CIA Analyst David McCloskey: How People Are Really Recruited, Manipulated, and Broken

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0:37As a family. Light them up, Johnny! Marvel's first family is certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. That is fantastic. And critics say it's one of the best superhero movies of all time. Marvel Studios' The Fantastic Four First Steps, now streaming on Disney+. Rated PG-13. What time is it, Ben? It's Club Rudeau! Really nasty autocratic regimes that massacre their own people, such as the Iranian one, can unfortunately remain in power for a long time. Killing your way out of something is a viable strategy, unfortunately. Even governments that don't really provide any significant socioeconomic benefits to their people, that are deeply repressive, and that have really lost all of their legitimacy narrative.

1:20The Iranian idea that the Islamic Republic is sort of a legitimate government, I think, by most of its people, I think that's gone. I say this after having worked on Syria at the CIA during the Arab Spring and watching how Assad held on, lost a lot of power, lost a lot of territory, changed the nature of his government, but held on until 2024, a 13-year civil war, essentially, and killed 700 ,000 people. I feel like in that culture, whether it's Saddam Hussein, Assad, the Iranian Republican Army, their attitude is we're going to fight to the last man standing and die in the seat. I mean, Assad ultimately left.

1:57He was forced out by Putin. But it feels like they will just hold on gripping to the bitter end. Am I right in saying that? Welcome to The Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me today is a bestselling author, David McCloskey. He's a former CIA analyst. He's a podcast host. He's a podcast brother of mine, actually. He is the co-host of The Rest is Classified for Goalhanger, another Goalhanger great podcast, which is brilliant. So please download his podcast. You'll learn a lot about David and an incredible history of so many different things that have gone on with the CIA and MI6, et cetera.

2:36But we're going to talk about The Persian, which is a novel that David has written. His previous books include The Seventh Floor, Damascus Station, and Moscow 10, or Moscow X, but I call it Moscow 10. But David, what a great book the Persian is, and thank you. Thank you. And a little bit of trivia, David and I are born on Trump's Insurrection Day. It used to be our birthday, David, the 6th of January. We've been celebrating it since before it was cool to celebrate, right? Yeah, but now it's Trump Liberation Day, David. So anyway, but anyway, great to have you on. Let's start with The Rest is Classified, if you don't mind.

3:17I'd like to talk a little bit about that show. While you're doing that, feather in a little bit of your background and tell us why our viewers and listeners should be downloading The Rest is Classified. And I'm proud to say, by the way, I'm a paying founding member of The Rest is Classified. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I like my goal. I like my goal hanger. I like a little bit of goal hanger in my life. All right, but tell us a little bit about the show first, then we'll get into the book. Yeah. So The Rest is Classified, which I co-host with Gordon Carrera. And I should note, Anthony, you have been a sort of celebrated guest on the podcast.

3:56We did some episodes on the Kennedy assassination, and you came on, and we had some fun. You treated me very shabbily, I'll say. Yes, I get bad reviews for that, so I have to off you. You got, yeah. Our club members were disappointed with your behavior. Some of our, yes. I did read some of the reviews. I was sort of teasing. Sometimes the British people don't get the American humor. That's true. I do apologize to you for my teasing, but I just, you know, I have a point of view on the Kennedy assassination that you and Dominic Sandbrook do not share, which is fine. That's true. Because you're the more normal establishment types.

4:35But I do appreciate you bringing me on. We had a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun. So The Rest is Classified, which I co-host with Gordon Carrera, is a podcast that focuses on stories from espionage sort of past and present. So we tell great stories about spies, and those could be stories from the Cold War. We're doing a series right now on Kim Philby, probably arguably the most notorious traitor in British espionage history, maybe in anyone's history. We did a story earlier this month about the raid to apprehend slash kidnap Nicolas Maduro out of his PJs. So we're looking at stuff that's going on now.

5:21We're looking at stuff that's going on way back when. And the idea is to really peel back the curtain and talk a lot about, you know, for example, in the Maduro raid podcast, how does that happen? How do you actually conduct a raid like that? What is the integration necessary between intelligence services and special forces, special operations to do that kind of thing? So we try to get into details about how the world of espionage and intelligence agencies actually work in each story and make it a good time. And I like Hassel Gordon Carrera because he's very British and we have fun with that as well.

