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While at the CIA, he worked in field stations across the Middle East and briefed senior White House officials and Arab royalty. If you pick up this book, you’ll find out soon enough as it’s unlikely you’ll be able to put it down.
He is a master of his craft, but possesses a self-awareness and self-reflection that makes him human.We absolutely do provide pretty basic hand-to-hand combat training to case officers, far less than anyone would probably believe, or certainly what Hollywood would portray.
He also identifies a potential insider who can help—Mariam, whose family is tied in with the regime but who also has reason to harbor hatred for the system. Tice’s plight would become a political tool leveraged by the Trump administration from 2018 to 2020, which claimed to be pulling out all the stops to secure his release from presumed Syrian government custody while, in truth, the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to close in February 2012, and some of the government and rebel forces’ escalating violence that framed the story intensified sometime thereafter. They pose as a couple to target Vadim, Putin’s private banker, and his wife, Anna, who―unbeknownst to CIA―is a Russian intelligence officer under deep cover at the bank. McCloskey’s case officers are passionate, driven, and, in some cases, obsessive about their mission and craft. The CIA adage of “never falling in love with your agent” is mostly a reminder to remain objective and even skeptical of your agent’s motivations and intelligence reporting so as to continually assess their veracity, access, and freedom from hostile control or deceptive intent. By barrel bomb and chemical weapon, Assad hoped to strangle the opposition, raising the level of violence to a level intolerable to those who stood in his way.
Indeed, not even James Bond would have been able to convince McCloskey’s caricature of a long-in-the-tooth CIA support officer to bump 007 up from economy class on a flight under 14 hours, even at the risk of the world coming to an end. But there’s a level of detachment required of the case officer despite the appearance he or she must always display to an agent: that they’re the center of your universe and a cherished friend. It’s no spoiler to note that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people is at the center of the novel.
The Syrian regime depicted in the novel seemed to rule by coercive control so all encompassing that those caught up in it could see no way out, no means of escape. It had shades of Red Sparrow but somehow I think Syria may be a little more ruthless and plays by fewer rules than Russia. 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.
But he likewise portrays other key players in this saga—such as the protagonist and other CIA characters as well as his principal Syrian nemesis—as more genuinely complex. The most memorable set of moments for me were in the middle of the Syrian war, when I traveled around the region with a group of very senior Agency folks. Tlass grew up alongside the Assads, his father being close with Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad. The analyst Zelda, the Office of Technical Services bombmaker Paulina, the Russian Volkov, the list goes on by McCloskey manages to imbue them with personality and vividness in a few short sentences, making them feel important and life-like.Set against the backdrop of a Syria pulsing with fear and rebellion, Damascus Station is a gripping thriller that offers a textured portrayal of espionage, love, loyalty, and betrayal in one of the most difficult CIA assignments on the planet. While many at the time hoped Bashar, a trained ophthalmologist with a very-Western oriented wife, would open up the country, ushering in a new prosperity, reality turned out very different. Set during the Syrian civil war, former CIA analyst David McCloskey’s exciting spy thriller is rife with “paranoia, the birthright of all Syrians,” the “quotidian brutality” of Bashar al Assad’s multiple “security” organizations, and the often byzantine machinations of the regime’s foreign and domestic opponents, including the Obama administration. Assuming that someone, somewhere, is always watching or tracking your movements, there are no “days off. Joseph, the protagonist of former CIA analyst David McCloskey’s exciting spy novel, Damascus Station, is vividly depicted as a real person.
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