David McCloskey: How to Win Friends and Recruit Sources For Your Spy Novel

Contrary to popular wisdom, it is not necessary to write what you know. A decidedly non-exhaustive list of exhibits: Tolstoy presumably did not know how to be a woman when he wrote Anna Karenina; Tom Clancy was an insurance agent and broker when he wrote The Hunt for Red October. Novels are not autobiographical. The author is not required to share the lived experience of the characters, though this undoubtedly helps speed along the process. 

But if you aren’t writing what you know, to build a compelling fictional world you do need some friends who know what they are talking about. Recruiting helpful sources with knowledge and access is vitally important. In past novels I have written about the construction of improvised explosive devices, money laundering, Persian cuisine, St. Petersburg, alligator wrestling, the cryptocurrency markets, and the world of Thoroughbred horse breeding and dealing. I have exactly zero experience with any of these things. So I went out and found people who did. Said differently: I recruited sources.

Recruiting sources is also the central drama in espionage. It is still the case that humans run governments and corporations. What happens in their heads, what they are planning to do next, and why, is of great importance to spy agencies the world over.

Combine the two, and this means that when writing espionage fiction, the author must recruit people with experience working in the spy business. To render characters in this world authentically – to say nothing of the tradecraft, the lingo, the organizational dynamics, or the moral and ethical code – the writer of spy fiction benefits from a stable of intelligence officers willing to answer questions about such things.

Full disclosure: I write spy novels featuring an ensemble cast of CIA officers, and I am a former CIA analyst, which certainly helps grease the wheels. I know former officers, which (generally) makes them more inclined to speak with me. And I am required to submit my manuscripts to the CIA’s Classification and Publication Review Board, which means the officers who speak with me know I play by the rules. I am not going to reveal sources or methods in my novels.

But in my latest outing, London Station, I was writing not only about the CIA, but about its British counterpart, the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS (commonly referred to as MI6, but almost nobody inside that Service ever calls it that). A few of the principal characters are British intelligence officers, and much of the novel takes place – shocker – in London. This meant I had to recruit British intelligence officers to help me build the world of their service inside the pages of my novel.

Two hurdles were immediately apparent. One: I am a former CIA analyst. Though Jack Ryan was a CIA analyst, and he gets to run around shooting the bad guys and getting into car chases, this – sadly – is not the world of an actual analyst. An actual analyst spends their time, well, analyzing. Analysts do not recruit sources, the case officers do. Two: the strictures of Britain’s Official Secrets Act prohibit these officers from speaking with me. To do so officially, any SIS officer, current or former, is required to receive formal approval from the Service. And this was never going to happen.

So, how to overcome these inconveniences? The CIA works closely with SIS all over the world, which means that many Agency case officers have developed personal and professional relationships with our British friends. A former CIA case officer with, say, experience in Islamabad, may have conducted joint operations with his or her British counterpart. So I landed on a simple strategy: get the case officers to do the work. I asked former CIA contacts to make introductions so I might test the waters with their British friends, and see who might be willing to help. In the spy business this would be called a warm pitch, and the success rate is significantly higher than the cold pitch, where you are, well, coming in cold.

And I found that many of these former British intelligence officers were keen to help – often because of the very thing that made cooperation, in theory, difficult in the first place: the Official Secrets Act. This collection of UK laws, dating to 1911, makes it nearly impossible for them to write or speak publicly about their work unless SIS approves (it rarely does). This means that many of them are sitting on a trove of colorful stories collected throughout their careers – with absolutely zero outlet. Enter a former CIA analyst keen to hear these stories. I found a host of Brits willing to take my phone calls, to host me for dinner, or go out for a pint. 

And quite often the actual stories were far more insane than anything I could make up. A few bizarre examples. There is a pub inside SIS head office at Vauxhall Cross. I discovered that the beer subsidies have been cut back in recent years, and that, in an homage to the Service’s most famous (fictional) alum, James Bond, there is a plaque behind the bar that reads ‘Licence to Grill.’ Several of my contacts were more willing to share details of relatively sensitive SIS operations than to admit this plaque existed.

Another story concerned an infamous, and infamously grumpy, lunch lady named Mary, who spent decades working in the canteen. Like the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, Mary was apparently quite fond of shouting at officers who dilly-dallied in line. A story that came up across three interviews, all conducted separately, went like this: one lunchtime a former Chief of SIS, the most senior officer in the Service, made his way through the lunch line. When it was time to pay, he discovered he did not have any money on him. The former Chief, quite lightheartedly, said something to the effect of: “Do you know who I am?” This, my sources all reported, was decidedly not intended as a power play, but rather a lighthearted attempt at humor to diffuse an otherwise awkward situation (and perhaps to score a free lunch). Mary’s reply, delivered in a raised tone with zero warmth or humor: “I don’t give a fuck who you are!”

As a writer of spy fiction, this is pure gold, the sort of colorful and entirely non-public story you can only acquire from a good source. In fiction, espionage, and espionage fiction, it’s not necessarily about what you know. It’s who you recruit.

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