5:58So we do two episodes a week, three for our club members, and we've been going for a little over a year now and having a lot of fun with it. You know, you talk about Kim Philby. And so for our viewers and listeners, Kim Philby was part of the British establishment, a well-regarded person. And, of course, he was a trader. He was selling secrets or converted to the KGB, and he was selling secrets. And, you know, we had something similar in Alger Hiss, right, in the U.S., right? A lot of people thought that Alger Hish was an establishmentarian. He went to all the right schools. Richard Nixon, Whitaker Chambers accused him of the same thing.

6:33So, again, before we get into the book, what turns a spy, David? Well, yeah, we've actually done a lot of episodes on this question because it's a little bit different for everybody. You know, there's a very, I think, overused acronym that still is somewhat directionally useful. It's MICE, M-I-C-E, money, ideology, control or coercion, and ego. And those four things are oftentimes, you know, sort of referred to as the potential motivations for why people commit espionage. And it's not totally wrong, but it sort of misses the very complicated human stew that's at the heart of all of these traitors, really, and the betrayal, not just of secrets and country, but oftentimes of friends and family and co-workers and that kind of thing.

7:28And so, you know, a lot of the case officers, the CIA case officers that we've interviewed for the pod talk about why people spy in terms of cracks and seams inside individual humans. So this idea that people have particular areas where they are broken, where they have vulnerabilities, where they want things. Sometimes they don't even know they want them. And a really good case officer, a really good handling officer is able to help that person discover things that they may not even know themselves that they actually want and then give them those things. And so it's a complicated picture, but, you know, the way it often looks in these kind of case officer agent handler relationships and why people end up becoming spies can look a lot like, you know, somewhat offering marital advice or someone stepping in if someone needs some extra money.

8:25It's very basic human stuff that often gets this relationship going and gets someone down a path to, you know, betraying everything that they hold dear. I think this is a good segue, actually, because in the Persian, you talk about a very complicated situation. You have an ancient friendship between the Persians and the Israelites, and these people ancestrally were reasonably close. the Shah of Iran was considered an ally of the United States and of Israel. And now you have this ideological regime that has suppressed this very large educated population of people for 46 or 47 years. And there's a fight going on.

9:10And so there's like everything you talk about, there's ideology, there's suppression of freedom. There's one country is worried about its existential survival. The other country is worried about perpetrating or continuing its sort of radical Islamic republic. Take us into the story of the Persian and what inspired you to write about this conflict. So the Persian is set in the very kind of real present day shadow war between Israel and Iran. So this is a story. It's not about Iran's program. This is not a story about the war in Gaza. This is a story about the intelligence conflict between Israel and Iran.

9:57And the thing that got me going on this was as I started to look into the history of really Israeli, you know, Mossad, their foreign intelligence agency, targeted assassinations, targeted killings of people in Iran, nuclear scientists, engineers, military officials, list goes on and on. It goes back to about 2007 when this policy started. And I thought it could be really interesting to flip that on its head and say, what if the Iranians had that capability, albeit at a kind of smaller scale, to do that inside Israel? What if they built that capability? And what would it look like then for the Israelis to try to stop those attacks and to hunt down the people responsible for that.

10:47And so the story really grew out of this kind of what-if construct around the Shadow War and flipping some of the real dynamics inside it on its head and saying, okay, how do I construct a kind of cat-and-mouse game between Mossad and between the Iranians that has some really interesting characters at its center? And of course, I mean, like any good spy novel, Anthony, this one's got a dentist right in the middle of it. Yeah. Listen, it's not really a dentist though, right? There's a lot going on there, right? No. Former dentist. Right. Former dentist. Okay. So an ordinary man living in a quiet life in Stockholm who it turns out it's a story about normal people doing extraordinary things, right?

