Damascus Station

Starred review from August 2, 2021
CIA case officer Sam Joseph, the hero of former CIA analyst McCloskey’s exhilarating debut, aims to recruit Mariam Haddad, an official who works at Damascus’s Syrian Palace, in Paris. At a diplomatic party, Sam rescues Mariam, who’s part of a Syrian government delegation, from the unwanted attentions of another guest, and they agree to meet for a drink the next evening. Mariam becomes a CIA asset, Sam teaches her the tradecraft she needs to operate without detection under the watchful eyes of her palace superiors, and they begin an illicit love affair. Sam follows Mariam to Damascus, where the plan is to hunt down a brutal pair of brothers, palace officials who kidnapped and killed an American spy. Their mission expands to deal with a larger threat. McCloskey portrays the brutal inner functioning of the Assad regime, as well as the CIA’s occasional ineptitude, while detailing such elements of spy craft as avoiding tails, maximizing dead drops, and operating safe houses. Refreshingly, as shown in the relationship between Sam and Mariam, he dares to be sentimental. Espionage fans will eagerly await his next. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, ICM/Sagalyn.

August 1, 2021
In his first novel, former CIA analyst McCloskey tackles the Syrian civil war in all its complexity, awash in unspeakable violence and tragedy, ""binding families and sects and ethnicities together in opposition to everyone else."" Reeling from his failure to exfiltrate a fellow agent from Syria, CIA operative Sam Joseph returns to Damascus, charged with recruiting Syrian Palace official Mariam Haddad as a double agent. Alarm bells clang when Sam violates a cardinal rule of espionage: don't fall in love with your would-be asset. Using his own experience to great advantage, McCloskey vividly details multiple aspects of tradecraft, including the elaborate rituals employed to detect and avoid surveillance. The human side of the story is equally well developed--not only the verboten romance, but also the textured portrayals of various supporting characters, especially Syrian counterintelligence chief Ali Hassan, Mariam's uncle, who emerges as a classically tragic figure. There is plenty of evil to go around here on all sides, and McCloskey faces it head-on; explicit torture scenes may be tough for some readers to handle, but they are anything but gratuitous. A strong debut.

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