London Station: David McCloskey on the CIA, MI6 & the End of the Special Relationship

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Back in July, and it's September now, of course. Actually, I'm gonna start again, David. Hello, everybody. It is Tuesday, September 29, 2026. A few months ago, back in July, we had one of the world's leading spy writers, novelists on the show, Daniel Silva. He's an old friend. Every two years, he comes on the show. He was talking about the truest fake spy in history, a man called Daniel Alon [as spoken: Gabriel Allon]. Daniel's latest book is called Ransom. He's an American writer. He lives in Washington, DC. [ed.: Silva's publisher bio gives Florida as his home.] But, it's a book set in the UK with an Israeli spy, and he seems, very fond of the UK, Daniel Silva. His previous book was also set in the UK. It was called A Death in Cornwall. [ed.: A Death in Cornwall (2024) was the book before last; Silva's previous novel was An Inside Job (2025), set in Italy.] It has an obscene amount of likes on Amazon, 27,000. Astonishing. My guest today is another very successful spy writer. David McCloskey has written four books [ed.: London Station is McCloskey's fifth novel, after Damascus Station, Moscow X, The Seventh Floor, and The Persian], including his latest, which is out today. London Station. He's an ex-CIA officer, so he knows the industry inside out. And as he told me before we went live, he's become somewhat of an Anglophile over the last couple of years, even if he's not particularly kind to MI6 in this new book. David, congratulations on the new book. It's out today, London Station. What is it about you American, spy writers that you all have this fondness for the UK? Do you all wanna be John le Carré? Is, is George Smiley always at the back of your mind?

00:02:22 David McCloskey: Well, Andrew, first off, it's good to be with you. Thanks for having me. I, you know, what is it about the UK? I would say I never actually thought I would set a spy novel in the UK. And the simple reason for that is that, this it's hard to get the stakes right. In particular, if you wanna write something that's really authentic, the relationship between the CIA, the Brits is pretty institutionalized. It's not always life or death. And so for a long time, I kinda thought out. It's not really gonna be something I tackle. And, and then a couple years ago before I started writing London Station, I had the thought pop into my head, which was, what if we fell out with the Brits? Like, what if the agency of the Brits started spying on each other again? Because, you know, we have this special relationship now. We didn't always have it. Prior to the Second World War, they spied on us. Right? They broke our ciphers. They ran influence campaigns in New York trying to get us into the war. Could I imagine a world where we go back to some of those dynamics? And so I thought that was an intriguing question that kinda set me down this path of, of writing this novel. And you're right. I mean, I, you know, I am, maybe increasingly Anglophilic, but I do really dish it out to my British friends in this novel.

00:03:53 Andrew Keen: I'm surprised you got any British friends, David, if you're making fun of me.

00:03:56 David McCloskey: They like so I my a cultural observation, from this knuckle dragging American is that Brits have a very self deprecating, sense of kind of cultural humor and rather enjoy being picked on. And so I think it

00:04:17 Andrew Keen: Well, I

00:04:18 David McCloskey: I found that it

00:04:19 Andrew Keen: Sorry. Go on.

00:04:21 David McCloskey: I was just I found that my British friends seem to enjoy the various jabs at, you know, their culture, politics, their intelligence services. They seem to get a kick out of it.

00:04:34 Andrew Keen: Well, you spent a lot the last couple of years in, in the UK, David, going in and out, though. I'm sure you've been to some swanky parties, have you?

00:04:43 David McCloskey: I actually have. Yeah. I, I have been very fortunate to kind of occasionally, get invited to interesting clubs and dinner parties and things like that. So, you know, all for the purposes of research, all tax deductible.

00:04:59 Andrew Keen: Of course. You're based in Dallas, Texas as we joked at the beginning or you joked the northern Texan capital of literature, at least in Northern Texas. Do Americans make good spies? I mean, the common understanding, maybe from the British point of view, although I'm Anglo-American, is that, all Brits are spies. We all have a bit of George Smiley in us, or we all aspire to be George Smiley, whereas Americans don't really understand the idea of being a spy. Is that rather unfair?

