David McCloskey: former CIA agent hopes Donald Trump's planned changes won't impact its core mission
February 8, 2025 • 17 mins
A former CIA agent is cautiously optimistic Donald Trump's plans for the agency won't affect its core mission.
The US President has extended buyout offers to the entire agency, which would see employees take some benefits like extended pa, in exchange for agreeing to resign.
Former agent and author David McCloskey, says he's hopeful the headlines are more smoke than fire.
He says agents he worked with under the first Trump administration would say there was almost no disruption in that time.
"The CIA just kind of runs and there's bluster and politicking at that sort of 30,000 foot level - but not really when you get down to what's happening inside the CIA."
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks EDB.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Now, I don't know about you, but I find the
world of secret service and spies and espionage utterly fascinating,
which is why I am so excited to talk to
my next guest, former CIA analyst turned author David McCloskey.
In his years at the CIA, David worked in field
stations across the Middle East. He had access to all
sorts of classified information. He gave testimony to Congress as
(00:32):
well as providing White House briefings. David left the CIA
in twenty fourteen and is now using his lived experience
to write the best spy thrillers books so good former
cias former CIA staff have said that they are the
most authentic accounts of CIA operations you'll find in print.
(00:53):
This week, David McCloskey released his third book that's called
The Seventh Floor. He is with me from Texas. Good morning, David,
Thank you so much for being with.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Us, Thank you so much for having me. Thrilled to
be here.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
You wild critics with the first two books. How much
of that success do you think is down to this
lived experience? That you're writing about.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Well, I think certainly some of it is. I mean,
I am trying in all of the books, you know,
first one Siria, second one's Russia. Third most current one
is the seventh Floor at CIA headquarters. So it's kind
of a Langley book in each of them. I am
trying to be, you know, sort of real and authentic
to the actual operations of CIA, but also the culture
(01:40):
and the way the place feels and what it's actually
like to work there. And so I think to some degree,
having lived that and knowing a lot of people you
know very closely who did as well, you know, it
makes it easier, I think, to really tell those stories
than if I were coming at this fully from the outside.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
It's interesting you mentioned culture because that's what I pick
up on. That's what I love about the books is
that you kind of bring that unique culture of the
CIA at light. You write in the book Langley managed
to be dull and smug, tribal and bureaucratic, and nerves
seem to and totally remove from where the espionage actually
happens the field. Tell me a little bit about those
(02:19):
different fragmentations within the CIA, because you do pick that
up in your books.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I think to some degree,
the CIA is like any other big organization where you
have a big bureaucracy, You have a lot of people
who are pretending to do work but actually aren't.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
You have people.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
Spending all day in you know, vicious and pointless meetings
and sending emails, and you have this tension between a
headquarters and the field, which if you're working in any
big organization you know that has a bunch of stores
everywhere or a bunch of railroad terminals or whatever, you're
going to have that tension. So I think to some
degree there's there's there are themes around the work of
(03:00):
CIA that will resonate with anybody, right. But at the
same time, the CIA is doing some really weird stuff.
I mean, we're out there trying to convince people to
commit treason and give us, you know, sort of or
sell us the darkest secrets that their country might have.
So that's a bizarre thing for an organization to do.
So both of those dynamics are present every day at CIA,
(03:22):
and I think I kind of I wanted those to that.
I don't know, that reality right to come through in
different ways in each of the novels.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
You're so right, it's part of it is just so
foreign to many of us. In the other parts you
can just relate to so easily. It's just it's a
general organization, very well put. Look, I get a sense
that people when they work for the CIA, they truly
believe in the work they do when they love it.
But I get the feeling from your book that the
CIA doesn't necessarily love you back.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Well.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
Again, I think it's this reality of working in really
big organizations, right, is that we can all convince ourselves
if we've served in one of these that are invaluable
and we're irreplaceable, you know.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
And the fact is is.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
That, you know, the CIA is just like that where
you could spend thirty years there and you get sent
out with a kind of you know less than you
know ticker tape parade, let's say, and all of a sudden.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
You're out, You're actually out.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
The building moves on, the people move on, the organization,
the operations move on, and you're sort of, you know, left,
I think dealing with frankly, you know, this question of
what did you give to a place that doesn't actually
give you that much back in the end. And so
I really wanted, especially in this book The Seventh Floor,
to kind of explore that tension or that dilemma of
(04:48):
you work at a place forever, it makes you, you know,
you help make it to some degree, but when you're out,
what do you take with you?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
What do you have left?
