Spy Thriller of the Year Features CIA Chief and Daily Mail Scoops

Earlier this year, I met a literary agent to discuss the thriller I am writing. During our conversation, he asked whether I had read Damascus Station by David McCloskey.

I admitted that I had not. The answer was clearly the wrong one. He responded with a mixture of disbelief and disdain, insisting that I put matters right immediately. I took his advice, went to the nearest Waterstones and bought a copy.

The praise printed on the cover offered an immediate explanation for the agent’s enthusiasm. General David Petraeus, who commanded US and Nato forces in Afghanistan and Iraq before becoming CIA director, called it “the best spy novel I have ever read”.

The Times described it as “one of the best spy thrillers for years”, while historian Simon Sebag Montefiore called it “breathlessly gripping and truly terrifying”.

The novel itself justified the acclaim. McCloskey spent years working as a CIA analyst at field stations throughout the Middle East, giving him a close view of some of the 21st century’s most consequential conflicts. That experience also gave him an exceptional command of espionage tradecraft.

Whether he is explaining how to build a pipe bomb or evade surveillance, McCloskey writes with the convincing authority of someone who understands the subject from the inside.

The novel also introduced Artemis Aphrodite Procter, a diminutive but formidable CIA station chief who stands just 5ft in her socks. She has since featured in three of McCloskey’s four novels.

Procter returns for a fourth time in McCloskey’s fifth book, London Station, published on Thursday. This time, however, she shares the spotlight with an unexpected co-star: the Daily Mail. The newspaper’s scoops, McCloskey says, “drive almost the entirety of the action” — more on that later.

The story begins with a Trump-like president taking power in Washington and setting out to rewrite the terms of Britain’s long-standing “special relationship” with the United States.

Its timing could scarcely be more pointed. The “America First” camp currently holds sway in the White House, fuelling repeated disputes with Britain over issues ranging from tariffs to the war in Iran. Tensions were also highlighted this week by the abrupt withdrawal of 12 heavy bombers from RAF Fairford.

In London Station, the fictional president is John Wood, and Britain’s intelligence services become one of his principal targets.

Wood regards the British as “pickpockets”. McCloskey’s narrator offers a more elaborate version of the insult, describing them as “a band of charmingly accented thieves trading on faded imperial glory to collect crumbs of intel and hawk them to the CIA in exchange for a fine meal”.

Determined to redress what he sees as an imbalance, Wood removes the experienced professional leading the CIA and replaces him with Bobby Jerome, the founder of America’s largest house-building company.

The idea may sound far-fetched, but McCloskey noted in a recent article for The Spectator that, soon after he completed London Station, Donald Trump appointed Bill Pulte — heir to a home-building fortune — as acting director of National Intelligence.

Jerome’s appointment immediately attracts opposition. A senator on the Intelligence Committee points out that the businessman has “zero intelligence or national security experience”.

When a congressman asks whether he plans to run the CIA as he runs his family business, the Texan responds defiantly: “So if you’re asking Senator, if I wish to run a bloated, roguish, government bureaucracy… with the same commitment to excellence that I’ve brought to my company, then the answer is yes.”

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Jerome then appoints his son-in-law, Harry Kellman, as director of operations, charging him with ensuring that the Agency receives value for money from its allies. The parallels with Trump could hardly be clearer.

Kellman wastes no time making his mark. At a critical moment in a perilous operation to extract an asset from Tehran, he cuts off aid to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service — apparently known internally as SIS, rather than MI6.

The decision has disastrous consequences, setting up a full-scale confrontation between two intelligence agencies that are meant to be working as allies.

Cue a first appearance by the Daily Mail. ‘CIA leaves MI6 agent to die in Iran,’ blares the front-page headline. The significance of the story is not lost on Artemis Procter, who has made a miraculous return to power after spending some months on what could have been described as gardening leave if it hadn’t involved her spending the time alligator-wrestling on her cousin’s ‘alligator-focused tourist-trap’ in Florida.

Following her appointment as Chief of London Station, the Mail has become her newspaper of choice.

As McCloskey told me when he dropped into the Daily Mail office earlier this week: ‘Procter is the kind of person who wants to know what’s going on in the world and she wants a lot of the fun stuff, too. And so I wanted the information to get leaked to her favourite British press outlet, and the answer I came up with was the Daily Mail.’

In his novel it doesn’t take long for the Americans to conclude that the story had been leaked to the Mail by a source close to the head of MI6 or a senior figure in Whitehall, and Jerome is incensed.

But – spoiler alert – not half as mad as he is 50 pages later when the Mail breaks an even more incendiary scoop.

‘The Daily Mail is kind of a character in London Station,’ says McCloskey. ‘One of the major sub-plots of this novel.’

This newspaper becomes a key part of the ‘information battle’ between the CIA and MI6. As McCloskey says: ‘Lo and behold, who gets the scoop? The Daily Mail. And the fallout from this Daily Mail piece really drives almost the entirety of the action and leads the CIA director to do some really wild and kinetic things in retaliation.’

He adds: ‘I think one of the biggest myths about the world of espionage is the superhero spy: well-armed, much more attractive than your average person, drinking martinis, all those kind of tropes.

‘Those stories are very interesting, they’re quite fun, but when you actually look at the world of the spy business and what they’re doing day to day, it just bears no resemblance at all to reality.’

That said, all great espionage thrillers tend to rely on a memorable central protagonist, and Procter – whose Russian is described as ‘fluent’ and her English as ‘profane’ – has matured into one of the most distinctive characters in the spy fiction genre.

McCloskey fans know her as a vodka-swilling hard-ass, but in London Station she is off the booze, replacing it with an addiction to energy drinks and candy. She still keeps a shotgun in her office, however.

McCloskey’s particular brand of genius is that he combines first-hand experience of the spy game with a novelist’s eye for detail and a playwright’s ear for dialogue.

You couldn’t ask for a more sure-footed guide to the murky world of espionage and the struggle for supremacy between the world’s great powers.