Journalist, spy novelist loves wearing both hats
If you want to know what really goes on in the morally ambiguous world of high-stakes spycraft, you might look to the novels of David Ignatius.
Novelist is one of two hats Ignatius wears.
The other is journalist, which he’s been for more than 40 years. For 27 of those years he’s written about foreign affairs, first for The Wall Street Journal and then for The Washington Post, where he writes a twice weekly column.
He’s had a busy couple of weeks, he told the audience Tuesday at The Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach.
First, he got a read on the situation in Syria traveling with the joint special operations command.
The war against ISIS is nearly won, he said, but don’t look for peace in the Middle East any time soon.
“Nothing is really over in the Middle East,” he said. That was obvious when he traveled to the border with Turkey, where Turkish forces were shelling the Americans and their allies, who include Kurds the Turks regard as a separatist threat.
Then he was off to Munich Security Conference. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians appears to have deflated the usually cocky Russian diplomats, Ignatius said.
His first novel came out of a story he’d pursued for two years about Ali Hassan Salameh, Yasser Arafat’s chief of intelligence, who fed information to the United States until he was assassinated by the Israelis in 1979.
Ignatius was put on the trail in
1980 when a Carter administration official let slip that the Israelis had killed “our man in the PLO.”
Ignatius’s story ran in February 1983 in The Wall Street Journal. Two months later, a terrorist truck bomb plowed into the American embassy in Beirut, killing CIA officer Robert Ames, who ran the Salameh operation, as well as every other CIA employee in the building.
Ignatius was in Beirut that day. The Arabs who’d been involved with Ames’ operation were grief-stricken.
“Who was left to talk to about it?” Ignatius said. The only American insider left was him.
“In the next weeks and months I learned the kind of detail about a sensitive operation most journalists don’t — and shouldn’t,” he said.
He didn’t know what to do with the information. He decided to turn it into a novel, “Agents of Innocence,” which the CIA now recommends to its officers.
That was 31 years and nine novels ago.
Former CIA director Leon Panetta said Ignatius’ most recent book, “The Quantum Spy,” about the race between the United States and China to make a super computer described as “the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb,” was so accurate it scarcely could be called a novel.
His novel “Body of Lies,” about a CIA operation to nab a top terrorist, was adapted as a 2008 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.
Recently, Ignatius wrote his first opera libretto, “The New Prince,” based on Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” which premiered in March in The Netherlands.
It’s sometimes difficult to crystallize opinions about complex foreign affairs for his 750-word columns, he said.
That’s what so freeing about fiction, he said. “When you have the opportunity to tell complicated stories in 200,000 words and not be proscriptive, that’s a joy.”