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In this June 4, 2015,
photo, CIA operative turned best-selling author, Jason Matthews, a 30-year CIA
veteran and author of the new novel, "Palace of Treason," poses for a
portrait in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
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When Jason Matthews retired after more than three decades as
a CIA operative, writing fiction proved a form of therapy.
Living in Los Angeles,
cut off from the agency and its secrets, Matthews channeled his energy into the
2013 novel "Red Sparrow." It became a best-seller and critical
success, resulting in a reported seven-figure movie deal.
AP report continues:
"I started thinking
about war stories," he said in an interview. "Pretty soon I blinked
and I had like 300, 400 pages."
Five years on from his
retirement, Matthews is back this week with a sequel, "Palace of
Treason," set in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
And the most interesting
accolades are coming from CIA insiders, who marvel at how he manages to slip so
much past the agency's censors, portraying the heart-pounding rhythms of
on-the-street espionage better that any novelist in recent memory.
They're not alone: The
New York Times dubbed Matthews' new book "enthralling" in a recent
review.
Matthews, 63, spent most
of his career overseas specializing in "denied areas," places where
Americans were closely watched and their movements restricted. He is part of a
long line of former spies who turned to fiction but the first to have spent a
full career at the CIA, rising to management, and then emerge to write with
such commercial and critical success.
Matthews speaks six
languages and helped manage seven CIA stations, sometimes working in tandem
with his wife, Suzanne, also a retired CIA officer. They raised two daughters
in countries they aren't allowed to name. At one point he was operations chief
in the counter-proliferation division, tasked with slowing Iran's nuclear
program, among other things.
He says his books amount
to "a love letter" to the Central Intelligence Agency of his memory,
one that he fears is slipping away. His specialty was classic espionage —
sneaking around foreign capitals persuading sources to betray their country.
It's a different
discipline than that employed by the many CIA case officers who spent the last
decade doing tours in Baghdad and Kabul, often conducting source meetings in an
armored vehicle with a military escort. Nor does it bear much resemblance to
the man-hunting involved in tracking terrorists to target in lethal drone
strikes.
Human intelligence, or
HUMINT, is the "the patrimony of CIA," Matthews says. "The irony
is that the global war on terror has actually taken away resources and
institutional focus from classic HUMINT."
Matthews' novels are a
celebration of HUMINT — the art and science of gathering it, the consequences
when it goes wrong. He found an amenable setting in modern Russia, which is
proving an increasingly nettlesome U.S. adversary. Unlike parts of Syria and
Iraq, the CIA can still send Americans to spy in Russia, where the biggest risk
to an operative with diplomatic immunity is being sent home.
The hero in his new book
is clever, competent Nathanial Nash, everything one would want in a CIA case
officer except perhaps for the forbidden love affair he carries on with his
asset, Dominika Egorova, a former ballerina and trained seductress who
dispatches attackers with a lipstick gun and her bare hands.
Matthews, who could pass
for an insurance salesman but for the thick-framed, fashion-forward glasses,
spares few details in his steamy sex scenes.
"I've read a lot of
thrillers, and some of the sex is almost offhand and embarrassingly
vague," he says. "So I wanted to go to the other end of the spectrum
and be embarrassingly graphic."
The Americans are the
good guys in these books, while the Russians are mostly corrupt torturers and
thugs. Putin, a central character in "Palace of Treason," is
portrayed as amoral, venal and paranoid.
Agency reviewers have
focused more on scenes that depicted the main characters using disguises and
carefully reading faces during hours-long surveillance detection routes to get
"black" before a secret meeting. These "are accurate, richly
detailed renderings of anxiety-filled tasks conducted daily by intelligence
operatives around the world," former CIA officer Jim Burridge and an unnamed
employee wrote in a review of "Red Sparrow" on the CIA's Web site.
That book won Matthews
the Edgar Award for best first novel by an American and a reputation among his
former colleagues. The agency reviewers marveled at how Matthews got all the
tradecraft, as spies call it, past the CIA's Publications Review Board, which
reserves the right to black out secrets in anything written by a former
employee.
Matthews said he hit a
snag, however, with his follow-up novel and was forced to fly to Washington and
change part of his ending to get final sign off.
Still, the narrative
bristles with reality.
When a Russian military
officer wonders why his CIA handler isn't offering him frequency-hopping mobile
phones like the Russians use, the CIA man marvels to himself: "If they
(only) knew how the FBI and the NSA were crawling up their
frequency-hopping" posteriors.
Matthews depicts plenty
of buffoonery by senior CIA officials, too, including a blustering, dangerously
unqualified Moscow station chief whose inability to spot surveillance puts
operations at risk. At headquarters, the chief of operations is caught in
flagrante delicto with his female assistant.
Matthews' institutional
criticism doesn't extend to the agency's harsh treatment of al-Qaida detainees,
excoriated in a recent Senate report. Although he played no role, he defends
his friends who did. The sum total of the CIA's work has been a force for good,
he said.
"Some of the things
that we've accomplished are absolutely magnificent, and have kept the bad guys
at bay," he said. "You never actually win 100 percent, but we've
pushed (weapons) programs back, and we've embarrassed bad people and eliminated
other people."
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