By Andrew F. Gulli
1. Tell us about your latest novel and what inspired it.
My latest is London Station, an exploration of what it would look like if the CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (known as MI6) fell out and began spying on each other once again. The so-called Special Relationship has been under some strain lately, and I was intrigued by the idea of putting it under maximum strain to see when, or if, it broke.
2. Without giving away any secrets, of course, what are some of the biggest misconceptions the public has about the CIA?
The biggest one is the idea of the superhero spy. Car chases, guns, tuxedos, above-average looks—these are Hollywood fantasies that bear no resemblance to the reality of espionage and the CIA. The way to understand the CIA is that it is a uniquely bipolar organization. The actual work is unique and has no analogue in the private sector, and the place is also a large public-sector organization with a gift shop and a lot of red tape and lawyers. Both are true, all at once.
3. I love your podcast, The Rest Is Classified—you can safely call me addicted. How did the podcast come about, and how do you and Gordon Corera choose the stories you cover?
Gordon and I met a few years ago through a mutual friend and bonded through our shared interest in all things espionage and spy stories. From there, our production company, Goalhanger, had reached out to both of us separately about the idea of a podcast on espionage, and we mentioned each other’s names as co-hosts. The rest is history.
We choose the stories based on our interests and what we think will resonate—it’s a mix of past and present, and we try to vary the geographic focus as much as possible. Mostly, though, we’re just after a great story.
4. We hear so many conflicting accounts of major historical events, particularly those involving espionage. How can an ordinary person begin to separate fact from fiction?
It’s very challenging. I think the best way is to find people you trust—or know are authentic—and pay attention to what they are saying. But the information environment we are in today makes this harder than it has ever been.
5. Had becoming a novelist always been in the cards for you, or did the ambition emerge after you left the CIA?
It really only emerged after I left the CIA. I started writing in the months after I left and realized that when I was deep in a story, time melted away and I drifted into flow. I never expected to become a writer, or to have a book published. Everything has followed from the fact that I find the writing itself to be addictive. That makes it all happen.
6. You chose a profession built around secrecy, pressure, and sometimes real danger. Now that you’re writing novels, have you ever heard a voice in your head saying, “I should have been doing this all along”?
Honestly…not really. I think the experience at CIA was crucial to writing the books. I wouldn’t be able to do this without that in the bank.
7. How wide is the gulf between spy fiction and what actually happens in the intelligence world? Are the real operations generally more mundane—or even stranger—than anything a novelist might invent?
It’s a chasm. The actual job is a lot more boring and humdrum than the life that’s depicted in spy fiction and spy entertainment more broadly. If I actually wrote out the reality of an operation end to end, it would involve a lot more sitting, waiting, and emailing than anyone would want to read about.
8. Which spy novelists have you most enjoyed reading or learned from? I’ll put two of my own favorites on the table: Eric Ambler and Robert Littell.
Those are two excellent picks. Others I would add: Charles McCarry (who I think can lay claim to being America’s answer to le Carré). Le Carré, of course. Jason Matthews, author of the fantastic Red Sparrow trilogy. Len Deighton is another—the espionage, office politics, and class commentary are fantastic. As are the food scenes. He was a skilled cook himself, and it shows.
9. When you’re devising a plot, do you ever draw upon something from your CIA experience and then have to stop yourself and think, “No—I can’t use that”? Where do you draw the line between authenticity and protecting classified information?
Never. I find the setting first, then the characters. And then the plot comes out of the characters. Plot is character in motion. And when I find those plots, I’m typically working from a unique situation I’ve never encountered in real life. I’m asking “what if” or “what you have to believe” questions that are connected to reality but not directly derivative of it.
10. What are you working on now?
I’m working on a direct sequel to my first novel, Damascus Station, set in the final months of the Assad regime in Syria, back in 2024. The novel deals with the unfinished business of the Syrian civil war and incorporates a few interesting counterfactuals about how that war may have ended if history had turned out differently. I’m having loads of fun with it.
11. Who would you nominate as the greatest spy in history—and you’re not allowed to say, “The greatest spy is the one nobody has ever heard of”?
Adolf Tolkachev, the so-called “Billion Dollar Spy.” An engineer, he spied for the CIA from inside the Soviet establishment, and his intelligence saved the Pentagon more than a billion dollars in research and development spending.
12. What possesses someone to become a double agent and live under that extraordinary pressure? And do you believe there are highly consequential double agents operating today whose names the public may never learn?
The most common reasons people spy are money, ideology, control, and ego. And yet it’s never really that simple. The people who spy do so for a complicated cocktail of reasons—they have cracks and seams in them that effective case officers find and exploit by essentially giving them what they want. It’s hard to understand. These people are not normal, and yet they wind up spying for reasons we can all relate to. They want money. They want respect. They want a better life for their children. They want revenge against a nasty boss or an organization that has passed them by.
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