11:33Or abnormal things, right? And so what do we know from your experience in life? We don't know who the heroes are, right? They get to the battlefield. You think the mancho guy is the hero, and it's the young corporal that's carrying people on his back to the tent hospital, right? We never really know who the heroes are, right? What makes the hero, David? Well, I'm kind of a sucker for these stories where you have the very ordinary person who looks a lot like all of us and who's not been brought up as a case officer, as a spy, who doesn't have any family members who have done this kind of work and who just gets sucked into something much bigger than himself.

12:19right um so that's kind of our protagonist is this guy named cameron goes by cam asfahadi who you know as a as a dentist in sweden realizes that you know he wants out he wants more money he's quite selfish and greedy and very self-interested so a lot like a lot of us and he wants to go to california uh wants a new life also something i think a lot of us can relate to But the way he gets there is that the Israelis, you know, Mossad puts someone in his dental chair and basically makes him an offer that he sort of can't refuse, but also doesn't really want to refuse. Right. And ends up in this game.

12:59Ends up in this game. Look, you know, he said that MICE acronym. He ends up in this game for money. But at a deeper level, he ends up in this game because he is disconnected from personal freedom. He's disconnected from his family. He's really a sort of unrooted person. who's wandering and who stumbles into somebody from Mossad who's got answers for him. Answers that he sort of thought he wanted, but as it's put to him by this guy in his dental chair, he realizes that's what he wants and he goes after it. And he ends up playing, you know, this very dangerous game for the rest of the novel. Let's go to the general, who I thought was perhaps the most chilling character.

13:42Okay, he's terrifying to me because he's so believable. So let's talk a little bit about him. Yeah, believe it or not, elements of this character, the general, I based off of my dear editor, my editor at W.W. Norton, who has been my editor for all four of my novels until he passed in the last five or six months. This guy by the name of Star Lawrence is absolute legend at at Norton and publishing. But who was the most savage critic of, you know, bad style, a bad story, terrible prose. I mean, he was just absolutely ruthless. And so the general is this. He's an Iranian interrogator who has our it's not spoiling anything, although, you know, there is we should say for listeners.

14:34There is hopefully a surprise ending here, which I don't think we want to give away, but it's not spoiling anything to say that this operation that Cam gets involved in goes totally sideways and he ends up in prison in Iran under the general's care. And he's writing much of the book as his confession three years on before he's presumably going to be executed. He's writing for the general. The general has him writing over and over and over again, in part because that's a piece of how you extract the truth from somebody in a situation like this, but also because the general is quite sadistic and enjoys it.

15:13And so he has Cam writing, you know, Cam writes the romance version of the story. He writes the Scandi Noir version of the story. He writes the spy version of the story. And the general is kind of editing this thing over and over again over the years as as Cam sort of continues to linger in captivity, just waiting for the end. But the general is this kind of, you know, he's he's meant to be hopefully an unsettling character because he's got Cam in a really terrible position. You know, I learned a lot in the book. You know, I love reading spy books because I'm not a spy and I want to learn what's lurking under the surface of our lives in terms of people, how they surveil people or potentially targeted assassination.

16:00And without revealing classified secrets, of course. how did your real world experience inform you to the details here of what you're writing about well it really does inform pretty much everything i do in the in the writing because i really try you know the way i write is the characters come out of the setting and the plot comes out of the characters and so i try to get the characters right and what i mean by that in the context of an intelligence story, is that my characters in this novel, one of them is a case officer for Mossad, Israel's Foreign Intelligence Service. Another one is the asset, Cam, who's recruited by Mossad.

16:44Well, to kind of get the characters right, you have to have an understanding of how does this work in the real world, in the same way that if you were writing a character who was a cop and you didn't you didn't do any research at all on what it's actually like to be a police officer you didn't talk to police officers you didn't you know engage with any of the sort of process that they deal with um didn't learn the vocabulary you would have a novel you would have a character at the center of a you know police procedural that just isn't going to feel right and i think in the same way i'm trying to create a feeling of authenticity of these novels by by sort of breathing that into the characters.

17:26And so practically the way I do that is I spend a lot of time with former CIA officers and I ask them a lot of questions. I put a lot of what-if scenarios to them. I did the same with Mossad officers in this book, try to find them and get them to talk to me and put the same questions to them about how Mossad operates and how it's different from the CIA. And a little bit harder to get in touch with Iranian intelligence officers, but spoke to a lot of Iranians about living in Tehran about the regime, about what its intelligence services are like, what it's like to be held by them, and kind of infuse the novel with a lot of that research.