Speaker 4 (04:56):
You know, it's kind of a I think it's an
evergreen question for people who have been loyal to an
organization for a really long time.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
And is that how you felt when you left?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Well? You know, actually, you know, I'm ashamed of it,
not really, I mean because I wish I had I
wish I had some great answer.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
That kept out that door, and yeah, no, I'm done,
I'm good things.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
I kind of thought, you know, I left for very
mundane reasons. It was just I looked at the people
who were five plus years ahead of me and said,
I'm not exactly sure this is what I want to
be doing. I want to go out into the world
and see what there is. So I didn't leave with
a sense of I don't think i'd been in for
you know, I hadn't been in for three decades, and
so I didn't have this built up sense of the
(05:38):
whole place was my life, you know. But I do
know people who have stayed in for multiple decades, some
for thirty, you know, five years, and there is this
you know that hearing those stories, I think is what
allowed me to fill the seventh floor with that kind
of feel and vibe.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Tell me about you know, when you leave the CIA,
you are writing from quite a privileged position with sort
of information around national security and things. Do you have
to submit to your manuscript to the CIA to cheek?
Speaker 4 (06:10):
Like?
Speaker 2 (06:11):
How do you balance that? Like what you can write about,
what you can take from your lived experience and share
on the page.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Yeah, so I am required to send everything to what
we call our publication review board. So everything from you know,
updates to my resume, to op eds I might write
for the newspaper, to the novels, everything goes to them.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Now they are actually.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
You know, you think big government agency, maybe this thing's
terrible to deal with. In reality, they're actually pretty fast.
I like to think maybe they just love the book
so they get them back to me so quickly, you know.
At I've convinced myself of this, but they're pretty fast.
They are actually very thoughtful and I think fair in
what they choose to redact. They do send stuff back.
It's kind of humorous actually. So you send them the document,
(06:59):
you know, word document, and they'll send back PDFs, like
multiple PDFs in some cases, like twenty or thirty PDFs.
It's all caps. Everything's been capitalized. I don't know why,
what program they're putting this into that capitalizes everything, and
then they redacted with a black highlighter. And that's the
stuff that you can't put in, you know. And the
reality is I do a lot of frankly self censoring
(07:22):
upfront because I want to be responsible. There are elements
of the operations in the Tradecraft that I know we are
just off limits and frankly would probably be boring to
the reader, and so I choose to just not not
include that. So I've gotten kind of this down after now,
you know, just sent my fourth book to them, like
I've now got this down to kind of a process
(07:43):
and not a science, I would say, but it moves
pretty smoothly.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
A lot of the I'm sure that a lot of
what you write about obviously, as we've talked about, comes
from your lived experience and things and quite an extraordinary job.
And I know that you spent eight years covering Syria,
and you lived in Damascus and things like that. Has
Wright actually been a way for you to process maybe
and deal with some of the situations and issue you know,
(08:10):
issues and things that you've hit to deal with as
an analyst.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Yeah, yeah, very much so.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
I mean, you know, the Syria experience really was the
start of this for me. You know, Syria, I worked
on it from the time when it was kind of
you know, pre civil war to them when it was
really in the thick of it. And that experience of
just watching an entire country pull itself to pieces, you know,
hundreds of thousands of people killed, the whole place shattered,
(08:39):
you know, ninety or so percent of the country in
you know, sort of in poverty, tens of thousands of
people disappeared. I mean, it was a it was an
experience where you feel you're very connected to the place,
and yet all the things you're writing are kind of
these strategic analyzes that are you know, anodyne, really bureaucratically
(08:59):
and for good reason. And so for me, the writing
when I got out was really an attempt to try
to connect, i think, to some of the humanity of
what had happened there.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
And to.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
Write stories, you know, and again I didn't start thinking
this would turn into novels, but just to kind of
write stories that would help me process what I had
seen and experienced.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
And then it just went from there.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
It's interesting, did you did you always think that this
was what you were going to do, right, novels when
you left the CIA? When did that idea come up?
Is this something you've always been king to do?
