Damascus Station: Unmissable New Spy Thriller From Former CIA Officer (Damascus Station, 1)

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For an authentic representation of what it's like to work in intelligence, look no further than Damascus Station. McCloskey has captured it all: the breathtaking close calls, the hand in glove of tech and ops, the heartbreaking disappointments, the thrill of a hard-won victory' - Alma Katsu, author of Red Widow and former CIA and NSA analyst Damascus Station is simply marvellous storytelling… a stand-out thriller and essential reading for fans of the genre’– Financial Times But the Syrians see themselves as fighting for survival; it takes Val’s death to force the realization among the Americans that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is willing to break the unspoken rules of the game.

Assad Or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria | Sam Dagher | Little, Brown, & Company | May 2019. McCloskey’s remarkably accomplished debut mixes action, a Romeo and Juliet story and previously undisclosed intelligence about Assad’s regime’– The Times Best Summer Books for 2023Strong character development is not an inconsequential point—spy stories hinge on the characters, their motivations, their fears, their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. A terrible plot or mundane espionage action (and Damascus Station is the furthest from one) can be saved by vivid characters, but the same cannot be said in reverse. Servicing a dead drop is a relatively banal activity in the broader ecosystem of literary espionage (and almost certainly absolutely terrifying and exciting for a real operations officer), but throw in dynamic characters working against each other, and it becomes something vastly more interesting.

A thrilling portrayal of espionage, love and betrayal… utterly brilliant& guaranteed to keep you pinned to your sunlounger’– Dorset Magazine Joseph, the protagonist of former CIA analyst David McCloskey’s exciting spy novel, Damascus Station, is vividly depicted as a real person. He must navigate his own emotions, the accurately captured and ironically rigid government administrative hoops found even in espionage, and the various evil villains hot on his trail. Indeed, not even James Bond would have been able to convince McCloskey’s caricature of a long-in-the-tooth CIA support officer to bump 007 up from economy class on a flight under 14 hours, even at the risk of the world coming to an end. The Biden administration has likewise invested in Tice. Its public posture, however, has been more focused on determining his ultimate fate rather than suggesting he might still be alive or his release is still possible. Sam pursues the brothers with surveillance assistance and monitoring from CIA headquarters, along with an extensive human network inside Syria. He also identifies a potential insider who can help—Mariam, whose family is tied in with the regime but who also has reason to harbor hatred for the system. Were she to be discovered as an opponent of the regime, Mariam and everyone around her would face certain death. McCloskey’s character development is rich and thoroughly enjoyable. Nearly every character, and there are many, receive an attention to detail that brings them to life, even if they are secondary to the plot. The analyst Zelda, the Office of Technical Services bombmaker Paulina, the Russian Volkov, the list goes on by McCloskey manages to imbue them with personality and vividness in a few short sentences, making them feel important and life-like. My personal favorite character was Artemis Aphrodite Procter, the no-nonsense Chief of Station Damascus, who suffers no fools and supports her people in the field, even if they require a punch in the mouth.

Advance Praise

Damascus Station is a breathless ride; the best laid plans sometimes come tumbling down and brinkmanship can lead to miscalculations on both sides. It is easy to identify good and evil here, but McCloskey also mines the nuances of people on both sides fighting to survive. Therein, perhaps, lies the high praise delivered by the likes of retired Gen. David Petraeus, who served as CIA director for a time, and who gushes i n a pre-publication blurb that Damascus Station “is the best spy novel I have ever read.” That is completely the figment of my imagination,” McCloskey said in an interview with SpyTalk . “We absolutely do provide pretty basic hand-to-hand combat training to case officers, far less than anyone would probably believe, or certainly what Hollywood would portray. But I think the idea of having a case officer doing this kind of felt reasonable to me from a recruitment standpoint, that you're trying to develop somebody and do something with them. You learn about them. It's kind of intimate.” Case officers assume, at their peril, that an agent has not lost their job, changed their mind, or been caught, threatened, and turned since the last time they met. An agent’s double life is a lonely and scary existence. But there’s a level of detachment required of the case officer despite the appearance he or she must always display to an agent: that they’re the center of your universe and a cherished friend. McCloskey does well to make Joseph both a confident and expert spy—and therefore, a vulnerable and real human being who at the end of the day must make the right choice.

I think even in a place like Syria where, you know, the regime is horrendous and what it's perpetrated over the past 10 years is hellish and despicable ,” McCloskey said, “... I wanted to capture what would it feel like to be in a position where you're sort of born into this system, and you still have choices and you have some agency. They are making decisions we wouldn't agree with, but what's going on there? And so how do you deal with a situation where you're trying to protect yourself and your family?” Falling in love with your agent—literally, in this case—is a cardinal sin in the espionage trade. But Sam cannot help himself, especially after she pummels him at the dojo.

Superb breathlessly gripping thrilling & truly terrifying, written in unadorned style by an CIA agent, almost real in its details of CIA espionage in Syria, savage feuds within Assad palace, intrigues of Mideast. Highly recommended' - Simon Sebag Montefiore But just like his villains, Damascus Station’s hero, like those around him, is human. And humans, even highly trained and effective case officers, make mistakes. The CIA adage of “never falling in love with your agent” is mostly a reminder to remain objective and even skeptical of your agent’s motivations and intelligence reporting so as to continually assess their veracity, access, and freedom from hostile control or deceptive intent. And an agent must be reassessed and essentially re-recruited at each and every meeting because life happens. Whereas I remain unable to sit through an episode of Homeland or 24, I was impressed and grateful for McCloskey’s ability to integrate just enough reality.

But it’s not the last we’re going to hear from McCloskey (and maybe Sam, too). The erstwhile CIA man has outlines for two other Syria books, and hints at a third that focuses on Russia. Protect your agent. It’s all that matters,” Sam Joseph reminds himself in the midst of a perfect storm of personal and professional crises while a looming threat places thousands of innocent lives at risk. The tension builds as we meet a cross-section of Syrian society, the impoverished, the falsely accused, the torturers themselves who pull out fingernails, then go home from work to play with their children. For an authentic representation of what it’s like to work in intelligence, look no further than Damascus Station. McCloskey has captured it all: the breathtaking close calls, the hand in glove of tech and ops, the heartbreaking disappointments, the thrill of a hard-won victory’– Alma Katsu, author of Red Widow and former CIA and NSA analyst Overly kind, says McCloskey, who describes himself as a student of some of the stars of the genre— John LeCarre , David Ignatius and, more recently, Jason Matthews , the author of Red Sparrow, who died in April and who was also a former CIA officer.Dagher also brings the civil war home, connecting the reader with every day average Syrians. He writes affectionally of those fighting to survive on the front line, continuing to advocate (at the time of writing) for freedom and reform, and those part of the Local Coordination Committees—organizers of and reporters on, the protests on-the-ground. The tragedy is that the reader knows, especially now, that their efforts will not prove to be successful. Stuffed with insider insights … It reveals some top-notch intelligence tradecraft’ – Tim Shipman, Sunday Times The tradecraft on display is riveting, far more so than any shoot-out. Running a multi-hour, cross-city surveillance detection route (SDR) is likely thrilling in practice, but does not on first glance make for riveting reading. Yet, McCloskey brings the reader along through every twist and turn, offering a glimpse, albeit incredibly limited, of what it must be like to be an Operations Officer in a hostile environment. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.