Spy fiction is mostly a gently conservative genre. The reader is usually asked to sympathize with the status quo and against those attempting to radically alter it; when a government is portrayed as behaving badly, it is generally also portrayed as malfunctioning. The genre also has a conservative relationship with realism. Since so much of spying happens behind closed doors, hidden by design from the general public, it is hard to know what counts as verisimilitude or plausibility, or even whether and in what way this might matter. In tandem, there has always been a permeable membrane between spying, spies, and writers of spy fiction. The two undisputed giants of the genre, John Le Carré and Graham Greene, were also, famously, practicing intelligence officers before becoming writers, and a great deal of Le Carré’s invented spylish—“mole,” “honeytrap,” “lamplighter”—has entered the vernacular of actual espionage practitioners. Kim Philby, the most famous double agent of all time (and the author of his own intriguing spy memoir) was nicknamed after the protagonist of Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim, arguably the first spy novel to be recognizable as such. Something about espionage and writing attract the same sort of people, or at least some of the same people. Again, it is hard to know what this means in practice. Le Carré declared his novels to be deliberately unrealistic; Ian Fleming, another espionage alum, wrote James Bond with no particular relationship to actually existing intelligence operations in mind at all.
It makes for good marketing, though. “Read it now, before it is banned!” exhorts an endorsement on the back cover of David McCloskey’s hyphy spy novel Damascus Station, itself attributed to a “former Navy SEAL and bestselling author” who therefore surely knows that such a book has by definition already been screened by the CIA’s Publications Review Board. McCloskey is a former CIA analyst (and former McKinsey consultant, naturally) who spent most of his career in the Middle East, during which, according to his website, he “briefed senior White House officials, Ambassadors, military officials, and Arab royalty.” The marketing for Damascus Station is almost singularly about this fact. Five separate CIA constituents give quotes on the inside jacket; former CIA director David Petraeus provides the lead; elsewhere it has been promoted by Sir John Sawers, former head of MI6. The Russia-focused follow-up Moscow X, according to the jacket, cements McCloskey as “the best spy fiction writer since Le Carré.”
In fact McCloskey is only one of a crop of newish spy novelists whose claims to readerly attention hinge on their past espionage careers, far more explicitly than in the past. Le Carré, after all, spent most of his career denying that he had ever been a spy. Former CIA operations officer I.S. Berry’s The Peacock and the Sparrow gets the rote jacket comparison to Le Carré, and is described in its summary, upsettingly, as “dripping with authenticity” (this is true, though; squeezed between finger and thumb, the pages do actually become soggy with verisimilitude). Charles Beaumont’s A Spy Alone differs in that his professional background is MI6 rather than the Agency, but he too gets the Le Carré treatment, plus a patriotic invocation reminding readers that “If you read it, the Kremlin won’t like it.” The authors support each other: McCloskey blurbs Berry, Berry blurbs Beaumont. There are in fact so many ex-spies now writing spy novels that the competition for tradecraft secrets to expose must be getting awfully tight. The question is begged, then: what does authenticity mean in this case? What does it mean to claim that an author’s past espionage experience informs a work of fiction? What would an authentic spy novel be authentic about?
Authenticity, whatever it might mean, is at the very least in tension with the comparisons to Le Carré, and not just because he never made—in fact generally denied—any suggestion that his books represented espionage at all accurately. His greatest works, heavy modernist novels like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or A Perfect Spy, were thrilling enough as spy stories, but Le Carré’s fictionalized intelligence services were meant to be microcosms of the nation, a laboratory and a mirror for postwar Britain. Dovetailing with a contemporaneous surge in postcolonial fiction, Le Carré explored the other side of the coin, the empire dissolving under the feet of its implementors. When it worked, Le Carré was hardly a spy writer at all, but rather a writer who borrowed the tropes and tensions of espionage in order to give shape to explorations of much more interesting social and political questions, embedded in a space of moral ambiguity that was a specific challenge to the ideological bifurcation of the cold war. To call someone “the next Le Carré” is a fair enough claim to make about an author, but it cannot simply mean that someone is able to produce fun spy stories. It hardly matters for this purpose whether the new spy writers, late of their intelligence agencies, can produce basically competent thrillers; they all can. The question is what else they can do, what new spin they can put on the established library of espionage tropes. What value can their past intelligence careers confer? And if that value is bound up, in whatever way, with authenticity, then what is authenticity doing that makes it valuable?