Speaker 4 (09:32):
No, I mean, the idea actually came up sort of
embarrassingly late, I think. I mean, I left the CIA,
and I had time in between leaving and starting a
new job, and I didn't actually have to have a
job for those you know, three or four months, and
so I spent a lot of that time, pretty much
all that time writing But at no point did I
think that I would turn it into a book. It
(09:53):
was just for me really, And then, you know, I
realized as I was writing that I loved the process
of writing, the input of it, just sitting down and
actually you know, spending six or eight hours putting words
down on paper. And so, you know, sort of fast
forward like five years from that, and I had this
manuscript which I thought, you know, was like maybe halfway decent,
(10:14):
but actually was terrible.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
I mean it was, you know, really atrocious.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
Like no plots, you know, totally disjointed characters because it
was all just like a diary.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
You know.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
It's like, you know, Matthew McConaughey published his diary, but
I'm not McConaughey. So there was no market for you know,
David mccloskey's Syria diary. And but at that point, five
years on, I thought, look, I loved writing so much.
Let me see if I could turn this into something
that not only I want to write and read, but
that other people might. And so that idea came actually
(10:44):
very late, and it was years after I had left CIA.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Well that's interesting, because they're so excellent. I thought maybe
you'd been right. Well obviously you had been writing as
an analyst, but not quite like this. And I should
just mention if people want to hear a little bit
more about how you feel about what's going on in
Syria at the moment. You did cover that in your
podcast and the rest was classified, which which is fantastic.
And let's have a little talk about the podcast, because
(11:09):
I've spent my summer listening to it. It's a podcast
you co host with Gordon our career, and you take
us sort of into the mysterious world of spies Andy Spinach.
But these are actually true stories. What is the importance
to sharing these stories?
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Well, you know, I think I will say that one
of our one of Gordon's and I's kind of key
goals is, of course we're trying to entertain people with
these stories, but we are also trying to make them
as authentic as possible to the reality of the espionage business.
And so I think what we're trying to accomplish, frankly,
is to shed some light on a really misunderstood world
(11:53):
where most of us, I think, get our you know,
kind of cues or our hints about what it's like
from Hollywood, right, and I think the reality of the
business in many ways is actually far more interesting because
at the core of most of the stories telling it
is just it's people who are like us, but who
happen to be in various parts of the espionage business.
(12:16):
Is their job either their intelligence officers, you know, or
they're the actual spies who have been recruited to go
and you know, give secrets, and it's just kind of
fascinating the choices that these humans have made, because they
tend to be caught up in, you know, games where
the geopolitical stakes are very high, where the personal stakes
are very high, and where many of them are sort
(12:37):
of living in existence where they're telling one group of
people one thing and another group of people another thing,
and so there's all these themes of betrayal and deception
that kind of infuse the stories. So, you know, it's
frankly just the case that there's a lot of material
out there, right, and we do believe that even people
(12:57):
who are not you know, maybe they're not reading spy
thrillers regularly, we do believe that they'll be interested in
these stories because at the heart of them are just
really interesting people.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Absolutely are you would all concerned for the Secret Service
and President Trump?
Speaker 4 (13:16):
Yeah, you know, I think I am. I am trying to,
I think maintain kind of a cautious hope that there
will be more smoke than fire and that the headlines
that we're seeing that a lot of the kind of
concern won't really translate into an effect on the CIS mission.
(13:37):
I mean, when I talk to people who are on
the inside, who were there for the first Trump administration
have been there, you know, since I left, they would
tell you that there was you know, really almost no
disruption to the CIA's core mission over the course of
that you know time that the CI just kind of
runs and there's bluster and you know, politicking, you know,
(13:58):
at that sort of the thirty thousand foot level, but
not really when you get down to what's happening inside CIA.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
You know, I think the.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
Buyouts that have been offered kind of strip me as
maybe not the best idea, in large part because it's
just not really focused.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
You know.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
I think it's probably the case that in any massive organization,
there are efficiencies to be had of just you know, jobs, people, roles,
et cetera that either need to be moved or maybe
don't need to be there. But you've got to be
really targeted about that kind of stuff. And so I
really do hope that again more smoke than fire, and
I'm sort of cautiously hopeful that that will be the
(14:35):
case in Trump two point zero as it was the
first time around.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
David just finally, you know, I read the books and
I love them, and it reflects sort of current day espionage.