00:05:36 David McCloskey: Well, I mean, I think a lot of my, friends and colleagues at the Central Intelligence Agency would beg to differ, but I do think that culturally you are hitting on something, which is that I think Brits, in particular, the sort of British reading public, are perhaps more fascinated by espionage and international thrillers in general than an American audience. And I think there's probably a lot of different reasons for that. The one that I, feel comes into play perhaps most is that they are, you know, they are sitting on a sort of, you know, the bones of an old global empire, and they all grow up with that history. And so there's perhaps a greater sense of the world and their place at it, and they obviously have, you know, a, legacy of a global spy service that predates America's by several decades. So I think all of that contributes in some way to their seeming cultural fascination with espionage and the kind of, you know, international thriller that I write.

00:06:53 Andrew Keen: Mentioned John le Carré earlier, one of the fathers of modern certainly Cold War spy literature. You have a couple of things in common with him. Firstly, you both have the first name David. Of course, le Carré was born David Cornwell. But secondly, more interesting, le Carré, of course, learned his craft, so to speak, from working for MI6 during the Cold War. You yourself have began your career, so to speak, in the CIA. Tell me about that. How long did you spend at the CIA? When did you join?

00:07:35 David McCloskey: So I joined in 2006 as an undergraduate intern, a job that actually does exist at CIA, then and now. And I was an analyst until 2014. So just about eight years, and I worked on Syria for the most part the entire time. And did some stuff in our counterterrorism center, broader Middle East stuff, but it was mostly as an analyst working on Syria.

00:08:04 Andrew Keen: What does an analyst mean?

00:08:06 David McCloskey: Yeah. It's a good question, because it's not to my, you know, chagrin after I joined. It's not like Jack Ryan, who is a CIA analyst in those, books and the movies. So with analysts, I think the best way I could describe it is that it is, it is like classified journalism. So you are like a journalist, an investigative reporter. You are looking at a story or a question that is of interest to your consumer. Right? I worked on Syria, a principal consumer of what the CIA produces as the president of the United States. When the uprising began in 2011 and it eventually as it drifts into civil war, there is this big question hanging over Syria, which is how long can Assad hold on? What are the different scenarios for how this could turn out? And so you have this question. And to answer that question, you have a bunch of different sources. A journalist who's doing a story about, you know, corporate malfeasance might have a source inside the company. They might have access to documents. You know, if this company has been dumping stuff into rivers in a sort of cartoonish example, you could have satellite imagery. You could have, you know, measurements taken of the acidity level of the water pollution, you name it. An analyst working on Syria has satellite imagery. We have HUMINT, which is stuff we've stolen from the Syrian government, information that we've stolen from the Syrian government. We could have intercepts of text messages, phone calls, faxes, emails, you name it. The analyst takes all that information, and some of it is more credible than other bits of it. It usually is fragmentary. There's a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity in the job, but you stitch together as best you can for that information the, the what, the why, and the so what of a particular question, and you write that up for policy makers in a clear and concise and non values laden apolitical way so that they could make better decisions, and that is what an analyst does.

00:10:17 Andrew Keen: You also work for McKinsey. You must have been the only, the only McCloskey at McKinsey, were you, David?

00:10:26 David McCloskey: I—

00:10:26 Andrew Keen: Did you sometimes get confused? Did you think you were working for McCloskey rather than McKinsey?

00:10:31 David McCloskey: Well, I am a megalomaniac and, you know, sort of, recreational narcissist. So occasionally, I would fantasize about that. But, no, I don't know if there were any other McCloskeys working there. I never came upon one.

00:10:45 Andrew Keen: Man, no. The I don't know who has a worse reputation, the CIA or McKinsey. But were you doing the same kind of thing, quote, unquote analytical work?

00:10:55 David McCloskey: Yeah. I was doing, I was doing, I mean, consulting work helping corporate clients with business problems. So that could be something like, hey. I'm a company that makes concrete pipe, and I wanna know how to price that pipe more effectively. Or I have a class one railroad in the US, and I have a bottleneck through Chicago. How do I move more trains through, to, you know, a consumer company that was making, was considering dropping a new line of appliances and wanted to create a business plan for that. So, you know, McKinsey, you're right. McKinsey, when you say the name now, and in particular, if you type that into Google, you will come up with a lot of results that show various dastardly things that the firm has done. But as I was there, I mean, it was quite literally what I just described to you are the types of projects that I was doing. So I, I did not dip my hands into any of the, you know, sort of controversial things that some partners of the firm did.

