“What if we fell out with the Brits? What if the agency and the Brits started spying on each other again?” — David McCloskey
What if the Americans and the British started spying on each other again? That’s the premise of London Station, David McCloskey’s fifth novel, out today. It isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Before the Second World War those perfidious Brits did spy on America, breaking American ciphers and running influence campaigns in New York to drag the United States into the war.
McCloskey spent eight years as a CIA analyst working on Syria, then a spell at McKinsey, before writing a series of successful spy novels and co-hosting the popular The Rest Is Classified podcast. The Dallas-based author has also, he admits, become an Anglophile — which hasn’t stopped him giving MI6 what the Brits would call a “good kicking” in London Station.
His returning heroine is Artemis Aphrodite Procter, so named by a father obsessed with Greek mythology and raised on a Florida alligator farm. Described by another of McCloskey’s characters as a competent extremist, she is short, dark, hard-drinking and equally mirthful and menacing. Probably not the type of Yank best suited to a pseudo-diplomatic posting in the capital of the former empire. Although I’m guessing there are many British fellows, both inside and outside MI6, not averse to spying on Ms Artemis Aphrodite Procter.
Further Reading:
• London Station by David McCloskey (W. W. Norton, September 29, 2026) — his fifth novel, after Damascus Station, Moscow X, The Seventh Floor and The Persian.
• The Rest Is Classified — the espionage podcast McCloskey co-hosts with the BBC’s Gordon Corera, where he and Gordon Corera have also discussed Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling.
• London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, a recent guest on this show — the dark-money London that runs in parallel with McCloskey’s subterranean city of espionage.
• Earlier this year on Keen On: Daniel Silva on Gabriel Allon — the other American spy novelist with a thing for the Brits.
Five Takeaways
• What If We Fell Out With the Brits? McCloskey never expected to set a novel in Britain, for a technical reason: the CIA–MI6 relationship is so institutionalized that it is hard to get the stakes right, and a thriller needs life or death. Then the question arrived — what if we fell out? What if the two services started spying on each other again? That is not fantasy, and the history is the reverse of what most people assume: before the Second World War the British spied on the Americans, broke their ciphers and ran influence campaigns in New York designed to pull the United States into the war. The novel imagines a new administration installing a brash CIA director skeptical of the cousins across the Atlantic, agents on both sides beginning to die, and a thriller that turns into a mole hunt. He is rude about MI6 throughout, which his British friends appear to enjoy — his theory being that Brits are self-deprecating enough to relish being picked on.
• Classified Journalism. He joined the CIA in 2006 as an undergraduate intern and left in 2014, working almost the whole time on Syria. His description of the job is the best short account of intelligence analysis you will hear: it is classified journalism. You have a question your consumer needs answered — and when your consumer is the president and the question is how long Assad can hold on, the sourcing is satellite imagery, stolen documents, intercepted calls and texts, all of it fragmentary and some of it more credible than the rest. You stitch together the what, the why and the so what, and you write it up clean and apolitical so someone can decide something. Everything he publishes now, from a novel to a résumé, still goes to the agency’s publication review board — though he argues the genuinely sensitive material would make for bad fiction anyway. Afterwards came McKinsey, where the work was pricing concrete pipe and clearing a rail bottleneck through Chicago, and where he was, as far as he knows, the only McCloskey.
• Artemis Aphrodite Procter. The character began with a real colleague — short, dark curly hair, not physically imposing but with a genuine physicality, and possessed of what he calls a mix of mirth and menace: someone you can drink and gamble with who will terrify you two days later. Then, as good characters do, she started speaking for herself. Her biography is a small comic masterpiece: named by a father obsessed with Greek mythology, raised outside Kissimmee in central Florida on the family business, the nation’s third largest alligator-themed amusement park, called Gatorville; university in Ohio; a first husband who didn’t work out; an application to the agency made more or less on a whim. Not upper class, not really middle class, and it shows in how she dresses, eats and speaks to people — which is exactly why putting her in London was irresistible. One character calls her a competent extremist. The running question across the books, he says, is what it means to be loyal to a place that is not loyal to you.
• Can a Man Write Her? AK put the objection directly: some literary thought police would say a male former CIA officer has no business inventing a female one. Two answers. First, the same logic throws out Anna Karenina, and he would rather part company than follow it. Second, and more interestingly, he thinks the objection misunderstands what novelists do: you are not inhabiting a character’s skin, you are hearing a voice and putting it on the page. His analogy is a reporter interviewing WNBA players — not sharing their background means more work, more research, more time with the subject, not a prohibition. On whether women make different spies he declines the generalization, while noting a real asymmetry: his analytical teams at the agency were at least half women, often majority, while the case officer cadre and the upper rungs of the Directorate of Operations remain heavily male. Which leaves the question he finds genuinely interesting about Procter — how much of her was always there, and how much the organization made.
• No Smiley Without Philby. On traitors, he separates the fiction from the trade. In literature they are everything, and Philby above all — not only because he turned an institution inside out but because his betrayal said something deep about the British class system that still resonates. Hence the line of the hour: you probably don’t have George Smiley without Kim Philby, le Carré having essentially novelized the wound. (AK’s reversal: perhaps you don’t have Philby, in the public mind, without Smiley.) Inside the actual bureaucracies, though, nobody is wrestling with those ghosts day to day. And on Britain’s place in all this, he refuses AK’s harsher framing — a subtext to a subtext — while conceding the structural reality: the agency is much larger and much richer, and when it wants to do somet...