I listen to the podcast and some of those stories
are historical espionage stories, And I wonder has the trade
actually sort of changed that much over the years, or
is it or a spy still essentially doing the same thing,
(15:01):
maybe just with some bitter tech.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
Yeah, yeah, well I think I think the answer is
busy yes to both of those things. I think that
the trade has changed significantly because basically a combination of
you know, cameras, biometrics, sensors everywhere, plus dirt cheap storage,
plus analytic tools to make sense of all that information,
(15:25):
many of which are AI powered. All of that means
that the fundamental kind of trade craft of how you
go through an operation to let's say, recruit somebody and
run them in Moscow or Beijing or Damascus or wherever,
that's totally different now, right, So it has changed. It's
also true that you know, secrets that you know, maybe
(15:48):
in the past were not digital, they were physical. It
was paper, it was in people's heads. There's now a
lot more digitally to be stolen. Right, So there's there
are kind of, you know, i'd say, massive changes to
the overall business. That said, I think it's still true
that having a really well placed human source, you know,
(16:09):
be they in the Kremlin with access to Vladimir Putin,
or be they Inassa's presidential palace, or you know, from
the Russian standpoint, and you think about my book the
Seventh Floor on the seventh floor at CIA's headquarters at Langley,
you know, having an agent or asset in those roles
is still an absolutely unique and extremely valuable thing for
(16:33):
a foreign intelligence service to have.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
And I don't think the value of that is going away.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
I think that it's getting more expensive to do that.
I think it's getting harder to do that, but it's
still exceptionally valuable. So a lot of the old school
espionage stories that we're doing on the POD, I think
I actually do have present day kind of analogs or
you know, relevant implications because you know, you think one
story we just did recently, Adolf Tolkachev, the spy in
(16:59):
Moscow at the height of the Cold War. You know,
we would kill to have an Adolf Tolkachev today embedded
in Moscow in a kind of key defense industries in
Moscow telling us everything about what the Russians are developing
for the next twenty years.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
We would love to have that today. So it's still
very relevant.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Oh, David, thank you so much for your time. It
has been a delight to talk to you.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Well, thank you so much for having me, wonderful to
be here.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
That was former CIA analyst now spy author David McCloskey.
His new book, The Seventh Floor, release this week, is
in stalls now.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rutkin, listen
live to News Talks it'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks EDB.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Now, I don't know about you, but I find the
world of secret service and spies and espionage utterly fascinating,
which is why I am so excited to talk to
my next guest, former CIA analyst turned author David McCloskey.
In his years at the CIA, David worked in field
stations across the Middle East. He had access to all
sorts of classified information. He gave testimony to Congress as
(00:32):
well as providing White House briefings. David left the CIA
in twenty fourteen and is now using his lived experience
to write the best spy thrillers books so good former
cias former CIA staff have said that they are the
most authentic accounts of CIA operations you'll find in print.
(00:53):
This week, David McCloskey released his third book that's called
The Seventh Floor. He is with me from Texas. Good morning, David,
Thank you so much for being with.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Us, Thank you so much for having me. Thrilled to
be here.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
You wild critics with the first two books. How much
of that success do you think is down to this
lived experience? That you're writing about.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Well, I think certainly some of it is. I mean,
I am trying in all of the books, you know,
first one Siria, second one's Russia. Third most current one
is the seventh Floor at CIA headquarters. So it's kind
of a Langley book in each of them. I am
trying to be, you know, sort of real and authentic
to the actual operations of CIA, but also the culture
(01:40):
and the way the place feels and what it's actually
like to work there. And so I think to some degree,
having lived that and knowing a lot of people you
know very closely who did as well, you know, it
makes it easier, I think, to really tell those stories
than if I were coming at this fully from the outside.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
It's interesting you mentioned culture because that's what I pick
up on. That's what I love about the books is
that you kind of bring that unique culture of the
CIA at light. You write in the book Langley managed
to be dull and smug, tribal and bureaucratic, and nerves
seem to and totally remove from where the espionage actually
happens the field. Tell me a little bit about those
(02:19):
different fragmentations within the CIA, because you do pick that
up in your books.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I think to some degree,
the CIA is like any other big organization where you
have a big bureaucracy, You have a lot of people
who are pretending to do work but actually aren't.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
You have people.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
Spending all day in you know, vicious and pointless meetings
and sending emails, and you have this tension between a
headquarters and the field, which if you're working in any
big organization you know that has a bunch of stores
everywhere or a bunch of railroad terminals or whatever, you're
going to have that tension. So I think to some
degree there's there's there are themes around the work of
(03:00):
CIA that will resonate with anybody, right. But at the
same time, the CIA is doing some really weird stuff.