00:11:53 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, the McKinsey now has the same reputation that the CIA used to have. It's interesting. So many young men, recent graduates working at McKinsey or the CIA as analysts, quote, unquote, fancy that they have a spy novel in them. They could be an international spy writer, go around the world, have a famous podcast. The vast majority of them, of course, don't make it. How did you do it, David? Did you always know that your work at both at McKinsey and at CIA was a long research project so you could become a world famous spy writer?

00:12:31 David McCloskey: No. Very, very much no. I had no idea that this would happen, and I'd never for, you know, one day while I was at the CIA thought that I would write a novel or, you know, multiple novels after I left. The writing was something that came much later, and even though I started to dip my toes into it shortly after leaving. And it was really a quite, sort of organic process of realizing that I liked to write. I like to sit down and, get into flow and watch or feel my day disappear as I get into a story. And writing is how I figure out what I think about the world and my place in it and others' place in it. So for me, you know, it I probably I wish that I had, thought I had that realization earlier because I probably would have paid more attention while I was at the agency and, you know, gotten more material that way. But, no, it was very much a post agency realization that this was something I wanted to do and would try to do it.

00:13:40 Andrew Keen: Did you work at Langley when you worked for the agency?

00:13:44 David McCloskey: I did. Yeah. That's where I spent most of my time at headquarters at Langley.

00:13:47 Andrew Keen: And have I mean, you've written, what, four books, including London, the new London book, The Seventh Floor, Moscow X, Damascus Station, each acclaimed. Have you had much response from the CIA? You're a little wary at first, nervous about maybe revealing some of the stuff you learned in your books?

00:14:12 David McCloskey: Well, so you have to send as a former analyst, case officer, whatever your role was, you have to send anything you write, publicly from an op-ed to a resume to a novel. You have to send that to their publication review board, and they review it, and they determine if there's anything that is classified in that document, and they redact it and tell you to take it out. Right? So there is a process to prevent people from, you know, from leaking or spilling intentionally or otherwise, anything that's sensitive. I also think that I have a pretty, especially now, you know, now that I'm many books in, I have a pretty good sense of what where the line is. And by that line, I don't exactly be the publication review board's line, but I mean mine because I don't want to I don't wanna reveal anything that is gonna you know, that would endanger any sensitive operation person, whatever, inside the agency. So I kind of know where the line is, and then I play by the rules and send everything to that's called the PRB, to make sure that there isn't anything that I've missed. So it's a it there's a process behind it.

00:15:25 Andrew Keen: So you know enough even now that you could get some of the people you work with or some of the people you didn't work with within the CIA into trouble in your literature?

00:15:36 David McCloskey: I suppose if I wanted to, but, honestly, if I did that, not only would it be sort of morally incorrect, I think it would be boring for the reader because the things that this anything that's actually sensitive, particular name or a particular piece of tech, it's not going to it's not gonna add to the storytelling. Right? It's actually gonna drag it. So it's not like there's a there's not a temptation as I'm writing to sort of reveal these kinds of things because the things that would actually be sensitive are not things that people would wanna read anyway.

00:16:17 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, spy craft is spy craft. The hero of Daniel Silva's book is a man called Gabriel Allon, an Israeli art thief or art expert, former spy, and it's always struck me when I've spoken to Daniel that he's also an alter ego. The hero of certainly of this latest book is harder to describe for you, David, I'm guessing, as an alter ego because it's a woman, Artemis Aphrodite Procter. She's been in some of your other books. Allon has his own, Wikipedia page. He's so credible. Maybe more real than you or I, just maybe like George Smiley. Artemis doesn't have her own, Wikipedia page, but she does come up in Gemini. How real is she? Tell me about her.

00:17:12 David McCloskey: As I first off, I should say, I'm a big fan of Daniel Silva's novels, and I got hooked on them when my dad, who was a big reader, had started passing them along to me. I think, yeah, fifteen years ago or something like that. So I'm a massive fan of that series, and I absolutely love what Daniel has

00:17:35 Andrew Keen: And Allon in particular, do you not, I was pressed [unclear] on George Smiley. Allon is where you hear it [unclear].