18:03So use the reader, latch onto these kind of details and feel like you're being pulled into a different world. To me, it's a human story. And I think a lot of this is going on in our political realm. Hear me out for a second. We know what's right. And we know when governments are acting and behaving in the right sort of way and in the wrong sort of way. We just know this. It's our intuition. We could look at something very quickly. It's like Malcolm Gladwell says, we just blink and know it's right and know it's wrong. The Iranian people, the majority of them know what's going on in the country is wrong.

18:43How much longer do you think that wrongness will survive? You know, this is the question, and it's one, you know, I just say, Gordon and I did a couple Iran episodes on The Rest is Classified on exactly this question of how should you look at a regime and its stability and how or can you predict when these things might tip? And, you know, it's interesting. I think regimes, sadly, really nasty autocratic regimes that massacre their own people, such as the Iranian one, can unfortunately remain in power for a long time. But, you know, killing your way out of something is a viable strategy, unfortunately.

19:32And even governments that don't really provide any significant socioeconomic benefits to their people, that are deeply repressive, and that have really lost all, you know, their legitimacy narrative. You know, the Iranian idea that the Islamic Republic is sort of a legitimate government, I think, by most of its people, I think that's gone. But it's really, it's quite a sad thing. I say this after having worked on Syria at the CIA during the Arab Spring and watching how Assad held on, lost a lot of power, lost a lot of territory, changed the nature of his government, but man, held on until 2024, a 13-year civil war, essentially.

20:19Killed a lot of people. And killed 700 ,000 people. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to make an observation and you tell me if you think it's accurate. I feel like in that culture, whether it's Saddam Hussein, Assad, the Iranian Republican army, their attitude is we're going to fight to the last man standing and, you know, die in the seat. I mean, Assad ultimately left. He was forced out by Putin. But but it feels like they will just hold on gripping to the bitter end. Am I right in saying that? I think in this context, it is that's a much more likely outcome. outcome than some kind of negotiated end or elements of the leadership stepping down.

20:59You know, I think also it's much less likely given, I mean, you look at the, obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty right now around the death toll so far, but it seems like tens of thousands of people died over a two-day period on January 8th and January 9th. It's a lot harder once you've done that as a leadership to imagine how you get to some kind of negotiated end or you'd even want it. And so, yeah, I think it's much more likely to become much more violent before there would be a transition or you'd slip into this kind of civil war, civil conflict kind of scenario before you'd get to some kind of transition, unfortunately.

21:38Okay. So you're a powerful, powerful storyteller because I look at the novel and yes, it's about the spy craft it's about the increase in their suspense but you've woven into this novel forgiveness uh personal survival it's a love story and so uh you're like a compassionate dude david so talk about this you sound surprised anthony you sound surprised by this i'm a cat i'm not as probably as compassionate as you i mean i don't know i've i've been blown away by the uh the human qualities. Not really surprised, by the way. I know you're a brilliant guy, and I know you're a man of letters. I'm not really surprised, but I love this aspect of the story.

22:26So talk a little bit about that. I think a lot of stories in the spy genre, and it makes damn good sense most of the time, end up being pretty dark, pretty gritty. You're dealing with a lot of, I mean, frankly, a lot of nasty stuff, right? You're dealing with people who betray other people and betray loved ones and you're dealing with people who are deceiving other people and lying and you know it's that's not the whole essence of of the spy game but it is a piece of it and it's a way it comes across a lot in spy novels and when i was writing this one i thought you know i don't know if i want to explore those kind of themes as much i mean There's a lot of that at the book, but I was fascinated because I read at some point early in the drafting.

23:13I was reading the story of Joseph in Genesis and was struck by what was necessary. We try to get to this guy's head and think about what's necessary to forgive a bunch of brothers who took your dearest possession and left you for dead. What is actually what what kind of person does that? You know, and. It's hard. And there's a long road, I think, for most of us to get there if we've been wrong, to get to a point where we can actually be forgiven by the people that we've wronged. You don't get it for free. And I wanted to explore a situation where somebody has, in this book, Cam does something.