I mean, we're out there trying to convince people to
commit treason and give us, you know, sort of or
sell us the darkest secrets that their country might have.
So that's a bizarre thing for an organization to do.
So both of those dynamics are present every day at CIA,
(03:22):
and I think I kind of I wanted those to that.
I don't know, that reality right to come through in
different ways in each of the novels.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
You're so right, it's part of it is just so
foreign to many of us. In the other parts you
can just relate to so easily. It's just it's a
general organization, very well put. Look, I get a sense
that people when they work for the CIA, they truly
believe in the work they do when they love it.
But I get the feeling from your book that the
CIA doesn't necessarily love you back.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Well.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
Again, I think it's this reality of working in really
big organizations, right, is that we can all convince ourselves
if we've served in one of these that are invaluable
and we're irreplaceable, you know.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
And the fact is is.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
That, you know, the CIA is just like that where
you could spend thirty years there and you get sent
out with a kind of you know less than you
know ticker tape parade, let's say, and all of a sudden.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
You're out, You're actually out.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
The building moves on, the people move on, the organization,
the operations move on, and you're sort of, you know, left,
I think dealing with frankly, you know, this question of
what did you give to a place that doesn't actually
give you that much back in the end. And so
I really wanted, especially in this book The Seventh Floor,
to kind of explore that tension or that dilemma of
(04:48):
you work at a place forever, it makes you, you know,
you help make it to some degree, but when you're out,
what do you take with you?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
What do you have left?
Speaker 4 (04:56):
You know, it's kind of a I think it's an
evergreen question for people who have been loyal to an
organization for a really long time.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
And is that how you felt when you left?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Well? You know, actually, you know, I'm ashamed of it,
not really, I mean because I wish I had I
wish I had some great answer.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
That kept out that door, and yeah, no, I'm done,
I'm good things.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
I kind of thought, you know, I left for very
mundane reasons. It was just I looked at the people
who were five plus years ahead of me and said,
I'm not exactly sure this is what I want to
be doing. I want to go out into the world
and see what there is. So I didn't leave with
a sense of I don't think i'd been in for
you know, I hadn't been in for three decades, and
so I didn't have this built up sense of the
(05:38):
whole place was my life, you know. But I do
know people who have stayed in for multiple decades, some
for thirty, you know, five years, and there is this
you know that hearing those stories, I think is what
allowed me to fill the seventh floor with that kind
of feel and vibe.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Tell me about you know, when you leave the CIA,
you are writing from quite a privileged position with sort
of information around national security and things. Do you have
to submit to your manuscript to the CIA to cheek?
Speaker 4 (06:10):
Like?
Speaker 2 (06:11):
How do you balance that? Like what you can write about,
what you can take from your lived experience and share
on the page.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Yeah, so I am required to send everything to what
we call our publication review board. So everything from you know,
updates to my resume, to op eds I might write
for the newspaper, to the novels, everything goes to them.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Now they are actually.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
You know, you think big government agency, maybe this thing's
terrible to deal with. In reality, they're actually pretty fast.
I like to think maybe they just love the book
so they get them back to me so quickly, you know.
At I've convinced myself of this, but they're pretty fast.
They are actually very thoughtful and I think fair in
what they choose to redact. They do send stuff back.
It's kind of humorous actually. So you send them the document,
(06:59):
you know, word document, and they'll send back PDFs, like
multiple PDFs in some cases, like twenty or thirty PDFs.