00:17:42 David McCloskey: I love Allon. Yes. He's an absolutely compelling, good, masterful character, and I have great memories of reading those novels. So I guess what I would say on Procter is she was originally based on a colleague of mine at the agency who because, like, the way I do characters is, you know, when you're finding a new character, you know you need to kind of this kind of character. It's oftentimes easier to start finding them if you think about someone or particular traits of somebody or even a group of people that you already know, to give that some initial authenticity or just give you something to start. And I had a friend of mine who is a quite, she's quite short. She's got dark curly hair just like Procter. Very, intense. Very she's not physically imposing, but there is a real physicality to her presence just like Procter has. And she is the kind of person who had this kind of great mix of mirth and menace that I think many case officers have where you can have a good time with them, have some drinks, go gambling, and then, you know, two days later, they'll absolutely terrify you and get up in your face about something and everything in between. And so I kind of started with that, my friend in mind as I wrote Procter very early on in my first novel, Damascus Station. And I found though that what happens with these characters is you might start with a concept of a character. But then the good characters, the ones that really have voice like Procter, they start to speak to you and they become their own person. So I don't write I don't think about my friend when I write Procter today, but she was the additional kind of inspiration to get Procter going.

00:19:44 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Some of the literary thought police might argue that a male CIA officer has no right to invent a female one. What do you think about the idea of you being able to see inside the soul if they have one of a female spy?

00:20:04 David McCloskey: Well, I'll make two thoughts on this. One is, the same logic would, would have us throw Anna Karenina out as some kind of invalid piece of, you know, appropriative work. So that's one thing, and I don't know if anyone wants to go down that road. Or if you do, I think just I part ways in conversation. The second point I would make is that I think that that line of reasoning, that logic, is mistaken about a core aspect of the way that novelists, deal with character, which is novelists are not inhabiting that character's skin. Novelists are, hearing the voice of a character and putting that down on the page. So in the same way, I would actually say that, you know, that logic would suggest that if I'm a reporter and I'm doing a piece on, you know, I'm doing a piece on I'm making this up out of thin air, the WNBA. And I'm interviewing a bunch of WNBA players about their experiences in the league and their backgrounds and all of that, that I can't write that either because I can't properly transmit or communicate the voice and expression of those players. And I think it's the same with the novel. Right? You are perhaps as a writer if you don't share the same background experiences culture of a character. I think you probably have more work to do to be able to hear that voice, more research, more time spent with that character. But it doesn't mean that you can't write that character. You should be able to write any character you want, because you're gonna tap into that voice and hear it and listen to that character as they go through the book, and you're gonna figure out what they wanna do next and why and where they come from. I think it's as simple as that.

00:22:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, I talked to, Daniel Silva about Gabriel Allon. You get the sense in his mind at least that Allon is more real and that they make their own decisions, maybe more in control than the writer. The name is wonderful, Artemis Aphrodite Procter. Has a gothic quality. Where is she from?

00:22:28 David McCloskey: Like, geographically, where did she come from?

00:22:31 Andrew Keen: Well, tell me a little bit about her background. How did she I mean, we talked about you ending up in the CIA, via McKinsey. I know you were at Johns Hopkins as well. So how did Artemis get in the agency?

00:22:45 David McCloskey: So Artemis grew up in Central Florida. She—

00:22:50 Andrew Keen: As she should with that name, although maybe you could have located her slightly west in Alabama or Mississippi.

00:22:59 David McCloskey: You could have. Yeah. Yeah. She's from, she's from Central Florida. Outside of Kissimmee, her father the name came from a father obsessed with Greek mythology. She went to school at Ohio, met her first husband. That didn't work out. She wanted to, travel, wanted to do something different with her life, ends up on kind of a whim applying to the agency, and gets in kind of a very typical way, which is, hey. This seems cool. Let me try it out and see if they'll take me. And they did. And she over the course of the books, you know, we sort of encounter this person who is quite tribal, is obviously you know, she's quite all in on the agency's mission even if she's not always all in on the organization itself. And I think throughout a couple of the books has been dealing with this bigger question around what does it look like to be loyal to a place that is not loyal to you, and how can you square those two things. So she's, I think one of the characters in this one refers to her as a competent extremist, which I think is a great way to describe her is that she is, she is all in on collecting the intelligence and protecting her assets. She is perhaps not always the type of person you would wanna work with her for, but she is brutally competent at what she does.

