Back in America

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If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.
Welcome to Back in America, the podcast.
Today on Back in America, I am thrilled to welcome David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst and the acclaimed author of The 7th Floor, Moscow X, and Damascus Station.
During his time at the CIA, David was deeply involved in CIA work, working across the Middle East during the [00:01:00] Arab Spring, briefing senior White House officials, military leaders, and even royalty. His expertise extended to delivering classified testimony to the Congress and writing for the President's daily brief.
After his intelligence career, David transitioned to McKinsey where he advised national security and aerospace clients on complex strategic issues. David now lives in Texas with his wife and three children. David, welcome to the show. It's a real pleasure to have you.
Thanks for having me. Really, really excited to be here chatting with you today. I
david, do you think that the current conflict between Israel, Lebanon, and Iran could escalate into a global war? Especially now that we see that the U. S. Navy got involved, how close do you think we are from a global crisis?
We are already in a regional conflict. And I think it's just a question of [00:02:00] whether it gets worse or whether it, we sort of find ways to, to deescalate.
There are enough connections between what's going on in the Middle East, sort of geopolitically with Russia that make it plausible, that the conflict if it were to escalate significantly, it'd be difficult to just contain it inside the region itself.
One of the things that has struck me in reading about the thirties has been that you did have these disparate kind of theaters of conflict.
With, Italian, essentially imperialism in North Africa, German in Eastern Europe Soviet in kind of that same, that same sphere, Japan, in East Asia, that all started with, Separate from one another, but eventually kind of merged and coalesced and became one conflict. I think that's very possible
And what do you [00:03:00] think is happening in the intelligence community at the very moment?

Inside CIA and inside every intelligence service. That's focused on this region to try to understand the signposts for broader conflict to try to understand what might trigger it and to come up with scenarios to help understand and kind of bound the possibilities about where the conflict might go and getting a hand.
Of course, these are unanswerable questions, right? So at the same time as CIA is, for example, trying to collect information on, let's say. Iranian plans and intentions, right, with respect to Israel, with respect to Iran's relationship with Hezbollah, like we're trying to collect real secrets about Iranian capabilities, but also, what the Iranians intend to [00:04:00] do.
We are also, at the same time, trying to deal with a world that is inherently unpredictable, and you're trying to bound that uncertainty so that you can help policymakers what scenarios they need to be prepared for.
There's also of course, just the daily business of, we have partnerships and relationships with. intelligence services all over this region and with foreign leaders all over this region. And we're trying to understand how best we can support them and how best we can actually exchange information with them so that we all have more information than our adversaries do.
Do you feel that the average American care about global event, like what's happening in the Middle East? And how do you think that domestic issues overshadow international concern?
I think as Americans in general, because we are bordered by oceans, distant from most of these conflicts going through an educational system that doesn't really prioritize foreign languages, [00:05:00] travel understanding how the world works, that many of us don't really have a deep.
Interest or understanding about what's going on around the world. I think that's generally true. And I think that that plus, frankly, just poor job we've done as a country on foreign policy over the past generation has made it very difficult to have conversations about what pieces of the globe matter to us.
What we should care about and where it makes sense to resource, diplomacy, military action. Commercial engagement, like we're not even because it's so distant to most of us and because again, we've just done a really bad job at managing foreign policy over the past generation. I think that connection, that [00:06:00] trust of the elites who manage it and the people who sort of benefit from it or don't.
Is really fundamentally broken and makes it hard to have those kinds of conversations.
You live the broad, and I wonder how did that experience change your perspective on what America is.
I lived abroad in France when I was in college, and then I've spent a lot of time mostly in the Middle East, , both living and working there when I was at the CIA. And I think that those kind of experiences help you understand, that there are other people in the world who have their own histories, their own cultures, their own perspectives.
And it doesn't mean that you always draw a sense of equivalency, moral or otherwise with, those systems, but it does arm you to just understand and empathize , with them and with other people who are brought up, [00:07:00] in very different circumstances from you and yet are in many ways, it can be quite similar.
It also gives you a sense in some cases where you can actually look at other societies and say, they're doing this better than we are. A very minor seeming example that was very profound to me when I was living in France was the importance that was placed.
On the family unit, on family dinners, on time together as a family, that was very different from, a lot of American families and my experience with friends in the States and their kind of family structure, not so much my own, but I'd seen that a lot in, in my college and in high school.
And you kind of see that and you think, well, they're doing something right there. I think that's genuinely better than, our emphasis or lack thereof here in the States. So that's a small example, but those, experiences, help you understand, where America's getting [00:08:00] things right and where things feel good or quote unquote, maybe better as you're, you're overseas comparing everything from the family unit to the plumbing, but sometimes you see places where you say, well, we don't have it all right.