It's all caps. Everything's been capitalized. I don't know why,
what program they're putting this into that capitalizes everything, and
then they redacted with a black highlighter. And that's the
stuff that you can't put in, you know. And the
reality is I do a lot of frankly self censoring
(07:22):
upfront because I want to be responsible. There are elements
of the operations in the Tradecraft that I know we are
just off limits and frankly would probably be boring to
the reader, and so I choose to just not not
include that. So I've gotten kind of this down after now,
you know, just sent my fourth book to them, like
I've now got this down to kind of a process
(07:43):
and not a science, I would say, but it moves
pretty smoothly.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
A lot of the I'm sure that a lot of
what you write about obviously, as we've talked about, comes
from your lived experience and things and quite an extraordinary job.
And I know that you spent eight years covering Syria,
and you lived in Damascus and things like that. Has
Wright actually been a way for you to process maybe
and deal with some of the situations and issue you know,
(08:10):
issues and things that you've hit to deal with as
an analyst.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Yeah, yeah, very much so.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
I mean, you know, the Syria experience really was the
start of this for me. You know, Syria, I worked
on it from the time when it was kind of
you know, pre civil war to them when it was
really in the thick of it. And that experience of
just watching an entire country pull itself to pieces, you know,
hundreds of thousands of people killed, the whole place shattered,
(08:39):
you know, ninety or so percent of the country in
you know, sort of in poverty, tens of thousands of
people disappeared. I mean, it was a it was an
experience where you feel you're very connected to the place,
and yet all the things you're writing are kind of
these strategic analyzes that are you know, anodyne, really bureaucratically
(08:59):
and for good reason. And so for me, the writing
when I got out was really an attempt to try
to connect, i think, to some of the humanity of
what had happened there.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
And to.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
Write stories, you know, and again I didn't start thinking
this would turn into novels, but just to kind of
write stories that would help me process what I had
seen and experienced.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
And then it just went from there.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
It's interesting, did you did you always think that this
was what you were going to do, right, novels when
you left the CIA? When did that idea come up?
Is this something you've always been king to do?
Speaker 4 (09:32):
No, I mean, the idea actually came up sort of
embarrassingly late, I think. I mean, I left the CIA,
and I had time in between leaving and starting a
new job, and I didn't actually have to have a
job for those you know, three or four months, and
so I spent a lot of that time, pretty much
all that time writing But at no point did I
think that I would turn it into a book. It
(09:53):
was just for me really, And then, you know, I
realized as I was writing that I loved the process
of writing, the input of it, just sitting down and
actually you know, spending six or eight hours putting words
down on paper. And so, you know, sort of fast
forward like five years from that, and I had this
manuscript which I thought, you know, was like maybe halfway decent,
(10:14):
but actually was terrible.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
I mean it was, you know, really atrocious.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
Like no plots, you know, totally disjointed characters because it
was all just like a diary.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
You know.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
It's like, you know, Matthew McConaughey published his diary, but
I'm not McConaughey. So there was no market for you know,
David mccloskey's Syria diary. And but at that point, five
years on, I thought, look, I loved writing so much.
Let me see if I could turn this into something
that not only I want to write and read, but
that other people might. And so that idea came actually
(10:44):
very late, and it was years after I had left CIA.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Well that's interesting, because they're so excellent. I thought maybe
you'd been right. Well obviously you had been writing as
an analyst, but not quite like this. And I should
just mention if people want to hear a little bit
more about how you feel about what's going on in
Syria at the moment. You did cover that in your
podcast and the rest was classified, which which is fantastic.
And let's have a little talk about the podcast, because
(11:09):
I've spent my summer listening to it. It's a podcast
you co host with Gordon our career, and you take
us sort of into the mysterious world of spies Andy Spinach.
But these are actually true stories. What is the importance
to sharing these stories?
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Well, you know, I think I will say that one
of our one of Gordon's and I's kind of key
goals is, of course we're trying to entertain people with
these stories, but we are also trying to make them
as authentic as possible to the reality of the espionage business.
And so I think what we're trying to accomplish, frankly,
is to shed some light on a really misunderstood world
(11:53):
where most of us, I think, get our you know,
kind of cues or our hints about what it's like
from Hollywood, right, and I think the reality of the
business in many ways is actually far more interesting because
at the core of most of the stories telling it
is just it's people who are like us, but who
happen to be in various parts of the espionage business.