00:24:33 Andrew Keen: Is she white?

00:24:35 David McCloskey: She is white. Yep.

00:24:37 Andrew Keen: And is she from a working class family? I mean, the family, her father said she wanted a he was obsessed with classical education. I mean, the name gives the impression maybe of an, an impoverished nostalgic white family. Any truth to that?

00:24:57 David McCloskey: Yeah. No. I think there is. The family's like, the sort of family business as it were, is running the nation's third largest alligator themed amusement park called Gatorville in Central Florida. And she definitely did not grow up, upper class, probably not even middle class, and you can sort of see that in some of her tastes. You know, how she dresses, what she chooses to eat, how she speaks to others. I think that sort of it still carries with her. She does not this is part of the reason why it was so much fun to put her in London, in the new one, London Station because she is so temperamentally unsuited for a kind of pseudo diplomatic role in the heart of the British capital.

00:25:52 Andrew Keen: You did a deal on your latest books with, a, an entertainment house, Prologue Entertainment. She sounds ready for television or YouTube or, or visual entertainment. When you created her, did in some ways you begin to think of her as a visual character, someone suited to, the screen?

00:26:24 David McCloskey: I'd say yes and no. I mean, yes to the idea that she's a visual character and that when I write her, I have a very clear idea in my head of what she looks like, what she's wearing, you know, all this kind of the sort of visual cues. Right? that's very clear to me. But I'd I never wrote her character thinking how would this work on screen or anything like that. I just, I just found this character that I found to be compelling, and interesting. And, you know, she's one that, you know, it's kind of that one of those great characters where even as the writer, I don't really know what she's gonna do next. I can have some hypothesis, but I don't really know. So she'll do things in chapters as I write them or sequences where it'll be like, oh, that's unexpected, but that's exactly what should happen. And when you find a character like that's surprising, it's gonna generate a lot of conflict. I mean, I think, you know, it's a great character in fiction, and you also hope not while I write, but, you know, hope that, okay, this whole there'd be a way to bring this character to life on screen.

00:27:31 Andrew Keen: David, you mentioned your own father who introduced you to Daniel Silva. The other David, David Cornwell, of course, aka John le Carré, had a very famous father or maybe very infamous father who was in and out of jail, who spent most of his life lying, inventing stuff, stealing, big time crook or maybe a small time crook. And I think, at least in my reading of le Carré, both literally and otherwise, it brought out his distrust, certainly of family, perhaps of himself, and of country. Spies have curious relationships with their countries, don't they, David? What's Artemis's relationship? you've talked about maybe the complexity of her family background, and maybe her style. What's her attitude towards the United States? Is it a, like so many spies, a love hate relationship? She's not Philby or Burgess, is she?

00:28:39 David McCloskey: No. She's not. I mean, she's a patriotic person, which I think would probably separate her from some of the, you know, protagonists in le Carré's novels, who I wouldn't consider to be, you know, although he's got patriotic Englishmen in there. I wouldn't you know, it's not sort of coming through loud and clear all the time.

00:29:00 Andrew Keen: George Smiley is patriotic in his own way, I think.

00:29:03 David McCloskey: In his own way. Yeah. And I think Procter is similar. I mean, I think she's patriotic in the sense that she believes that this country, she's an American, she grew up here, she works for an institution inside the American government, and she believes, that American policymakers, the people who run the place, should have better information about our adversaries than our adversaries have about us. And that's what she that's the work that she does. Now, similarly, I think maybe, you know, sort of just thinking about her and some of the other, you know, long time case officers and agency analysts that I know. Because in this business, you're trying as best you can to deal with the world as it is. Right? And not how you want it to be. I think she's quite clear eyed about problems in the country. I think she's quite clear eyed about the people who run it. You know, London Station is sort of filled with an interesting crop of, senior characters who are quite political, who have come to run the agency, and she is not in any way, sort of, you know, she's she understands, I think the world that she lives in and the good and bad about the government that she serves. But on balance, she has decided that it is a good thing for this country to have a really effective spy service, and that's the job that she set out for herself.

00:30:38 Andrew Keen: And then does she distinguish I assume she distinguishes because it's almost [unclear] between the dysfunctionality or incompetence of the agency versus the dysfunctionality or incompetence of the country.

