Episode 13: What Makes a Great Authentic Spy Novel?
Double agents, dead drops, and deadly missions enliven some of the most popular and well-known spy novels. But do you need to have been an ACTUAL spy in an intelligence agency like the CIA to write like one? And how do real spies rate the fictional ones?
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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[PETER SIGHS]
[PETER, THINKING ALOUD TO HIMSELF:] Covering national security can be tough. I spend so much time thinking about all these threats.
It can all be a bit of a bummer.
[PETER SIGHS]
Maybe I should just try to relax a little… have a little fun…
[SOUND OF PETER PUTTING HIS FEET UP, POURING SOME TEA]
Maybe I could even try and write a spy novel… just like John le Carré….
ARCHIVAL John le Carré: [NARRATING] …when he was being treated as a live double agent with a serious prospect of development. The pickup point was the forecourt to York City race course. He was to arrive by bus and with a copy of the previous day's Yorkshire Post while his case officer waited in the layby in an office car.
People love his novels...
ARCHIVAL John le Carré: [NARRATING] Today if experience told me anything, Sergei Borisovich was just one more poor player in the endless cycle of Russian double-double games who has had his hour and been tossed away, and now he has decided it's time to press his help button.
How did le Carré do it?
ARCHIVAL John le Carré: Look for conflict.
Mr. le Carré? Is that you?
ARCHIVAL John le Carré: Yes. The cat sat on the mat is not a story, but the cat sat on the dog's mat is the beginning of a story. So look for conflict.
So conflict, like the kind you have with a family member?
ARCHIVAL John le Carré: My mother left me when I was 5 and then I didn’t see her until I was 21. My father would periodically disappear. … Then he absolutely disappeared because he was on the run.
Yeah I’d always kind of known he was a con artist.
ARCHIVAL John le Carré: That sounds rather gloomy, but for a writer, it was an amazing resource of experience and characters.
Really? Characters… Seems a bit obvious. Anything else I need to know, Mr. le Carré?
ARCHIVAL John le Carré: I really can't write unless I'm speaking my lines. I read them aloud to myself. I read them aloud to my wife, poor lady.
My wife Tresha does that for me as well. She's got great ideas.
And I've certainly interviewed my share of spies.
A writer I know once told me, you just need to go to sleep and your unconscious basically will do a lot of the writing for you.
So how hard could this spy novel thing be anyway? You’re just making stuff up…
J.E. Leonardson: It's a lot harder than you think.
Alma Katsu: It's a little harder, I think, for people who haven't been in the business, no matter how many people you interview, how much research you do....
Valerie Plame: Many people walk around going, I have a novel in me. Sure. How hard can this be? And it turns out it's really hard.
Okay… Maybe it's not so easy… It probably would be a good idea to get a little more advice.
I'm Peter Bergen.
Up next on In the Room, what it takes to write a great, authentic spy novel.
[THEME MUSIC]
Author Alma Katsu always wanted to be a fiction writer. In college, she studied writing.
Alma Katsu: But I come from a very small town and sort of an unworldly family. And this was a long time ago, pre-internet. And um, back then it was not obvious how one actually became a novelist.
She was told she was too young.
Alma Katsu: Everybody at the time said ‘What can you write a novel about? You haven't had any life experience.’
So naturally instead of becoming a novelist, she went to work as an analyst for the National Security Agency, the NSA — the U.S. intelligence agency that collects and analyzes information from things like cell phones all over the world.
Alma Katsu: So I had the opportunity to test with NSA and just the tests — I heard such crazy stories about 'em. I figured, well, that's a life experience. And even if it goes no further than that, there's something I wouldn't normally do. But I tested well and they offered me a job. I told them I'll only come for a few years and then I'll leave.And they were like, ‘sure, sure.’ And I had a 35 year career in intelligence.
Peter Bergen: When you joined it was famously known as the ‘No Such Agency.’ Right. I mean, now it has something of a public profile, but when you joined, even its existence was almost a secret.
Alma Katsu: Yes. We couldn't say that we worked for NSA. We had to say we worked for the Department of Defense, everybody knew…
Peter Bergen: Anybody who, like, knew the intelligence community would probably be able to divine it. But, but it was a highly secretive, uh, organization, uh, still is.
Alma Katsu: It still is. Yes.
