Friendship in a Faithless Business: A Guest Post by David McCloskey
Former CIA analyst and author of Moscow X and Damascus Station David McCloskey returns with The Seventh Floor. A thriller centered on six CIA officers who must turn on each other, this story explores the interpersonal connections within the CIA from an expert. Read on for McCloskey’s exclusive guest post diving into his research process.
Hardcover $29.99
The Seventh Floor: A Novel
The Seventh Floor: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover $29.99
In a job this unforgiving, friendship can’t last. These secret agents have survived the unspeakable together, and now their next targets are each other.
In a job this unforgiving, friendship can’t last. These secret agents have survived the unspeakable together, and now their next targets are each other.
The Seventh Floor is a story very close to my heart. At its center is the delightfully deranged Artemis Aphrodite Procter, who, making her return from Moscow X, is run out of the service after a series of operations gone wrong. She eventually makes her way back in a very unofficial capacity to investigate the existence of a mole operating at Langley. She is joined by her good friend – and Damascus Station collaborator – Sam Joseph, a reunion that I feel gives this story some incredible spark. Procter and Sam’s mole hunt quickly leads them to the bleak reality that they must investigating some of Procter’s dearest friends and most cherished enemies. All of these suspects are denizens of the CIA’s famed Seventh Floor – the Langley executive suites where the leadership of the organization rules the roost. The book, more than any of my other work, is an exploration of the current nature and culture of the present-day CIA. It is also a story about friendship in a faithless business and to what extent we really know our friends.
Even though I was a CIA analyst for nearly ten years, this novel required gobs of research on everything from alligator wrestling to modern surveillance cameras, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service to the husbandry of exotic fish (seriously). Two areas were most important, though.
First, the book is a modern mole hunt, so one of the key pieces of research was to understand how a counterespionage investigation really functions. What is the process? Who is involved? What is the day-to-day like? The novel is – I hope – to some extent an ‘intelligence procedural’ in which the reader is brought into the inner workings of CIA and the espionage business, and so I invested heavily in researching how such investigations have functioned in the past, and how they work today. There are many good memoirs of historical mole hunts (and the psychology of those who commit treason). I was able to tap an exceptional network of former colleagues who are willing to speak to me about such things.
Second, another absolutely essential bit was to get CIA and Langley right, everything from the cultural moment down to the tradecraft and the furniture on the actual ‘Seventh Floor.’ I’ve of course visited the Seventh Floor many times for meetings and briefings, but now, as a novelist, I am drawn to details that I quite frankly had ignored when I was in the building. For example: What is the layout? How are the offices decorated? What food is served? What is the daily hum of activity? I was fortunate to be able to go back into Langley once during my research process, to refresh my memory on all of this. I also spent hours on the phone with colleagues who helped me piece it all together.
Oh, and the research on the alligator wrestling and exotic fish husbandry? Let’s just say I’m on a first name basis with several aquatics dealers now. It turns out that a spy novelist needs friends in all sorts of places.