00:30:52 David McCloskey: Yeah. That's right. And I think that in this one, London Station in particular, we see some of the dysfunction, some of the political dysfunction in the country, has seeped into the agency itself. I mean, I think, you know, it's not a secret right now that we're dealing with an increasingly polarized political climate and, you know, sort of growing politicization of institutions that didn't used to be politicized. And, you know, as a result, I think, a growing distrust of many of those institutions. Those are all dynamics that, you know, Procter and company are dealing with, in this novel. And they're ones that I didn't set out to write a political novel, but I wanted to you know, as you read this book, I want people to feel like it speaks to the world that we're living in.

00:31:49 Andrew Keen: The CIA, of course, was born, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's a kind of black sheep. It came out, of the OSS, Wild Bill Donovan, who you know all about, the father of the OSS, very much in the context of, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and his hostility and jealousy about the CIA. Is that a kind of an institutional legacy, both in your literature and in your experience, David, at the agency, that it's never been quite treated, in the top rank, perhaps, as some CIA people might like to think it should be.

00:32:39 David McCloskey: I've look. I think that the agency I'll answer this in a couple ways. The first one is I think it is right that because we live in a pretty open democracy and have over the course of the agency's history, that there is there always has been and there always will be a distrust of secret organizations. Right? So there is a kind of cultural instinct to say secrecy, bad. Therefore, secret institutions, also bad. Or shady, unaccountable, you name it. Right? So that's there and always will be. That said, I think that the agency over time, when you look at the types of people who apply, you know, the agency is getting a lot of very talented motivated people who are doing everything from analysis to recruiting assets to, you know, the tech infrastructure that and, you know, all the work that enables the operations. Even today, you know, the agency is getting over 100,000 applications a year. So we're dealing with a lot of people who are quite competent, quite smart, quite clever, who want to join it. So I think that I think you're right that there is a mixed picture because there's this sort of suspicion and distrust of the place, that's embedded in our cultural fabric. And yet at the same time, a lot of very, very smart and capable Americans are feeding its talent pipeline every year. So it's a bit of a mixed picture, I would say. Although, you know, I think that the agency, for the most part, is a brand as a result of that, is a brand that, that certainly is recognizable and that for many people, you know, carries real weight because it's secretive and seen as some kind of, you know, an organization that perhaps not anyone can get into.

00:34:51 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We noted earlier that MI6, of course, was riddled with spies, Philby, Maclean, etcetera. The CIA less so, but there have been some notable notorious double agents. We did a show a few years ago on Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames [ed.: Hanssen was an FBI agent, not CIA] as well. How important is this both in terms of the history of double agents within the CIA, both in terms of your experience within the CIA and in your literature?

00:35:21 David McCloskey: I would take the literature point first because I think that in literature, they're exceptionally important and Philby, you know, Kim Philby more so than anybody because he not only showed what can happen when you turn an institution inside out, but his betrayal said something, I think, quite deep about the British class system, and its establishment that resonated then with Brits and continues to resonate today. So Kim Philby has had this massive impact on how we think about the espionage business, but he's also had an incredible, you know, sort of cultural legacy because you don't you probably don't have George Smiley without Kim Philby. Right? I mean, le Carré just essentially novelizes, the

00:36:12 Andrew Keen: Oh, you could reverse that. You wouldn't have, George Smiley. You wouldn't have Maclean [as spoken] without Smiley.

00:36:19 David McCloskey: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think that's true as well. So I think double this idea of sort of double agents in culture, is a massive one. I think for the purposes of the fiction, you know, as a writer, you are you're trying to fill your novel with as much conflict as possible. Right? Conflict is the fuel of good storytelling and good fiction. And when you have, you know, and obviously, you would like that conflict to be both inside a character. Right? And also between that character and other characters in the world. And when you have a, you know, someone who is working inside an organization against it, you have a level of deception and betrayal and double dealing that is just loaded with conflict. Right? It sets people against people, friends against friends, somewhat, you know, husbands against wives. Husbands against wives. Right? So that's just, you know, that's just kind of gold dust for spy fiction. So I think that is why I would actually make the case that, that when you get into the actual business, the spy business, those double agents for the most part are not looming large in the minds of many people in the business. Now, of course, if you're on the team that's hunting the moles, you know, or if you're, you know, Nicholas Elliott and you're on the trail of Kim Philby, that's not gonna be true. But I think, you know, today, when you get into the bureaucracies of these spy organizations, MI6 or the CIA, you're not day to day, these people are not sort of looming over the work that you're doing. I mean, they've shaped it sort of in the background in many unseen ways, but you're not, you know, you're not sort of wrestling, with their ghosts, you know, day by day.