Not immune to the heritage of their genre, these novels all feature divorced male protagonists in middle age, struggling to outdo each other in their disillusionment, cynicism, and despair. These protagonists share many key biographical details and, incredibly, as if the writers planned it together, all have names beginning with S—Sam, Shane, Simon—although Moscow X features a female protagonist named Sia. Maybe it stands for spy.
McCloskey first.If authenticity means a profusion of technical expertise, then it comes as promised; the tradecraft is both meticulously detailed and basically plausible. The plot takes place in the “early years of the Syrian civil war,” and Damascus, at least, is credibly evoked. As reality-obsessed as he allegedly is, though, McCloskey is not above having a station chief named Artemis Aphrodite Proctor, a diminutive woman who repeatedly uses the word “dogshit” in official diplomatic cables and keeps a shotgun propped against the wall of her office. And despite his protagonist’s cliched warning that “this job is dead cats and garbage more than anything else,” most of the action happens in safehouses in Tuscany or the French Riviera, cooking elaborately described meals on secluded balconies and raiding the CIA’s apparently unlimited wine cellars. McCloskey’s protagonist Sam Joseph can protest all he wants—he is still a globetrotting, bed-hopping, bullet-spraying gourmand with a string of broken relationships and a nose for fine wine, and is even, as a gratuitous scene in Las Vegas makes clear, an implausibly good gambler (McCloskey has said in an interview that he was picturing Ryan Gosling in the role). The main difference between him and James Bond is that Sam is a single-entendre patriot, all-in on The Mission, while the Bond of Fleming’s novels was prone to the sort of nihilistic musing that would presumably get him fired from McCloskey’s CIA.
Damascus Station is nevertheless a marvel of some sort, and the lengthy scenes about how to lose a tail or construct a cover feel genuinely intimate, like an actual look behind the curtain. Left to speak for itself, the effect of all the technical detail would be to entrap even skeptical reviewers like fingerprints planted on a dirty sidearm. But McCloskey insists on discussing his book’s authenticity via a fascinating acknowledgments section that doubles as a sort of short methodological essay. This paratextual gambit allows McCloskey to have his cake but also keep it safely ensconced in the embassy’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Thus we learn that a scene in which CIA explosives experts test their work on actual human cadavers is imaginary, whereas there really is a hot dog vending machine at headquarters in Langley, and a rival intelligence service did in fact leave a huge pile of human excrement on the bed of McCloskey’s former colleague.
Authentic, but not that authentic; real, but not dangerously so. In a way, this disarming of the book’s plausible deniability feels like a betrayal as acute as Philby’s. Of course McCloskey was not going to be allowed to publish “operational details,” whatever those might be, but from the vantage point of the reader the claim to authenticity hinges on the fact that any given detail might be true, and so the accuracy feels accurate only insofar as we do not know for sure that it is inaccurate. Undermining this by doubling back to point out all the exaggerations is a strange choice. The performance of authenticity obscures the foreclosure of its tangible possibility. More instructive, then, is what McCloskey leaves out. The White House, or indeed any symbol of democratic accountability, remains remote and opaque to McCloskey’s spies, and his scrupulously unnamed president is a perpetually cautious killjoy who won’t let the CIA have any fun. The closest McCloskey gets to any sort of explicit partisan sentiment is having his (unnamed, but obvious) Obama fidget unhappily when a reporter asks, following a successful bombing raid, why he didn’t militarily intervene in Syria earlier. In Moscow X, the less honed and vastly more gruesome semisequel, Russia has invaded Ukraine, the recalcitrant president is presumably Joe Biden (he describes an operation, Bidenishly, as “an absolutely remarkable clusterfuck”) and the Trump years are conveniently sidestepped.
In contrast to McCloskey’s nameless American presidents, Vladimir Putin appears both by name and in the narrative action. He first shows up briefly in Damascus Station, avuncularly comforting Bashar Al-Assad (also in a speaking role) over a conference call. In Moscow X, Putin and his obsequious satellites hover around the edge of the narrative until the boss shows up at the end, like Tolstoy’s Napoleon, cloaked in power but revealing himself to be weak, ineffectual, desperate. McCloskey ventriloquizes what must be his own views through one of the Russian characters: “I have no interest in changing the system because I do not, quite honestly, believe another system is possible,” she says. “There would be new faces . . . new names given to institutions, but nothing would truly change.” The CIA station chief clarifies that she does not want “Russia becoming a friendly country, a democracy, or whatever. . . .What we should aspire to instead is a divided Russia. Weak. Inward looking.” The president then rejects “a beautiful menu of options” to achieve this goal, provoking dismay in the Agency. For McCloskey, the limiting factor on the CIA’s ability to remake the world for the better is the White House’s stomach for roughhousing abroad; a president who didn’t have to worry about reelection, who could simply rubber-stamp all the operational zaniness, might be best of all. And while McCloskey makes clear that his, and the CIA’s, notional commitment is to preserving the “great republic,” the novel is weaker for failing to flag this tension, the absence of which leaves him with a world of virtuous Americans battling both foreign villains and squeamish domestic politicians in an effort to do uncomplicatedly good things in secret. As a thriller, McCloskey’s book is as good as it gets; but this is about as far from Le Carré’s project as a spy novel could possibly be.