(12:16):
Is their job either their intelligence officers, you know, or
they're the actual spies who have been recruited to go
and you know, give secrets, and it's just kind of
fascinating the choices that these humans have made, because they
tend to be caught up in, you know, games where
the geopolitical stakes are very high, where the personal stakes
are very high, and where many of them are sort
(12:37):
of living in existence where they're telling one group of
people one thing and another group of people another thing,
and so there's all these themes of betrayal and deception
that kind of infuse the stories. So, you know, it's
frankly just the case that there's a lot of material
out there, right, and we do believe that even people
(12:57):
who are not you know, maybe they're not reading spy
thrillers regularly, we do believe that they'll be interested in
these stories because at the heart of them are just
really interesting people.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Absolutely are you would all concerned for the Secret Service
and President Trump?
Speaker 4 (13:16):
Yeah, you know, I think I am. I am trying to,
I think maintain kind of a cautious hope that there
will be more smoke than fire and that the headlines
that we're seeing that a lot of the kind of
concern won't really translate into an effect on the CIS mission.
(13:37):
I mean, when I talk to people who are on
the inside, who were there for the first Trump administration
have been there, you know, since I left, they would
tell you that there was you know, really almost no
disruption to the CIA's core mission over the course of
that you know time that the CI just kind of
runs and there's bluster and you know, politicking, you know,
(13:58):
at that sort of the thirty thousand foot level, but
not really when you get down to what's happening inside CIA.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
You know, I think the.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
Buyouts that have been offered kind of strip me as
maybe not the best idea, in large part because it's
just not really focused.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
You know.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
I think it's probably the case that in any massive organization,
there are efficiencies to be had of just you know, jobs, people, roles,
et cetera that either need to be moved or maybe
don't need to be there. But you've got to be
really targeted about that kind of stuff. And so I
really do hope that again more smoke than fire, and
I'm sort of cautiously hopeful that that will be the
(14:35):
case in Trump two point zero as it was the
first time around.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
David just finally, you know, I read the books and
I love them, and it reflects sort of current day espionage.
I listen to the podcast and some of those stories
are historical espionage stories, And I wonder has the trade
actually sort of changed that much over the years, or
is it or a spy still essentially doing the same thing,
(15:01):
maybe just with some bitter tech.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
Yeah, yeah, well I think I think the answer is
busy yes to both of those things. I think that
the trade has changed significantly because basically a combination of
you know, cameras, biometrics, sensors everywhere, plus dirt cheap storage,
plus analytic tools to make sense of all that information,
(15:25):
many of which are AI powered. All of that means
that the fundamental kind of trade craft of how you
go through an operation to let's say, recruit somebody and
run them in Moscow or Beijing or Damascus or wherever,
that's totally different now, right, So it has changed. It's
also true that you know, secrets that you know, maybe
(15:48):
in the past were not digital, they were physical. It
was paper, it was in people's heads. There's now a
lot more digitally to be stolen. Right, So there's there
are kind of, you know, i'd say, massive changes to
the overall business. That said, I think it's still true
that having a really well placed human source, you know,
(16:09):
be they in the Kremlin with access to Vladimir Putin,
or be they Inassa's presidential palace, or you know, from
the Russian standpoint, and you think about my book the
Seventh Floor on the seventh floor at CIA's headquarters at Langley,
you know, having an agent or asset in those roles
is still an absolutely unique and extremely valuable thing for
(16:33):
a foreign intelligence service to have.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
And I don't think the value of that is going away.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
I think that it's getting more expensive to do that.
I think it's getting harder to do that, but it's
still exceptionally valuable. So a lot of the old school
espionage stories that we're doing on the POD, I think
I actually do have present day kind of analogs or
you know, relevant implications because you know, you think one
story we just did recently, Adolf Tolkachev, the spy in
(16:59):
Moscow at the height of the Cold War. You know,
we would kill to have an Adolf Tolkachev today embedded
in Moscow in a kind of key defense industries in
Moscow telling us everything about what the Russians are developing
for the next twenty years.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
We would love to have that today. So it's still
very relevant.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Oh, David, thank you so much for your time. It
has been a delight to talk to you.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Well, thank you so much for having me, wonderful to
be here.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
That was former CIA analyst now spy author David McCloskey.
His new book, The Seventh Floor, release this week, is
in stalls now.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rutkin, listen
live to News Talks it'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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