And it's a humbling thing and it sounds a little sappy, but maybe more of a sense of like we're kind of all in this together to some degree. And. Having those kind of connections and bonds between people who were brought up in very different places and have very different experiences, I think is, really a powerful, , and ultimately good thing.
In your latest book, The Seventh Floor, one of your characters, Rem Somov, criticized America, its polarization, and he said that we are witnessing the destruction of America from within. I wonder how much of you there is in this character. ,
my novel, The Seventh Floor is a. Essentially a modern mole hunt. , the Russians have a, , an asset, a double agent working in the [00:09:00] upper reaches of Langley CIA headquarters on the seventh floor, which is where the director has their offices. And the book is really a hoot on it.
There's, there's an investigation. To determine who is the mole and you, the reader led along with this investigator. Her name's Artemis Proctor. She appears in my first two novels as well. She's the unofficial mole hunter in this book, trying to figure out which of her friends or enemies, , is working for, for Moscow.
And on the other side of the coin. Is Rem Zomov, who is an officer inside the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and he is running the mole and trying to protect the identity of this mole from being uncovered by Proctor and her friend. And. Rem Zomov has a perspective on what they're hoping to achieve with this penetration of CIA.
And it [00:10:00] is, of course, to steal secrets from the agency. But at a deeper level, it's also to essentially turn the place inside out. And to turn the institution into a pawn for Russia inside the United States kind of government and, and social fabric. And over the course of this, he's got, as, as you mentioned, this perspective that, you know, there are these massive cracks and fissures in American society and he can help sort of exploit them.
And hopefully, ultimately destroy CIA as an institution by turning it inside out from the top. His diagnosis of the problems I think is, drawing on enough reality around our political polarization, , our public health, our sort of loss of mojo, I think in many respects.
I think he's right on all of that stuff, sort of lost a sense of our place in the world. I think he's, he's [00:11:00] right. I don't think we're near the collapse that he perhaps thinks that we are. And I purposely made his character a bit provocative in that perspective because he's, He's like a lot of other Russians, and look, if you read any of these leaks from disinformation groups that are working on behalf of the Russian state, they all end up getting high on their own supply.
They overstate their actual impact on American society pretty consistently, and I think Rem falls into that trap as well in the novel.
I'm really curious of how you ended up being a writer. I read that you were inspired by your father
Yeah. Yeah.
and then you started, I mean, at the CIA, you did write a lot. That was your job. Then McKinsey, you kept on writing reports.
At what point did you go like . I want to dedicate my life to writing.
Well, my dad did have a big influence on me. I mean, he's a, college [00:12:00] professor, we grew up in a house where, sort of, he was reading all the time we were talking about what we were reading, we would go to bookstores and libraries, on the weekends and just kind of look around at different books.
So it was always a, sort of place where I felt like ideas, the, the sort of the content of, of stories. I mean, these were. What we talked about at our kitchen table. But I had never really considered writing until actually I left the CIA. And I just started to write about my experience working on my, my account at the CIA was Syria.
And so I started to write just about what I had experienced living in Syria, working on it. Cause this was a time when, sort of the country had fallen into just utter collapse and state failure.
We want the
[00:13:00] And that was a very traumatic experience for me and a very emotional one.
And
And so the writing really was.
By attempt to understand what I thought about the world. My place in it, what I had experienced. And so I just kind of wrote and wrote and wrote, and it was really
And more of a journal entry to be honest, to start, that effort, became very slowly over time, Damascus station.
I had to essentially took what I had written, put it in a drawer for five years, came back to it. And said, okay, how do I write something that I want to write and read, but also something that other people would want to read too. And I think that time away was really critical to get more objective about the storyline, the plot, what I was attempting to do, and to sort of [00:14:00] think about, how do I turn this into a propulsive story that, that's interesting to everybody.
So right, writing turned from being a job to being sort of a healing process.
yeah, yeah, in many ways, It was a way for me to understand what I thought about things and, and to get my thinking straight, but also to experiment with writing, writing voice, writing character. I mean, it's not the kind of writing you do at.
The Central Intelligence Agency. It's not the kind of writing you do at McKinsey. You do this kind of anodyne, objective, emotionless stuff. And I was, I was pleasantly surprised to see that in fiction, I could deal with a lot of the same topics, the geopolitical topics but through the lens of just people and how they're experienced by ordinary people.
That was a real profound moment for me in realizing [00:15:00] that I enjoyed that. Yeah. A lot more than trying to prognosticate about where the Syrian civil war was headed or what might happen in the Middle East, those topics are very interesting to me, but I feel like I have more to say about how individual people might experience them and live through them.
