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

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Mr. McCloskey, who grew up in Minnesota and studied international relations, worked as a political analyst in CIA headquarters and from field stations in the Middle East.

For those hoping for a more realistic look at how the CIA spies, you won’t be disappointed. Yes, as an operational tradecraft diva who spent 34 years on the street for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, I found a number of artificial, inaccurate, or unrealistic accounts. But whereas I remain unable to sit through an episode of Homeland or 24 and simply suspend reality for 007 films, which are just pure fun, I was impressed and grateful for McCloskey’s ability to integrate just enough reality. In fairness, the author explains his interest in protecting sources and methods as well as the CIA review process, which likewise assures as much while not revealing too much. Damascus Station is simply marvellous storytelling...a stand-out thriller and essential reading for fans of the genre' - Financial Times

Advance Praise

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. A daring CIA operation threatens chaos in the Kremlin. But can Langley trust the Russian at its center? 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 author is a former CIA analyst and his knowledge is all over this superb debut spy thriller … full of the paranoia, tedium and terror of spying’ – The Sun 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.

But the cat and mouse chase for the killer soon leads to a trail of high-profile assassinations and the discovery of a dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime, bringing the pair under the all-seeing eyes of Assad’s spy catcher, Ali Hassan, and his brother Rustum, the head of the feared Republican Guard. 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.” 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.” Assad Or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria | Sam Dagher | Little, Brown, & Company | May 2019.David McCloskey is a former CIA analyst … the book is energised by his own experience’– The Times Best Books of 2023 So Far 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 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?” 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.”