Her long career in intelligence also included a decade at the CIA where she worked as an analyst and gathered intelligence on things like mass atrocities and genocide.
Alma Katsu: I looked for war criminals. Uh, Bosnia for instance, we, we did a lot of chasing of Mladić and Karadžić.
And she even did a stint as a recruiter trying to convince others to join the CIA, but that burning desire to write fiction just wouldn’t go away.She actually wrote her first novel, a historical thriller called The Taker, while she was still working for the CIA.
She's written eight books, including a pair of spy novels. The first one was Red Widow.
Alma Katsu: It is actually based on a true incident. The bad guy was a man I worked for. [KATSU LAUGHS] He was a great officer, but he had maybe too much imagination and, um, he decided he was gonna authorize this operation that put American lives at risk and he didn't go through the proper vetting channels that he should have. And we all knew it was a huge mistake at the time, but no one could dissuade him. And the absolute worst happened. And at the time I remember thinking, if I ever get to write a spy novel, I'm going to use this.
The story's about a young-ish, uh, CIA case officer named Lindsey Duncan. She's very idealistic, like a lot of people at CIA. They want to do the right thing and they don't realize how their career is gonna test them, and make them question: how do you even know what the right thing is to do? So she gets pulled in to, uh, look for a suspected mole. And I kind of show in the book, like how they triangulate that, how you would figure out who the person might be and narrow your list of suspects. And then I don't wanna give away too much, but Lindsey finds out that the mole is someone she never would've thought.
So she uncovers the mole. But for the rest of it, you're just going to have to read Red Widow.
The novel that followed, Red London, is about Russian oligarchs.
Alma Katsu: It's told by Lindsey, but it's also told by this British aristocrat who's the wife of a Russian oligarch. Putin has disappeared. And there is a new Russian president and not a lot is known about him. And CIA and MI6 don't believe him. You know, he's saying all the right things on the international stage, but they think something's up. So they send Lindsey in to see if she can flip the British aristocrat and, and they find out that the situation was a lot more dire than they had thought.
And there are details in the novels that are plucked right from Katsu's own real life experience as an intelligence official.
Alma Katsu: There's one point where Lindsey is able to figure out who the mole is because she does a social network analysis on a site that we do have at the agency.
Peter Bergen: You started in the early eighties, so, misogyny was pretty rampant in the intelligence community at that time, or what, what was your experience of that?
Alma Katsu: Well, and particularly with the Defense Department, it's an interesting thing because on one hand the Defense Department is very responsive to when it's told, look, you have a problem, you're racist, you're sexist. They'll put in processes to try to mitigate that. And, and they're fairly successful at it, really. But it's a difficult process. DoD, it does have a very sexist mindset, and it was, I'll just be frank, it was terrible at NSA and it still is to this day. Their official word is that it's not a problem, but any woman who works there will tell you that it, it is a problem.
Peter Bergen: And that is reflected in the novels that you write?
Alma Katsu: Boy, it's not as bad in the novels as it, I think it was in, in real life. Sorry, NSA.
And that's why Katsu hopes her novels, which are fiction of course, can still offer her readers some truth about what it's actually like to be a female spy.
Alma Katsu: You know, the spy novel trade is pretty much dominated by male protagonists and male writers. If you look for women, it tends to be historical fiction and it tends to be World War II. And I just felt like that was quite an injustice. My goal in writing those books was to talk about what it's like for women today in intelligence. And so, the books are really about the moral and ethical conundrums that intelligence people face. It's not all cut and dry.
Peter Bergen: So what makes a good, authentic spy novel?
Alma Katsu: I still work for the Center of the Study of Intelligence, which is the think tank at CIA. And, one of the programs there are the guys that do all the reviews of nonfiction and fiction. You know, they do it mostly for fun and they are so harsh on any novel written by an ex officer. You know, I was in the office next to them and I could hear them just roasting people alive.
And it made me worry when I write a book, are they gonna roast me alive? But you find very quickly if you're a writer, especially a professional novelist, readers have expectations of books, spy books, and it's mostly drawn from movies and TV. And they want, you know, explosions, they want people running down the street, waving guns as ill advised as that is. You know, the Jason Bourne super soldier…
ARCHIVAL Bourne Ultimatum:
Jason Bourne: There’s someone on your tail. Get in the store.