Take me to the day and the place when you took your journal entry and said, this is going to be a book. I mean,
knew wasn't a book, but it was like the length of a book. And. You fast forward to 2019, I took six months off my consulting job for a whole bunch of reasons just to spend more time with the family, kind of get healthy.[00:16:00]
And I also knew that I was going to go nuts if I didn't have a project. And so I decided, look, my project is going to be that I'm going to take this hundred thousand words of stuff and I'm going to turn it into a book. And so there, there was kind of the months before I started that sabbatical, whatever you want to call it, where I said, okay, that will, I will, whether it gets published, you know, beyond me, but I will turn this into a book.
And I spent that whole time, about seven months in the end. , finishing the book and that's what became Damascus Station, my first novel.
I can feel that there is a lot not said here. Into how that happened, , I can feel that there is, an element that was, , a very important, , health reason for you to want to do that. But still, , I mean, nobody becomes [00:17:00] a writer like that. , you need the connection, you need the understanding of the industry.
You need, you need help. You need an editor. Where did it start? Was it a phone call? Was it someone you met?
So the, the kind of, commercial side, , started with a warm connection that I had through my wife, who had a friend at a think tank in D. C. Who had an agent and this agent did primarily nonfiction stuff, but, but did a little bit of fiction and, and did some spy fiction.
And so I had a conversation with him. It was probably not more than 10 minutes when I started the process. And I said, here's the concept I'm thinking about. Here's a little bit about me. And he offered some advice, and he said, look, when you have a couple of chapters, send me those chapters and we can have another conversation, And so a couple of months later, after, I'd kind of gone through this whole phase of outlining things and then throwing it all away, I just started, I wrote a couple chapters, had a friend look at them, [00:18:00] my wife look at them and sent them to that agent.
And he said, I like this. Here's a couple thoughts. When you're done, send me the book and I will read it and tell you what I think. And we didn't talk again, , for like five months. And I just wrote the book and edited it like crazy, probably seven or eight times in total, and had a bunch of friends read it and offer their thoughts and did more editing.
And when it was done, I sent it back to him and said, I think this is it. And two or three weeks later, he got back to me and said, I really love this I want to work with you.
We submitted that book, , about a week before COVID started. So that was unfortunate timing. We submitted it to like seven or eight editors. And pretty much everybody said no, except for one, which is actually my current editor now at WW Norton, his name is Star Lawrence, and he didn't even, he didn't offer on the book or anything like that.
He just said, I love this stuff. I hate this stuff. If you fix [00:19:00] this stuff that I hate, let's have another conversation. And so I spent basically that summer of 2020 doing another round of edits on the book. And when that was done, Star read it and Made an offer to buy it and then it came out a year later.
Yeah, wow, amazing. How do you cope with the pressure of social media as a writer? Sure. I mean, you've got good. Reads all the reviews, Amazon, all the stuff. How do you deal with that?
If you're talking about reviews, I do check them sometimes. I shouldn't. I don't think there's a lot for writers to, to gain from checking those kind of platforms for a couple reasons. One is. I think if you read stuff that's like, Hey, this guy's the greatest writer ever. And I love this book. It makes you think you're awesome. And that's not actually helpful for good writing.
And then on the other side, if you read really bad reviews and people tell you that you're, you're, you [00:20:00] know, horrible and you, you know, you should never write again. That also isn't the right headspace to be in, to be writing. You need to be in a spot, I think, where you have enough self confidence about your own writing abilities.
To continue to show up to the empty page and put words on it. But you also need enough humility that you don't always get it right. And you constantly need to subject the writing to pressure and pain to make it as, as good as it can possibly be. And I don't think reviews generally help with either of those things.
Let's go back to, , politics and your life in the, , intelligence community briefly. I was reading on Politico that, , the intelligence community is extremely concerned with a second mandate from Trump. Okay. Given, , how politicized you want the U.
S. intelligence agency to be. And what's your [00:21:00] take on that?
I'm concerned too. I'm broadly just concerned that we now live in a society that is extremely politicized and extremely polarized. , and It's very hard or harder. Number one, there's just not as much trust in institutions anymore. And so the CIA is part of that, you know, the sense of kind of a public compact, I think is being eroded, but very specifically to CIA.
The agency is an apolitical or is designed to be a relatively apolitical institution, only the director and deputy director or political appointees. Everybody else in that building, , are careerists for, for the most part. It's a pretty technical skill to be an intelligence analyst or to work in tech or to be a case officer.
And you really need people who know what they're doing and, and have grown up in that system. It is designed to be a truth [00:22:00] teller to the president and to senior policy makers. About what's actually going on in the world. It is, it is not designed to be, or intended to be a political instrument.