00:38:12 Andrew Keen: David, your character, Artemis Aphrodite Procter, has some and I'm careful here. I'll probably get myself into trouble. Has some male qualities, hard drinking, for example. We've already talked about whether male writers can invent female characters, so we can continue down that path, probably offend a few people. When it comes to spying, and especially double agents or spying on spies, do women, and particularly your character in this book, your protagonist who's in all your books, Artemis Aphrodite Procter, does she bring different qualities when it comes to loyalty and rooting out disloyalty, or is that, oversimplistic to make gendered generalizations about spies?

00:39:10 David McCloskey: I, you know, I think it's probably over simplistic. I'm just thinking and I guess what I would say is I know a tremendous number of women who are exceptional case officers, exceptional analysts, and also know a tremendous number of men who were both of those things too. So I'm not sure if there are particular gender qualities that enable someone to be better at particular aspects of this business. But I mean, I will say that Artemis perhaps stands out in that when you look at the agency today, and it's changing, but slowly, and you look at the upper rungs of the Directorate of Operations, you know, it's a largely male dominated business. And it's been like that for a very, very long time in particular in the DO. It's very much not true on the analytical side. You know, I most of my teams at the agency were at least fifty, if not, majority female. But when you look at the case officer cadre, it's not it's very skewed. And so I think one of the things I've sort of wrestled with in thinking about the Procter character and why she does what she does and how she has worked in this business is, you know, you sort of I'm always thinking about, like, okay. Is she how much of this was her when she came in, and then how much of her is being shaped by this organization that she has chosen to work in? And I mean, it's an ongoing and kind of fascinating question for me is, you know, given where she came from, was it was she always like this, or, you know, has the place changed her? And it's I think it's, you know, it's for her, it's a little bit of both.

00:41:09 Andrew Keen: You mentioned that, she was based she's based on a friend of yours. There have been some notable female characters in the CIA, Virginia Hall, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy. Is she based on neither of them?

00:41:23 David McCloskey: No. No. She's not. She's she started based on my friend who was neither of those women.

00:41:30 Andrew Keen: So, David, the book's out today. I'm not sure how much of it you wanna give away. I mean, we want everybody to read the book. I'm sure it will be a best seller like your other books. What do you want people to know about the book to tempt them into ordering it online or going to their local bookstore?

00:41:53 David McCloskey: I would say that this spy novel, it's set at the middle of the US-UK relationship, but it's basically an exploration of a very provocative question, which is what would it look like if you were spying on the— if the CIA was spying on the Brits, or—

00:42:08 Andrew Keen: If the—

00:42:08 David McCloskey: —the British—

00:42:08 Andrew Keen: So, as one crime fiction lover wrote, it's the CIA versus MI6, spy versus spy.

00:42:18 David McCloskey: That's right. And this story, basically I mean, I tried to come up with a way, a path for these two agencies to spy on each other. And as you think it can't get any worse between the two of them, it does and the assets of both services start to disappear. So this kind of thriller we have shifts into mystery mode and Procter and her friends have to figure out where this leak is coming from and if she needs to patch things up with her British frenemies to help close that leak and protect both services.

00:43:00 Andrew Keen: Does it have some Graham Greene in it? Are some of these officers profoundly incompetent, and is the narrative in some ways rather absurd?

00:43:12 David McCloskey: I you know, I think that as we have seen from perhaps just reading headlines around the Western world these days, fiction writers are probably, trailing reality in crafting absurd scenarios and geopolitical, you know, headlines. So there is definitely some absurdity here, but I don't think it's I think it is probably less absurd than many of the actual things that we're seeing happening in our world today. And frankly, look, in a spy novel that's in part about the high politics of two intelligence services, you, for me at least, and this is just my own taste, I like to have quite interesting combustible characters who oftentimes, you know, do unexpected things or, you know, in the case of a couple characters in this novel, are actually big screw ups who make mistakes, and those mistakes color the novel. And I think we could all we've all worked at organizations where, you know, you've got someone who makes a massive mistake and then an entire team has to clean it up. So that's I think the absurd incompetence, these are features of human life, and they are features of the characters in this novel.