Bad Guy 1: I want Grab Team C in there. Tell me what’s going on.
[SOUNDS OF FIGHTING]
Bad Guy 2: Jesus Christ… that’s Jason Bourne.
Alma Katsu: Um, [PETER LAUGHS] and I knew, oh gosh, you can't not have that. Or people say, what a dull book you have. Um, so I tried to walk that line. I tried to show what it's really like to work in it, um, and have enough excitement that they won't miss the guns. Although I did get a lot of questions about why I didn't have more guns in my book. So there is a gun scene in Red London. [KATSU LAUGHS]
Peter Bergen: And your novels, even though their novels had to go through the publication review board at CIA in case there was classified information. What was that process like?
Alma Katsu: When you're an employee and you want to publish a book, they have several levers over you. It's not just that you can't publish classified information in your book. You can't cause embarrassment to the agency. You know, I did write a few spy novels earlier and they were terrible and I subjected the pre-pub review board to them, unfortunately. And it was like pulling teeth to try to get them to get through anything.
And, at that time, they would try to get you to change what seemed like ridiculous things. Like you couldn't say Chief of Station. And I'd say, well it’s out there. Everyone knows that's a term. And they're like, yes, but you come from CIA so you would be confirming that this is the... fine, whatever. So you'd make these idiotic changes. Nowadays, I have to say, they're wonderful. They turn stuff around, usually within a month, if not sooner. And I have to say for my two books, they never asked for one change.
Peter Bergen: Because also, you have a sense of what the guide rails are anyway, right? So you’re...
Alma Katsu: I do you sort of know where that line is. But I wonder, people have said I should probably try to test that line a little bit more in the next book. [KATSU LAUGHS]
Someone else who knows a thing or two about what it means to have the CIA review your writing to make sure you're not revealing any classified stuff — is this woman:
Valerie Plame: I never thought I would write a spy novel., I was too busy working and living it. My name is Valerie Plame. I am a former covert CIA operations officer. My passion has been the nuclear threat and counter proliferation.
You might remember that name… Valerie Plame.
ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster 1: More tonight on the investigation by a special prosecutor into the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster 2:Now the latest on the outing of a spy in Washington. A close friend of Valerie Plame confirmed to me earlier tonight that she was a CIA operative who works strictly undercover.
Plame, who'd worked under cover at the CIA was unmasked — that is her real name. Her true identity was illegally leaked to the media shortly after the U.S. went to war in Iraq.
Valerie Plame: In July of 2003, my former husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times. And in it he went after the central premise that the Bush White House gave for the war in Iraq, which was, there's an imminent nuclear threat.
Valerie Plame: And Joe Wilson said, uh, this isn't, uh, true actually at all. And two weeks later, my name and my true CIA identity was betrayed by the Bush White House.
ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: In Washington tonight, the big question ricocheting through the halls of Congress, the White House, the CIA, the Justice Department, and newsrooms is this: did administration officials deliberately blow the cover of a CIA agent as a measure of revenge against her husband?
Valerie Plame: And that started the beginning of years of a political maelstrom that Joe and I lived through. It became highly partisan, and it ended, at least in part, with the 2007 conviction of Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff for obstruction of justice… lying.
Plame resigned from the CIA after her identity was revealed. She’d spent 20 years at the agency.
Valerie Plame: I was an operations officer. I went through training at the Farm, the place where the CIA does their training. I was posted overseas, uh, in a variety of places.And I also traveled quite a bit often in alias. You have different passports. You have different means of moving around.
And, over time I became more deeply involved in all the issues surrounding the nuclear threat — who was selling nuclear weapons, black market, rogue nation states, the transfer of nuclear technology. I worked with a team that brought down the Pakistani nuclear entrepreneur AQ Khan. He could get his hands on almost anything for a period there throughout the eighties and into the nineties, to sell to countries like North Korea or Iran or Libya. And, I loved what I did, and it all came to a screaming halt in 2003.
At the CIA, Plame had mainly been working under what's known as non-official cover. She was what’s known as a NOC. NOCs are the most covert CIA operatives. They typically work overseas and they often pretend to work for some sort of business. If these spies are caught, there's no guarantee that the CIA would fess up to their true identities.And Plame had been living a pretty secret life; now she was suddenly thrust into public life.
