lot of research, much like during his analyst days.
And now? McCloskey is already moving on. “I’ve started the third one. It’s much more domestically focused. It’s a mole hunt, sort of a modern homage to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” So, from one David to another, Cornwell to McCloskey, spooks turned scribes. The secret is out.
