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

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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?” T]his propulsive thriller is at once a master class in spy craft and a poignant story of forbidden love set during the brutal Syrian civil war." People 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 McCloskey says that the specifics of the story—time, place,and major characters—are purely fictional, including an instance of Sam engaging in a martial arts training session with his undercover operative and love interest, both being trained by an Israeli instructor.

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.” If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. As a result, he had an easy time when CIA censors reviewed his work. “I did my own kind of filtering…I might have had one hundred fifty footnotes in there to show where stuff had already been through the PRB or where it just existed in the public domain, outside of WikiLeaks and stuff—which doesn't really count when you're trying to source things with them. So as a result, you know, they didn't touch much, to be honest.” 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 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.

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. A thrilling portrayal of espionage, love and betrayal… utterly brilliant& guaranteed to keep you pinned to your sunlounger’– Dorset Magazine The story takes place in the early 2010s, while the United States was engaged and supporting Assad’s opponents in the Syrian civil war. The Syrian president does appear in the story as an unattractive walk-on character, the only real political figure in the book. McCloskey goes deeper on the supporting cast around the dictator. There are husbands and wives, family members who must be protected, human foibles even among the most unyielding enemies.

Don’t miss this enthralling standout debut, one of the best to come across my desk in recent years’ – Adam LeBor, Financial Times However, what is clear from this novel is that McCloskey has been there, done it and a whole lot more. The intricacies of the story are there for all to see and in the hands of a lesser author they would not play out as well as they do here. Damascus Station is simply marvellous storytelling… a stand-out thriller and essential reading for fans of the genre’– Financial Times 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. A] swift dive into the lethal, nebulous world of CIA operations in the Middle East… Damascus Station is a breathless ride." SpyTalkMcCloskey’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 2023 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 A truly sensational read! In fact, Damascus Station is the best spy novel I have ever read. David McCloskey experienced Syria firsthand as a CIA analyst, and he delivers a thrilling, graphic, gripping, and realistic - albeit fictional - portrayal of the CIA and the bloody, tragic Syrian uprising. I lived this extraordinarily frustrating episode in Agency history, and I could not put this book down.” 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. His main character, Samuel Joseph, hews more to the middle of the spectrum between Jason Bourne and George Smiley, and that’s not a bad thing. He is a master of his craft, but possesses a self-awareness and self-reflection that makes him human. His absolutely verboten indiscretion of becoming romantically and physically entangled with his agent Miriam, certainly raises the stakes in the plot.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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 author clearly knows his stuff and at times makes it difficult to follow all the nuances of the plot, but this doesn’t spoil the story, rather it makes you concentrate that bit harder. I'm here to say I'm hooked! His writing style was outta this world. The characters they immediately drew me in and kept me interested and very intrigued throughout the entire book!David McCloskey is a former CIA analyst … the book is energised by his own experience’– The Times Best Books of 2023 So Far I wrote most of the novel in 2019, and since then the day-to-day fighting in Syria has declined as lines of control have hardened and the large number of foreign actors involved have pressed their local allies for ceasefires and the like. But the events of the novel take place in the early years of the conflict, roughly 2011-2013, and the war only got worse in the years that followed.” Damascus Station is simply marvellous storytelling...a stand-out thriller and essential reading for fans of the genre." Financial Times A spy thriller I never would have guessed would be something I would get so into..... And I can't wait.for this to hit stores in October. David you have gained a new reader here! Assad Or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria | Sam Dagher | Little, Brown, & Company | May 2019.

I am always on the look-out for spy novels however there appear to be very few authors out there who have been able to capture the genre perfectly (other than Le Carre and Forsyth, for me). Sam and his CIA team use that human factor to find weaknesses among their adversaries and to exploit those weaknesses. In Damascus Station, victory is never assured and there is more than one deadly encounter before it’s all over. An astonishingly accomplished debut that masterfully mixes action, tradecraft lore, a grown-up Romeo and Juliet story and bags of untold intelligence about the conflict’– John Dugdale, The Times Best Thriller Books of 2023 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 MontefioreThe story is gruesome against a violent and merciless regime . Nobody can possibly come out of this well.