23:55It's really wrong. And he deceives somebody at length throughout the novel, you know, this woman named Roya. And I wanted to see if there was a way to get to forgiveness. And so for me, and I didn't know the answer when I started, really, but I thought I wanted to see if a guy who wants that would be able to get it in the end. You know, how do you research and write? Like, how do you tell us the process? um the the book is so incredibly well researched frankly and i really feel like i got an intelligence briefing by reading the book so tell us a little bit about that process i um i try to treat my writing like a nine to five as much as i can sometimes the podcast does impinge on that but i try to write 2 000 words a day um usually about five days a week and i try to get as fast as possible to the essence of a first, a really lousy first draft as quickly as possible as well.

25:00And as I'm doing that kind of initial sprint, I'm not actually thinking too much about a lot of the research that's going to be necessary to make this thing feel like it's a holistic story that's well-researched and has a bunch of details. I'm just kind of getting that thing. And I get that thing. And I think that draft to me is kind of the equivalent of taking a bunch of stuff out of your cabinet, your pantry in the kitchen and putting it down on the countertop and then saying, all right, I've got 30 ingredients out here. What kind of meal do I want to make? And then as I move forward, I'm like, OK, I'm going to take all these ingredients.

25:38I'm going to make spaghetti and meatballs. And so there's going to be some stuff that I put out on the countertop that I put back. So in the draft, I might delete it, get rid of it entirely, whole characters, plot lines. but then other things that really need to be brought out. So like this, you know, ground beef and garlic and Parmesan cheese, you know, needs to be turned into, with these spices, need to be turned into meatballs. And so here's how I'm going to do that. And so then there's a bunch of research to kind of refine it, get it really tight. And that happens, honestly, a lot just through conversations with people.

26:09I mean, it's a lot of reading too, but I find that the best stuff is by getting in touch with somebody who really knows and just putting like five questions to them, walking them through a situation and having them play back to you how they would handle it. Some of the best conversations I had about Iran in this book were from people who had just recently left Tehran who could talk about, here's, you know, here's the kind of dishes we have when we have birthday parties. Here's what traffic is like in this part of town. Here's what the city smells like. Things like that that you're not going to get from reading a book about Iran's foreign policy, but you've got to get down to that human level.

26:44So a lot of the research really happens in that way. And then it's just rinse and repeat for like usually 10 drafts and then the book's done. Yeah. So I look, I'm looking forward to the next book. Actually, I think, I think you have created a franchise for yourself, uh, where people are going to be like, okay, when's the next book coming out? I want to, I want to chomp down on it. Okay. So we're at, we're at the point in the podcast where, um, my producer and I, we picked out five words. Okay. And so you're going to give me a one or two sentences. Obviously, there are words from your book. I'm going to say Iran.

27:21I say Iran, you think of what? Civilization. Yeah, I'm bullish on Iran. And when I think of Iran, I think of a future story that's quite bullish for Iran. I feel like the thing is burning out. It's probably going to end violently, but I feel like it's burning out. What about Israel? Hopeful. You know, I think I'll use more than two sentences on this one. Yeah, yeah, no, no. Give me a few seconds. I dedicate, you know, part of the dedication for this book, beyond that to my lovely wife, was for Israel and Iran for, you know, a better future and a better way. And just seeing these two societies, these two governments that are linked in this awful conflict and looking at sort of the underlying, you know, the people that are there, I hope that there's a better way to translate the connection between, you know, Persia and Israel because there actually could be, I think, tremendous, as there has been in the not so distant past, a tremendously close relationship between the two societies.

28:31Something I gleaned from the book and just tell me if my analysis is correct. I feel like Israel is tougher. A lot of people in the United States feel like, okay, Israel needs the U.S. for its survival, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm not saying that that's not an important alliance. It certainly is. But I feel like Israel is way tougher and way more resilient autonomously than people think. That's sort of what I got from your book. Is that fair to say, or am I off on that? No, I think so. I think certainly there's some external dependencies on us in particular and on that sort of intelligence and security and military connection.