The morality of I.S. Berry’s The Peacock and the Sparrow, which makes similar sport out of the Arab Spring as seen from Bahrain, is darker, more pessimistic, but ultimately not much less straightforward. But Berry’s Shane Collins—even harder-drinking, gruffer, more jaded, and less political than McCloskey’s Sam Joseph, with the obligatory failed marriage in the rearview, and an estranged son as a bonus—is a willfully, theatrically loathsome person. “I had no marketable skills, no human attachments worth the name,” he reflects. He considers himself “neither glaringly successful nor unsuccessful, a near-invisible piece of flotsam carried by the stinking sea of sludge.” He muses that one woman possesses “skin that eluded nationality,” describes another’s breasts as “sadly fascinating like a mangled animal,” and is pleased to discover that his new lover has “none of the triviality or false femininity of American women; neither did she have the humorless affectation of European women.” Berry’s prose, and especially Shane’s repetitively miserable introspections, are more reminiscent of the self-defensive nihilism of hardboiled detective fiction than of the espionage tradition, and Shane ends the novel working as a private detective. Berry also has Shane describe himself as “a fifty-plus man coming in from the cold”—a nod to Le Carré’s Alec Leamas, the original hard-drinking, post-happiness title character of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. That book established the genre cliché that practitioners of intelligence are glum rather than debonaire, broken down, alcoholic, personally disastrous; but the valence of that depression has changed. Whereas Le Carré’s Leamas was a cynical alcoholic in parallel with the moral exhaustion of cold war liberalism, Shane is gratuitously dysphoric for a different reason.
There is more than one thing to be authentic about, and while tradecraft is the most obviously belabored vector of authenticity in spy novels, Berry is more interested in depicting the psychology of intelligence work than its technical mechanics. Shane’s obsessive pessimism is a result of the stresses, the costly triumphs, the repetitive strain from constantly looking over one’s shoulders, most of all the heavy, heavy secrets—the effect on a human life is depicted as corrosive. The failed marriages and high-functioning alcoholism, then, are the opposite of Le Carré’s cold war malaise: Shane is depressed precisely because of his moral superiority. The abnegation is self-sacrificial, a necessarily entailed price of carrying democracy’s burden. In Berry’s telling, the spy’s neuroticism becomes an almost Promethean spiritual injury. Monastic, self-denying Shane torments himself, or submits to torment, in the service of post-ideological Atlanticism.
Berry does, therefore, perhaps inadvertently, give us something more like a real spydeology, a moral theory of espionage. The means-versus-ends self-sacrifice inverts the usual framing, in which spies justify morally questionable actions with reference to the always-worse alternatives; Shane’s gratuitous misery is an act of love, suggesting literary parallels from Le Guin to Dostoevsky. So: if you could ensure the safety of millions—if you could prevent a terrorist attack!—through a decades-long process of self-sacrifice, would you not, on some level, be obligated to do so? If there is a throughline between McCloskey and Berry, it is the uninterrogated (sorry) apolitical utopianism of their characters, certain in the belief that anything beyond The Mission is a meaningless distraction. The authenticity, then, is that this is probably how a lot of intelligence officers really do see themselves. The cynicism obscures a belief that intelligence really can change the world (a notion Le Carré always strenuously denied), and that all meaningful change really takes place through, or is at least safeguarded and underwritten by, the hardest edge of state power. Watching the fallout from an embassy office, these spies represent an imperial power exhausted but triumphant, existing for no reason other than to sustain itself, because other imperialisms are worse. Fair enough; but this is not moral or political complexity. A simpler moral universe could hardly be imagined.
Then there is Charles Beaumont’s A Spy Alone. Beaumont—apparently an alum of MI6—takes his commitment to secrecy much more seriously than his peers, writing under a pseudonym, giving his podcast interviews from behind a voice-distorter, and eschewing an acknowledgments section as a matter of professional principle. Yet his book contains very little tradecraft, and not much that is identifiable as contemporary intelligence work. The plot—Russians have been funding the British far right since the early 1990s, running several politicians and various other public figures as semiwitting agents—hangs on professional intelligence officers using elaborate but easily recognizable references to generate codenames, which the protagonist, a hard-drinking, cynical, aimless man in ambiguous middle age named Simon Sharman, happens to detect. Simon differs from the other protagonists; he has two failed marriages. Other than this, and a generalized haplessness, he might as well be anyone.
