CIA agent drew on experience to write the award-winning novel Red Sparrow
In spy novels, retirements rarely last long. Jaded spooks can barely put their feet up before their old masters come calling, coaxing them back for one last job. In reality, as Jason Matthews knew when he retired from the CIA, ‘‘when you’re out, you’re out’’.
For 33 years Matthews, who has died aged 69, worked in the directorate of operations, the clandestine side of the CIA. By the end of his career in 2010 he was station chief in Los Angeles, having been deputy in six other stations. Although he was coy about their locales, he said with a wink that he was ‘‘familiar with’’ Athens, Belgrade, Budapest, Hong Kong and
Istanbul.
His job had been to ‘‘recruit sources with access who could provide intelligence to our policymakers to save the world from nuclear holocaust’’. At least, that was the ‘‘short version’’. In countries where CIA operatives were unwelcome, he became accustomed to scanning the streets for hostile observers, checking rooms for bugs, and taking every care when contacting sources who could be killed for speaking to him.
‘‘When that lifestyle ends, it ends with a crash,’’ he said. He then had to work out what to do with himself. Had he lived in Washington, he could have joined a group of retired spies, and passed the time swapping war stories, but in California that was not an option. So he took to writing.
Out of fictionalised vignettes of his experiences there emerged a novel, Red Sparrow, the modern-day story of an American and a Russian agent, each tasked with recruiting the other. The Russian, Dominika, had been a ballet dancer until an injury ended her career. Desperate to pay her mother’s medical bills, she is coerced into joining the Russian intelligence service as a ‘‘sparrow’’, a seductress of enemy agents.
She is tasked with seducing CIA operative Nate Nash, yet they find themselves falling for one another and she becomes his informant. ‘‘The one big fictitious error . . . is that Nate would be instantly fired for having slept with a recruited source,’’ said Matthews.
Critics agreed that Red Sparrow (2013) was a remarkably slick debut novel. It won the 2014 Edgar award for best first novel by an American author. Although it had its share of sex and violence, it also offered readers the more cerebral excitement of a John Le Carre novel, immersing them in the machinations of espionage; of how to deliver a package undetected, and how to evade surveillance by pacing the streets for hours. A review on the CIA’s website noted that officers would ‘‘wonder how he got all this past the publications review board’’, which censors the writing of former agents.
Matthews sold the film rights for a sevenfigure sum; the movie was released in 2018,
starring Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton. Matthews wrote two sequels, Palace of Treason (2015) and The Kremlin’s Candidate (2018), the latter a plausible tale of a US presidential candidate with a secret known only to Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader had walk-on parts in both novels, and Matthews liked to thank him ‘‘for the endless content’’ he provided. ‘‘He’s a great character, and his national goals are the stuff of spy novels: weaken Nato, dissolve the Atlantic alliance, break up the European Union.’’
James Jason Matthews was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Aglaia and Charles, who ran a family baking business. He grew up speaking Greek with both sides of the family. After a master’s in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia, he had interviews for jobs in various government departments. One, ‘‘on a gloomy grey day, in a gloomy grey building, with a gloomy grey little man’’, turned out to be for a job in the CIA.
His first job in the agency was ‘‘to shut up and make sure the safe house had beer in the fridge’’. Later he was doing ‘‘street work’’, searching for sources to recruit. He shared that job with Suzanne Moran, whom he met in 1979 while both were working for the CIA in Athens. They married in 1983 and had two daughters.
One challenge of the job was concealing its nature from the girls. When they asked why a security guard would check the underside of their car every morning (for bombs), Suzanne replied: ‘‘He’s checking for cats. We don’t want to drive off and run over a kitty cat.’’
Matthews claimed to have only rarely used the girls as ‘‘operational props’’, once taking them to an icecream shop to observe a rogue agent. He and Suzanne told them the true nature of their work when they turned 10.
Matthews, a slightly tubby man, spoke not in one-liners, but in calm, lawyerly paragraphs. His manner seemed so open and guileless that it was easy to forget he had spent his life lying. He did not like the word ‘‘lying’’, preferring to call it ‘‘periodic selective morality’’.–
‘‘He’s a great character, and his national goals are the stuff of spy novels ...’’ Jason Matthews on Vladimir Putin