00:44:30 Andrew Keen: You've been very generous with your time, David. Couple more very brief questions. Last week, the new British prime minister claimed to be the figure between, America and China in terms of fixing AI. Britain, it seems, historically and in the work of all its writers from Graham Greene to John le Carré, is always searching for a role in a world which, doesn't necessarily suit its post-imperial pretensions. Does London Station suggest that I mean, I know you like London, and you like going there, and you like English people, and I'm sure you like going to the pub and watching the football and all the rest of it. But does London really matter or England matter or Britain matter in any way, especially post-Brexit England? When it comes to intelligence and spying, aren't they just a subtext to a subtext?

00:45:34 David McCloskey: Oh, I think that's a little too uncharitable, to that service. I think that look. I from the standpoint of the British intelligence officers in the novel, I think that is a major question that they're grappling with as they're dealing with their American counterparts. How do we fit into this? Do we fit in? Are we now at odds from a sort of values or geopolitical interest standpoint with our with the Americans? That question I mean, it's not just a question of the novel. This is a question that UK parliamentary inquiries are trying to deal with now, right, and committees. So it's a big unanswerable question. I will say this from the standpoint of the spy services. The Central Intelligence Agency is much larger and has a lot more money than the British SIS. That is a structural reality that is not going away. And it means that when the agency wants to do something, even if the Brits don't want us to do it or they disagree or whatever, we get to do what we want. Right? That is structurally the way it's set up, or the way it's come out. That said, as I was researching the novel, I was encountering dozens of former CIA officers and former British intelligence officers who have incredible stories about how the two services, when they work together on an issue of mutual concern or shared importance, are able to work jointly in a way that is much more, impactful than if either service worked alone. And that is the reality in the spy business of a foreign partnership where a an ally, a partner, even if they're smaller, if they have a particular source, if they have a particular piece of geography. In some cases, they could have a particular technical capability. You know, all of those things can be value added to the other service, and that is exactly how the US-UK spy relationship works. If the US commits 80 units and the Brits commit 20, right? A hundred is more than 80, and it's more than 20. And that is the underlying sort of cold logic of these kind of partnerships, and that's not going anywhere anytime soon.

00:48:00 Andrew Keen: Final question, David. The book's out today, London Station. As I said, I think it'll be a bestseller as your previous spy novels. It's, not the first book this year to be a bestseller with the word London in it. Earlier this year, we did a show with Patrick Radden Keefe, who just has a new book called London Falling. It's a nonfiction book, but it portrays London in a very dark way full of dark money, Russian, Arab money, violence, drugs, general unpleasantness. I'm not sure if you've read, Keefe's London Falling.

00:48:40 David McCloskey: Yeah. We talked with we spoke with him on, The Rest Is Classified, about London Falling. It's a terrific book. I'd highly commend it to all of your listeners.

00:48:49 Andrew Keen: And as that happens, the main characters it's a very sad book. The main character in the book, Matthew Brettler, whose son was killed, is somebody I grew up with, so I have some personal experience with that. But my final question is, is your London, David McCloskey's London, similar? Or maybe it's the London of, Artemis Aphrodite Procter. Is it different from the London of, Patrick Radden Keefe, the London that's falling, at least in his mind?

00:49:26 David McCloskey: Yeah. No. I don't think it is. But I think that the novel that I've written is dealing with foreign spy services and individual personalities in, you know, in London that are not wired into the same underbelly that Patrick Radden Keefe is describing. So my London is, as best as I can craft it, the, you know, the same London that Patrick has, we're just sort of shining a different light on it and looking at different places.

00:50:00 Andrew Keen: Well, the book is out today. Real honor, David. Really fun to talk to you. The, the McCloskey of McKinley [as spoken: McKinsey] or the McKinley [as spoken: McKinsey] of McCloskey. The book is out today. It's called, London Station. It's a novel, and you can also, of course, hear David. He's a famous podcaster on The Rest Is Classified. David, love to get you back on the show to more to talk more spies. Thank you so much.

00:50:28 David McCloskey: Thanks, Andrew. This has been great fun. Thanks for having me.