It feels a bit—as literally any of Beaumont’s characters might say, in literally any situation—unsporting to go after the book on formal literary grounds. Some of the writing tics are too irritating to recount here. The characters switch sides, tones, and ideologies haphazardly, frequently contradicting themselves. Beaumont clearly has no idea how to use a smartphone and apparently didn’t feel the need to google it before making the plot hinge on this. He draws parallels between Oxford—a place where one can “join with the powerful and the influential, to be an insider, part of the system that runs things”—and MI6. But his Oxford is erratically evoked and peppered with awkward cliches and factual errors. This characterization bodes poorly for the accuracy of his spies. And while we cannot know if Beaumont was “really” involved with MI6, he surely didn’t need to be in order to write this book.
There is no point going on about all this; A Spy Alone was not written as Booker bait. But for all its faults, it is the only book in this grouping which attempts to bend a studiously apolitical genre into a defined ideological shape, and is therefore by far the most interesting. Spy fiction is most effective when it is about something other than spying and the writer can lean on the stakes of espionage in order to show something interesting about human nature. Le Carré, at his best, was writing about fathers and sons; Graham Greene was writing about failure. McCloskey and Berry are former spies writing spy novels about the day-to-day practice of spying, and there is a limit to how interesting that can be—whereas Beaumont, to his credit, is really trying to write a Brexit novel. There are Russians in A Spy Alone, to be sure, and a Kremlin apparently endowed with superpowers, but Beaumont’s real villains are all British. There is an alcoholic, fascist-sympathizing history professor; a couple of oleaginous politicians; a crooked visa broker. It is not very difficult to match these people with real-life British public figures, if one is so inclined. Like McCloskey, he shies away from naming Western politicians—his British prime minister is “overweight, dithering”—but Putin gets namechecked, as does Steve Bannon. Lest readers get the wrong idea about Beaumont’s politics, one of his Russian assets is a “leftist agitator, Guardian columnist and Labour party strategist,” while another is “not a communist…but quite possible a Leninist,” which Beaumont helpfully defines as “someone prepared to destroy everything to get what he wants.”
Beaumont repeatedly spells out his earnest vendettas. “This isn’t the country I grew up in,” he writes with palpable disorientation. His villains want to gut the civil service, privatize the nuclear deterrent; he has no idea why. At times it sounds like he has simply spent too much time on Twitter: “Your people, the civil service, the Remainer deep state, the fucking blob have run Britain into the ground,” one of his thinly veiled Brexiteers informs Simon. Elsewhere, he seems to be anticipating criticism: “There was a certain class of former intelligence officer…who saw a Russian plot behind every crashing computer, every Western policy failure, every Russian dying before their time. Simon had tried hard not to be a sufferer from ‘Russia derangement syndrome.’” His plaintiveness, while incoherent, is sometimes endearing:
They always seem to be winning. Why can’t we win? I mean, normal people who pay their taxes and don’t think they’re above the rules. The ones who think that politicians should actually be doing something for the right reasons, not just to make their friends rich. The ones who believe that the civil service are doing their best for the country, not just a lazy bunch of pen-pushers. Why can’t we win anymore? Why is politics always the arseholes winning, by being arseholes?
Beaumont has a theory about this: it was Russia all along. What he wants instead of Russian influence, Russian money, Russian meddling, is to go back to the way things were. His nostalgia, instantiated via a fixation on the artifacts of the British upper class, tracks a political ideology of some kind, but really what Beaumont is interested in is the way in which democracy itself, or at least specific democratic processes, can become corrupted in ways that allow the institutions associated with democracy to act counter to the interests of the demos. This is dangerous territory, politically and conceptually. The idea of a “national interest” (a favorite hand-wave of espiocrats) that supersedes democratically expressed intent is not a million miles away from the claim, expressed by one of Beaumont’s villains, that authoritarian systems are simply better-suited to the challenges of modern statecraft. Just out of reach is the idea that the problem with democracy is not just intrusive Russian money, but intrusive money in general. Yet it is also clearly true that a democratic decision, made on the basis of false information, cannot really be said to be wholly democratic. It is the case that elections can be meddled with; intelligence agencies should know. And, more fundamentally, it is the case that part of the Brexit argument about an unaccountable deep state rang true because every government, out of necessity, makes a lot of decisions without first checking the public’s opinion.