Peter Bergen: Was this like stepping from real life into a spy novel?
Valerie Plame: I was living a spy novel for, for all its both glamor as well as, uh, stretches of incredible boredom.
After leaving the CIA, Plame decided to turn her real life into a book. A true story. Titled Fair Game. Which in turn was made into a movie with the same title.
ARCHIVAL Fair Game:
Valerie Plame: [READING ALOUD] “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife Valerie Plame…”
‘Joe Wilson’: “…as an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” He just went ahead and did it.
Naomi Watts starred as Plame and Sean Penn played her then-husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson.
ARCHIVAL Fair Game:
’Valerie Plame’: Does this run overseas?
‘Joe Wilson’: It's in the newspaper, Valerie. It's on the...
’Valerie Plame’: No Novak's column. Does he? Is he syndicated overseas?
‘Joe Wilson’: It's everywhere.
’Valerie Plame’: God.
And once her real life was turned into a movie, it only seemed logical that the next step would mean she too would fictionalize her life, this time in a spy novel.
Valerie Plame: You can say a lot more in fiction than perhaps in reality.
A pair of spy novels actually. Blowback, which was then followed by Burned.
Valerie Plame: I never thought I would be outed but when all that came to pass, I thought, well let me give it a try. I wanted to tell stories based on people that I knew, both that I had worked with as well as, uh, the assets that I had recruited. And I also wanted to… create a character — Vanessa Pearson was the character in both. She worked for the CIA. — that was less of a female cartoon character that had been so heavily relied upon up to that point. I found that eye rolling that, oh, you know, if it's a woman, she must be sleeping with someone to get intelligence. No. [PETER LAUGHS]
Peter Bergen: And Vanessa Pearson, uh, your name is obviously Valerie Plame. To what extent is she reflective of you?
Valerie Plame: Aspects of her in kind of dealing with sexual harassment, but also trying to figure out how to navigate that world, how to be smart about it. And both of them deal with an AQ Khan-like villain. I was able to put into it, locations where I have lived and worked and worked operationally. I love being able to put real elements into the plot.
Peter Bergen: What are things that you read in other spy novels or inauthentic details that sort of set you off that like immediately say this person has no idea what they're writing about.
Valerie Plame: Oh, the eye rolling stuff? That it's just one person acting independently, uh, that you sleep with someone to get intelligence, that guns in the room somehow help. Too heavy a reliance on technology. I mean, it's fun TV or fun, fun to watch in the movie.
Peter Bergen: Your second book begins with a big bang, um, which is a bomb going off right in front of the Louvre in Paris. We don't want to you know, give away too much of the, of the book, but why did you decide to start it like that?
Valerie Plame: Because my area of knowledge is in the nuclear threat field, and I wanted to make the stakes as high as they possibly be. The fact that we haven't had a nuclear incident to this date is only by luck. Having nuclear weapons does not make us any safer. I care about that deeply. Again, in my mind was AQ Khan this, uh, evil man who had sold nuclear widgets all over the world. So that's how I, that's how I started it.
Peter Bergen: I wanted to move to another AQ, which is al-Qaeda, and, uh, because if I wanted to write a spy novel, um, which I'm not sure I’m capable of…
Valerie Plame: Oh, come on, Peter. [PETER LAUGHS]
Peter Bergen: But, um, you know, you write about what you know, so I would write about, you know, trying to penetrate al-Qaeda with some kind of asset. Perhaps the asset is early on, discovered and executed, and then, you know, the CIA officer is filled with guilt and he or she then tries to put somebody back in.
Peter Bergen: And that's the beginning of the novel. I'm not sure how it ends, but what advice would you have for me as I'm trying to write this, this novel?
Valerie Plame: [PLAME LAUGHS] Okay. Um, so Peter, for some, uh, some advice think about all the characters that have passed in your sight, and you pull little bits and pieces from them.
Valerie Plame: What's more fun than to take, you know, a real life character and put it on the page and slightly change some of the details. I would caution you to stay away from that… sex and guns are the only ways to collect intelligence. You're, you're so smart and uh that's how good intelligence is collected. Use that.
[MUSIC TRANSITION]
J.E. Leonardson: If you feel that you have it in you and that you have something to say, go ahead. Give it a try.
