“What if we fell out with the Brits? What if the agency and the Brits started spying on each other again?” — David McCloskey
What if the Americans and the British started spying on each other again? That’s the premise of London Station, David McCloskey’s fifth novel, out today. It isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Before the Second World War those perfidious Brits did spy on America, breaking American ciphers and running influence campaigns in New York to drag the United States into the war.
McCloskey spent eight years as a CIA analyst working on Syria, then a spell at McKinsey, before writing a series of successful spy novels and co-hosting the popular The Rest Is Classified podcast. The Dallas-based author has also, he admits, become an Anglophile — which hasn’t stopped him giving MI6 what the Brits would call a “good kicking” in London Station.
His returning heroine is Artemis Aphrodite Procter, so named by a father obsessed with Greek mythology and raised on a Florida alligator farm. Described by another of McCloskey’s characters as a competent extremist, she is short, dark, hard-drinking and equally mirthful and menacing. Probably not the type of Yank best suited to a pseudo-diplomatic posting in the capital of the former empire. Although I’m guessing there are many British fellows, both inside and outside MI6, not averse to spying on Ms Artemis Aphrodite Procter.
Five Takeaways
• What If We Fell Out With the Brits? The premise isn’t fantasy — before the Second World War the British spied on America, broke its ciphers and ran influence campaigns in New York.
• Classified Journalism. Eight years as a CIA analyst on Syria. The job, he says, is investigative reporting with satellite imagery and stolen documents instead of a source inside the company.
• Artemis Aphrodite Procter. Named by a father obsessed with Greek mythology, raised on the proceeds of the nation’s third largest alligator-themed amusement park. A competent extremist.
• Can a Man Write Her? The same logic would throw out Anna Karenina. Novelists don’t inhabit a character’s skin — they hear a voice and put it on the page.
• No Smiley Without Philby. His betrayal said something deep about the British class system. And on the special relationship: eighty units plus twenty is more than eighty.
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Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: another American Anglophile
00:02:22 What if we fell out with the Brits?
00:04:59 Do Americans make good spies?
00:06:53 From the CIA to the page
00:08:04 What an analyst actually does
00:10:17 The only McCloskey at McKinsey
00:12:31 How he became a novelist
00:14:12 The publication review board
00:16:17 Artemis Aphrodite Procter
00:19:44 Can a man write a woman?
00:22:28 Gatorville, Kissimmee and a first husband
00:25:52 Writing for the screen
00:27:31 Spies and their countries
00:30:38 When politics seeps into the agency
00:31:49 The CIA, the OSS and J. Edgar Hoover
00:34:51 Philby, Ames and the double agents
00:38:12 Do women make different spies?
00:41:30 What London Station is about
00:43:00 A touch of Graham Greene
00:44:30 Does Britain still matter?
00:48:00 Two Londons: McCloskey and Radden Keefe