Many of these decisions are obscure technical ones, and the vague democratic theory about this is that an elected leader must necessarily appoint a large number of policy technicians to implement the broader agenda. Many policy decisions are contested between parties, but many are not; there is a lot of governance that happens quietly, in the dark, because it is in nobody’s electoral interest to talk about it. Intelligence is one such area that has, at least until recently, received comparatively limited partisan attention. Intelligence, and military power more broadly, occupies a unique place in Western political discourse. Like the royal family in Britain, the American security state is imagined as a suprapolitical national symbol, the subject of cross-party consensus, beyond or outside of the realm of disagreement (like the royal family, too, the relationship with luxury is deliberately ambiguous: a good deal of public messaging has to reiterate that it must not actually be as glamorous as it looks). In a severely polarized democracy, it is harder for the spy to imagine a demos on behalf of which these dubious acts might be committed, much less an authentically representative government. If really big foreign policy questions are, as Beaumont seems to imply (and McCloskey specifically does not), on the table for the first time, then the premises upon which thousands of intelligence professionals have built their careers are newly unstable. As the imperial consensus fragments, for better or worse, the security state inevitably becomes drawn back into the arena of politics as such. The fantasy of the spy as a nonpartisan agent of the national interest is unviable if there is no consensus on what might constitute that interest, and while that fantasy has always been materially frivolous, it is now rhetorically implausible as well.
And so here is a political paradox finally worthy of Le Carré: what is the moral culpability of an intelligence officer tasked with carrying out the decisions of a democratically elected government that is acting contrary to what that intelligence officer has hitherto believed to be the national interest? Not just what if the president was a Russian asset, but more profoundly, what does it mean to represent the—or a—national interest at all? To whom does an intelligence officer ultimately owe loyalty: the agency, the government, or the public? What happens when two of those three loci of accountability are in apparent conflict? What is the distinction between attempting to restore the equilibrium of the liberal democratic security bargain, versus becoming deeply politicized, developing radical opinions about the government of the day, and going rogue?
This is the sort of question that breeds whistleblowers, and, by the end of the novel, Beaumont’s protagonist is at least sort of engaged in whistleblowing (the secrets revealed are not MI6’s, though—none of the books spend even a sentence considering that an intelligence agency might itself act unethically). It’s inconceivable that anyone in McCloskey’s confident, decisive CIA would ever want to blow the whistle on any operational activities, and Berry’s spies are too depressed and hungover to contemplate such weighty questions. Beaumont, the weakest of the three on the level of prose, plot, and characterization, and the least persuasive as an authentic former spy, is the one asking the most interesting questions, and is in this sense much closer to being Le Carré’s heir. In at least gesturing at the complexities of democratic representation, he is also exploring an “authenticity” no less “real” than that of tradecraft or workplace psychology. Tradecraft may have the appearance of reality; but Beaumont’s democratic ouroboros is the reality being gestured at. That slippage, more than the eternal problem of how to lose a tail or access classified documents, cuts to the moral core of intelligence work.
Who would James Bond vote for? When espiocrats warn publicly, as they do with increasing frequency, about the dangers of the second Donald Trump presidency, when they say that Trump cannot be trusted to safeguard classified information or pursue the national interest, there is a sense in which they are obviously correct. But what does this mean after Trump has been democratically elected? What would it mean for an unelected intelligence administrator to second-guess a democratically made decision and pursue some other policy instead? Perhaps these questions are too deep for a genre-bound spy novel, but individual intelligence officers out there in the world are clearly grappling with the possibility of having to grapple with them. The degree to which Trump does or does not represent a real break with existing American foreign policy is almost beside the point.
During the cold war, Western intelligence agencies perceived the threat from without, and therefore also the threat from within, to come from the political left. This time, it comes largely from the right. In either direction, secret life is unavoidably vanguardist. So perhaps the “other” imagined by intelligence agencies is not the spies on the opposite side, but rather the unknowing public, for whom the knowledge of what secret things are being done on their alleged behalf is both forbidden and supposedly harmful. They cannot be trusted with that information; they are not strong or savvy enough, and have not been properly vetted. Worse, they might vote wrong, and screw things up for the nation—for themselves. Nevertheless the spy is tasked with protecting them, even as the question of who “they” are becomes harder and harder not to have an opinion about. Pleading guileless faith in “the Mission” is not going to work much longer; it is for the next generation of spy novelists to ask what happens after the mission is canceled.
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