Maybe I should really give this spy novel thing a try.
J.E. Leonardson: There's really no penalty for failure.
I just need to find someone who'd give my novel a good review.
J.E. Leonardson: I'm J.E. Leonardson and I'm a counterintelligence analyst at the CIA.
Peter Bergen: Um, and you have a sort of a part-time gig at the CIA, doing what?
J.E. Leonardson: Oh, I do a lot of book reviews for the in-house Journal, Studies in Intelligence. I started doing those about 20 or 25 years ago.
Peter Bergen: I've had some of my own books reviewed, I think favorably in general.
J.E. Leonardson: Well, that's good. I, I can't say that I was one of the reviewers.
Peter Bergen: [PETER LAUGHS] No. And can you, clarify your speaking in your capacity as an individual? Your views don't necessarily represent those of the U.S. government.
J.E. Leonardson: Exactly.
Peter Bergen:So what makes a good authentic spy novel?
J.E. Leonardson: I don't think there's any such thing as an authentic spy novel, because if, if you wrote a novel about what we do day to day, no one would go beyond the first two pages.
Peter Bergen: Because?
J.E. Leonardson: Because you come into work, you sit down in front of a computer and you spend your day sending and receiving emails, uh, making phone calls and going to meetings, [PETER LAUGHS] and it's just as dull as, as any other job.
What makes for a really good spy novel is that it's entertaining you can write a straight up thriller where there's a lot of action and a lot of shootings and kidnappings and all that kind of stuff or you can write something that's more like a classic mystery. But what really makes it good is that you have a clear plot and you've got characters that people are interested in. And if you can pull that off, you'll have a good novel.
Peter Bergen: There are aspects of the Agency where, like the nonofficial cover, you know, the people who work in the Special Activities Division, which is the paramilitary wing, the case officers, I mean, they're not all just sitting at desks, right? So, I mean, there is… I'm sure the majority of people who work at the Agency, it's like going to the office, but for some people it's a bit different.
J.E. Leonardson: Oh, even they spend a lot of time at their desks.
Peter Bergen: Okay… [PETER LAUGHS]
J.E. Leonardson: They go out, they meet the spies and, and there can be a lot of adventures with that, that's for sure. Uh, but they come back, they have to write up the reports, they have to write up their expense accounting. It's a bureaucracy.
By the way, you’re going to be deeply unsurprised when I tell you that Leonardson’s a pen name, of course (you know, secrecy).... I wondered what makes him such a tough critic…
J.E. Leonardson: Most spy novelist drafts fail.
Peter Bergen: Why do they fail?
J.E. Leonardson: Writing a spy novel is one of those things that, the people who do it and do it right, it looks easy. And you read one and you say, well, I could do that. And then you sit down and you realize coming up with a good plot, fleshing out your characters and dialogue. Oh my god. Dialogue is so difficult.
Peter Bergen: Do you have a spy novel in your desk?
J.E. Leonardson: Uh, I have one that was a miserable failure. [PETER LAUGHS] I try to forget that. [PETER LAUGHS]
Peter Bergen: I mean, did you finish it?
J.E. Leonardson: I did and I have an agent, um, who has handled some books that I've done under my true name and I sent it to him and he read it and he said, you know, you are very good at non-fiction. Why are you wasting your time on this stuff? [PETER LAUGHS]
[MUSIC]
J.E. Leonardson: The plot was a guy gets killed on the very first page, he's walking home from dinner, and a drunk driver just kills him by accident. And when the police go to the guy's apartment, they don't really find very much. And somehow the FBI gets word of it and they go and they look around and they start to think they're on the trail of a Russian illegal. And, it goes from there. It took me about a year to write it, which was far too short because I was writing it very quickly, and it showed. I think the story itself was pretty good. It was just the writing was, was terrible.
And he admits every once in a while he thinks about taking it out of his drawer and resurrecting it.
J.E. Leonardson: I think about that every now and then, and, uh, then I pour myself a drink and take a deep breath.
And starting with his own novel — Leonardson says it's real easy to write a bad spy novel.
J.E. Leonardson: There's only a few basic plots out there. You have the outsider who stumbles on some terrible plot to destroy civilization. You have the mole hunt, uh, you have the burned out officer on one last mission, that sort of thing. [PETER LAUGHS] And the trick is to make it sound fresh.