And of course, there are plenty of examples we could give of, of times when that has fallen short, but the the design is that CIA can speak truth to power
okay. Okay.
and going through a rigorous process to make sure we actually produce something that, that's true.
Was truthful for the president so that no matter if they were Democrat, Republican angry at CIA, in love with CIA, I mean, we were just reporting what, what was actually going on and I sat in, I sat at meetings with CIA directors were very junior [00:23:00] analysts would, would contradict, would contradict the CIA director in meetings because they actually knew more about a particular topic and were encouraged by their managers to, to do that.
We have examples of what it can look like when institutions of state become extremely politicized. I mean, a great example of this is what happened, , after the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet union, where, the engineers on the ground there actually knew how to, I mean, they wouldn't have prevented anything from happening, but they could have prevented the sort of extent of the disaster.
And the problem was that the political commissars were trying to cover their butts. Weren't interested in the technical solutions because they wanted to sort of, prevent the loss of standing with Moscow. And so it was much worse than it needed to be. And I think there's actually a similar analogy you can draw with intelligence analysis and, and, , collection today, where if you start to treat it like it's a political football, [00:24:00] Or that the agency is a piece on your political chessboard, you end up, soiling the objectivity of that, truth that comes in and it makes it much harder for us to actually know what's going on in the world.
Are you already starting to write a new novel?
I'm almost done with the fourth one.
What is it about?
been wor it's about Israel and Iran. If you can, if you can believe it. It's It's a book that's set in the middle of the shadow war between Tel Aviv and Tehran, and it is all about, a group of Iranians who are trying to kill a group of Israelis inside Israel, and a group of Israelis who are trying to find out who's trying to kill them in Iran, and they go back and forth.
Extremely timely, huh?
yeah, as it, as it turns out, I mean, I started writing it last fall, , after October 7th, but before we kind of had this massive expansion of the shadow war [00:25:00] into broad daylight. , so I've had to, I've had to make some updates along the way, but , I'm trying to deal as realistically with the dynamics in the region as I can.
How do you do your research besides Googling and, stuff? Do you still have access in the community, in the intelligence community or?
I have people who will talk to me. Both current and former officers. And that I find is, is the single best way to render this stuff authentically. You, you kind of need to find, as a, as a writer, it's false, false that you need to write what you do not need to just write or just be hamstrung to write based on your own experiences and expertise.
But if you're going to step much outside of that, you need good friends who know what they're talking about and, and, or who can help get you access to people who do, you know like my, my Israel Iran book. I mean, I, so I've never been to Tehran. I've never been to [00:26:00] Iran. I may never go, but I was able to find a a guy who has lived in Iran for most of his life and just left Tehran two years ago, and, knows the ins and outs of the city, like the back of his hand.
And he's reading the book to give me notes on how I have rendered Tehran. So you find people like that who are willing to play a role. And, and, and that, that's how I mean, I read everything I can, but there's a limit to that. And the most valuable stuff are from those kinds of conversations.
And, and what do you, what would you like your reader to take out of your books?
Well, number one, I want them to lose sleep and I want their families to be angry with them because they've been ignored for several days while they, while they read. So that's one kind of overarching thing is like, I am, I am trying to create an experience where you don't want to pull yourself away from the book.
So that's, that's one. I think. At a deeper level, I am trying to get the [00:27:00] CIA right. So I, I want readers to be brought into that world and to feel like they have some better understanding, not just of like the tradecraft and the operations and all that, although that's all well and good, but also kind of the, the culture, the moral ethic, all that stuff.
I want the CIA to feel very real and I want readers to come out of this with like a better understanding of, the CIA, good, bad, and ugly. And then on the kind of geopolitical side, in my novels, I try to flatten the distance between the stakes of the characters and the geopolitical stakes so that those are almost one in the same,
Silence.
station, you have a sense of the Syrian civil war. If you come out of Moscow X, my second novel, you have a sense of sort of the back and forth between the CIA and the Russians right now, if you come out of the seventh [00:28:00] floor, you have a sense on the Russian angle, but also you've been brought into Langley to sort of understand how this place works, what role it plays, where it's messed up, where it functions, that kind of thing.
So those are the things I want people to come away with, but it's all sort of wrapped in this. Or underneath the superstructure of. The story fails if it's not consumed. And I want people to just be propelled forward by the story.
Thank you finally what is America to you? Silence.
I think America to me is an idea that we are not bound by ethnicity, race, where we came from, where our parents came from, that we can build a really safe, dynamic, free, open society that is nation where anyone can be part of it, right? You [00:29:00] don't have to be, , born here to contribute.
I think that's a really powerful idea. And it's one that I think I'm really hopeful will continue to guide us going forward.
Thank you so much, David.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to Back in America. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe on whatever platform you are using and share it with your friends. Thank you. [00:30:00]