Cover image of "Damascus Station," a novel about espionage in Syria

Few world leaders in recent decades have proven themselves to be more savage than Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian Civil War he launched against peaceful protestors in 2011 as the Arab Spring swirled throughout the Middle East has cost as many as 600,000 lives, more than one of every fifty of Syria’s twenty-two million people. The UN estimates that over six million have been internally displaced and another five million have crossed international borders seeking safety elsewhere. (Together, that’s half the country’s population.) And Assad and the sycophants and sadists who surround him have remained oblivious to appeals from most of the world’s nations to negotiate with the opposition.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Sadly, a winning strategy

Tragically, Assad’s ferocity has worked for him. As I write, the news is emerging in the Western press that Syria’s neighbors are restoring relations with the regime. But that is now. Eight or nine years ago, when Barack Obama served in the White House, the fighting in Syria was at its peak. And it’s against that background that CIA veteran David McCloskey spins out his spellbinding spy story about espionage in Syria, Damascus Station.

Damascus Station by David McCloskey (2021) 428 pages ★★★★★ 

Image of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his top generals, who figure in this novel about espionage in Syria
Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad with two of his top generals, like those depicted so memorably in Damascus Station. Image: timesofisrael.com

A tale of espionage in Syria

The principal antagonists in this novel are the men and women of the CIA and the senior-most figures in Assad’s intelligence apparatus, the mukhabarat, as well as the dictator himself. But others get into the act, too, including Russian intelligence, an Israeli spy, and the jihadist rebels in Syria. The action centers on the CIA station in the basement of the US Embassy in Damascus. But the story wanders to and from Washington, DC, and to France and Italy as well.

In classic spy fiction, the characters are almost always men, with women typically playing the role of love interest or femme fatale. Not so in Damascus Station. Many of the principal characters, both Syrian and American, are women. And they’re just as tough as the men. One particularly memorable figure in the story is five-foot-tall Artemis Aphrodite Procter, the Chief of Damascus Station, whose pugnacity and liberal use of the F-word sometime shock even the men around her. But espionage in Syria is not for the squeamish or the faint of heart.

A love story unfolds through the action

At heart, the novel is a love story pairing Sam Joseph, one of the Agency’s top recruiters of agents in “denied areas” such as Moscow (and now Damascus), with Mariam Haddad, a senior official in the Presidential Palace. The CIA dispatches Sam to Paris to recruit Mariam, where she is on a Syrian delegation to a conference. This follows Sam’s aborted attempt to exfiltrate the Agency’s top source in the Palace. (The man was caught and murdered by the mukhabarat.) Both Sam and Mariam are unusually attractive (of course, this being fiction), and they are drawn together from the outset. But circumstances weigh heavily against it. For Sam, an affair with an asset is a firing offense that could get him summarily dismissed from the CIA. For Mariam, it’s a matter of life and death. If anyone in the Palace finds out, she would face torture and would almost certainly be shot as a traitor. In the novel, we follow them through the months ahead as events spin out of control in Syria.

Thousands of tons of sarin

While Sam and Mariam explore the pleasures of an affair, the war within Syria heats up. The Palace is embattled. Top officials there work frantically to build a stockpile of sarin gas to use against the massed forces of the “opposition.” Assad and his allies don’t distinguish between the democratic forces supported by the West and the jihadists who are steadily gaining ground. This is the era of Barack Obama’s “red line.” Then, the US threatened to bomb Syria if the regime used chemical warfare on its citizens. We know now that Obama backed off his threat. But no one knew that at the time. And Assad was heedless of the threat. In a program managed by his Republican Guard, officials in the novel are amassing thousands of tons of sarin. The plan is to launch a major offensive and win the civil war at one stroke.

A primer on CIA tradecraft

Author David McCloskey was a Syria specialist for the CIA for six years. He knows whereof he writes in this novel about espionage in Syria. Damascus Station is filled with the acronyms and jargon that officers of the agency, like employees throughout the government, throw around so casually. Employees of the Agency are officers, never “agents.” Spies recruited within Syria are “assets,” or, rarely, agents. He describes in detail the techniques Sam uses in his two tours in Syria to avoid detection. And he introduces us to gadgets developed by the CIA’s Technical Services Division that would make James Bond’s Q salivate with envy. The book comes across as a primer on tradecraft.

About the author

Image of David McCloskey, author of this novel about espionage in Syria

According to his British literary agency, “David McCloskey covered Syria as a CIA analyst for six years, from 2008 – 2014 and watched the country descend into unrest, civil war, and state failure. During this time, he wrote near-weekly memos for the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), lived and worked in CIA field stations throughout the region, and briefed senior White House officials, members of Congress, and Arab royalty. Damascus Station is his first novel.”

I’ve also reviewed the author’s second book featuring Artemis Procter, Moscow X (A CIA plot to destabilize the Russian government).

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