Peter Bergen: Yeah.
J.E. Leonardson: So the trap is, it doesn't sound fresh. It begins to sound cliche. And you sometimes, you'll be reading and like, ‘okay, I know exactly what's coming in five pages.’ And it does. And in that kind of predictability, you, you get bored with the book pretty quickly.
Something else that drives him completely crazy-
J.E. Leonardson: I think it's when they get too political. There's nothing wrong with working some political or social commentary into a spy novel. Some writers have done really good jobs with that and produced very fine novels that way. Uh, le Carré is an example…
ARCHIVAL John le Carré: [NARRATING] “Same feeling we used to have in Moscow. If you remember, back in those days.” Those days for the Cold War, the one his detractors say he's still fighting. “And we're the laughing stock to our beloved allies and neighbors, in case you haven't noticed,” he goes on merrily. “A bunch of post imperial nostalgists who can't run a fruit stall.”
J.E. Leonardson:… but sometimes they just overdo it and lose the focus. I mean, it's a spy novel.
Peter Bergen: Do spy novels today, the newer ones, do you sort of see, um, more contemporary themes and concerns or more women writing and like, you know, what's, what's the change you've seen over the decades?
J.E. Leonardson: Spy novels reflect the times and they reflect what people worry about. And if you look at the very first spy novels, which were being written in Britain in the early 1900s, they're about German plots to invade Britain. And then between the wars, they're these mysterious plots in the Balkans. And then of course afterward it be-, it becomes the Cold War and us versus the communists.
It's funny: spy novels fell on hard times in the nineties. Spy novels couldn't even be given away. They were just piled up on the remainder tables in bookstores.
Peter Bergen: That's interesting. So because the Cold War had been, seemed completely won...
J.E. Leonardson: Exactly. And now the Russians are making a comeback as the bad guys. The Chinese are in them as bad guys. Um, there's a lot more — and I guess this reflects current cultural issues — talk about identity, people shifting in their identities, that sort of thing. Uh, the role of women.
[MUSIC TRANSITION]
Well, it feels like I've gotten a pretty good idea of what to avoid when I’m writing my future spy novel. So maybe I can try my pitch for my spy novel just one more time. I noticed that Alma Katsu does writing workshops… maybe I can try my idea out on her…
[MUSIC TRANSITION]
Peter Bergen: Something I know that you know about is al-Qaeda. And so my novel begins with, I have a, a protagonist who's a CIA officer who's recruited an asset inside al-Qaeda. That asset is discovered by al-Qaeda, tortured, executed. Of course, the CIA officer, um, is very burdened by this but is still trying to penetrate al-Qaeda. If that was the premise of the beginning of the novel, what would you advise me? Or would you advise me like to stick to your day job?
Alma Katsu: [KATSU LAUGHS] Well, first of all, I have to say, I do think everyone at CIA thinks they have a novel in them. Uh, judging by the amount of requests I get for advice. Um, no, I mean, that's a perfectly good plot for a story. I would say it's probably been done a few times. So your challenge as the novelist is to think of a new way to tell that story.
Really what people read novels for are the characters. So, and this is also something that really confounds my former colleagues at CIA. They think everybody reads spy novels for the geopolitical intrigues and for the insights into tradecraft. And they do to a degree, but, um, mostly it's for the characters.
So yeah, that would be my advice to you. Just really get in that character's head. Maybe he's an ex CNN journalist who becomes a spy….[BOTH LAUGH]
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Well, we couldn’t do an episode about spy novels without giving you some recommendations for what to read.
Of course there’s Red London by Alma Katsu and Blowback by Valerie Plame.
And American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson.
And last but not least, John le Carré’s Agent Running in the Field, published by Audible and Penguin Audio, copyright Penguin Audio, which you’ve heard bits and pieces from in this episode.
You might also want to check out a conference organized by Valerie Plame called Spies, Lies and Nukes taking place in November in New Mexico.
In this episode you also heard excerpts from an interview with John le Carré with BBC 2 and from The Audiobook Show from the Royal National Institute of Blind People.
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Please note: This episode includes excerpts from John le Carré’s Agent Running in the Field, copyright Penguin Audio; from an episode of The Audiobook Show by the Royal National Institute of Blind People; and from the BBC.
