Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth David Ignatius 20180113

Our principal rival in that race is china. As far as simply the facts, the quantum spy is a novel that imagines the characters involved, the battle to see who can steal the other secrets about world changing technology, principally the story of my hero, american of chinese descent who was a cia officer, asked to penetrate the Chinese Intelligence Service and in the process learns about himself and the cia and how the world works shake him to his foundations and we see in this novel how the Chinese Intelligence Service not so familiar to readers of spy fiction, we have been with carla, the russians by world is your to us so one of the pleasures for me if it takes us into the world of state security, very secretive Chinese Intelligence Agency that is the principal antagonist in this book. Host how much of it is true . I always say in the prefaces to my books they exist in an imagined world, if you take any book i write and think it is a recipe for how to bake a cake you are going to end up with a but by because all sorts of things are thrown in. That said i do a lot of research for every one of my novels, the quantum spy is my 10th novel, i researched it for many months, went to computer laboratories where Quantum Computers are being experimented with that one has been built. I travel everyplace mentioned in the book, looked at it, studied the Chinese Intelligence Service in all sorts of ways. My answer would be it is a novel, the story is imagine terry, it is drawn from real life. It is as real as i could make it be and still be a work of fiction. One of the conflicts is science and whether it should be open and fair and you write that science has no flag. Science shouldnt have flags. The problem in the area i was writing about where you have a superpowerful technology, the reason want to computing is so important is if you built a quantum computer it could shred any symptom subsystem of encryption. All of your adversaries most secret messages, documents, information, it has that real purpose in the world. Host when it comes to quantum computing is at the future . Quantum computing is coming at us fast. In my book i describe a technology that is a kind of quantum computer, purists say it is quantum kneeling and i wont bore your viewers with the details of the different. It assembles cubits, a standard computer has bits, 0 or one, on or off and become Quantum Computers made of cubits, strange as it sounds are 0 and one at the same time. They have this ambiguous state and that means as you assemble these cubits, as you entangle them to use the phrase technologists use, they begin to build a computer in every direction simultaneously, vastly more powerful than any supercomputer of her bills, a problem that would take thousands of years even for the most powerful supercomputers to be done in a few seconds with Quantum Computers because of the power of these cubits so whoever gets that technology is going to have an instrument that would be potentially world changing and it could change the world and lots of other ways, discovering drugs, new materials, anything that involves lots of computation, simulation, these computers will be able to do in an entirely different way and that is why everybody is excited about it. It used to be said this was 20 years out, then people began to fade is 10 years out. The most recent estimates i heard are maybe it is 5 years out. As i mentioned there is a company in vancouver, British Columbia that built 2000 cubits and can be powerful in some areas. So talk to people who do technology they get excited about this but nobody can give you precise prediction when it is coming. And classification. A lot of this computer research, it companies, companies that change the world, google, microsoft, have proprietary limits on their technology, they own it but it was not classified, move it out as quickly as you can, with so many applications like quantum computing there has been ground for 20 years, and effort to take the most sensitive technologies and do some of that research with classification. There was disclosure of the nsas secret black budget, when i first thought Something Like this in 2014, there is a battle between scientists who want the most of the world possible, we share information, ideas, from china, russia, wherever they come from, and others who say it is too valuable, you wouldnt have brought germans into los alamos during the Manhattan Project so they need controls. That is one of the issues of debate. Host americanism is questions. Harris chain, our hero, grew up in flagstaff, arizona, i bleed red, white and blue, served in the army in iraq, recruited into the cia, feels entirely american. Never occurred to him is that ground would be subject to manipulation and he finds in the course of the book that both for the chinese who try to manipulate him using his ancestry and for some americans in the Intelligence Community doubt him because of his ancestry, ends that being central to his experience, deeply upsetting as a person and that is where the arc of his story is coming, to realize people see him in a way he doesnt see himself and by the end of the book, readers describe, he is the quantum spy. Host has that been true in the Intelligence Community since the 40s or whenever that somebodys nationality or their heritage can affect how they are viewed . I think our Intelligence Community has always been eager to use the richness of our National Fabric to draw people who speak languages, cultural skills, case officers who worked the soviet file with russia or ukraine, east european backgrounds, in the middle east, people who speak arabic, fluency through their families or others, drawn into that part of the agencys operations, it has always been part of that. The danger is when people feel they are being seen in stereotypical ways, the arabamerican is good at the set of things but not that. Had a similar problem with gender. Women for decades felt all those were given responsible roles they were not given the heart of what the cia does, encouraged to go out and spy which is how you make your mark in the cia and they felt limited, careers were stunted. That is another theme, a woman who felt she was in a sense robbed of success and experience she might have had as an Intelligence Officer because of her gender and having a deeper age about that, that was another part of this book. With a novel like this you start with conclusion and work backwards . You start with the idea, the team you want to play with to understand quantum computing. Im always looking for something to do as a journalist. I love to grab a report and find information so i got interested in quantum computing when i saw the chinese were our principal rivals that interested me. Wasnt until i could see the characters, harris chang in a hotel room in singapore that i started writing this book after coming back on the plane, a long plane ride and suddenly i understood where it would start rolling in this tale starting at a hotel room in singapore. For the writer, the process of taking the themes, making those themes alive and characters understand, the places those characters inhabit and to be honest, the essential thing in writing this book and every book i have written is rewriting it, the first draft in which you have done your first kind of rough sketch and then you need to go in ruthlessly and look at what works and what doesnt, the characters who were fully developed and the ones that dont work and you need people who are really honest with you to say this just isnt there yet, you have to go back and do it again, that person for me principally in my recent books has been my wife, the hardest thing in the world to see her husband slaving away and got the first draft done and give it to you like a puppy and i would say what do you think . And she would read it carefully and say i just dont get is there yet or very believable so you go back and hopefully get another honest evaluation. Even the very best writers are capable of writing stuff but it is not very good, not real and we need people who tell us the things we may love in our books, just arent there yet, do it again. I have learned the value, not good enough. Host denise, mike flanagan, some of the characters in the quantum spy, what do those project . Those project diverse agencies, this is one in terms of every variable. A lot of women work in the agency and i think one thing that has changed about the cia, once thought to be an ivy league playground, basically gail was the feeders school to the cia, more diverse in that way, every educational background, looking for the unconventional interest and backgrounds. There is a blue collar side of the cia, kate sturm, who supported my book, an important part of the cia not often recognized and safehouses and airplanes and shooters to guard the case officers, to do unglamorous stuff you have to get done. They carry themselves that way with a chip on their shoulder and interested in people. And how they think. Host they have unlimited safehouses, unlimited money, unlimited resources, is that based on reallife . Guest the cia doesnt suffer for resources. It suffers from ideas, difficulties as a country, operating in clandestine ways, people, americans are not great at keeping secrets or telling lies. There is a natural straightforwardness to the american character, i think. The cia in a period when American Power was strongest, in the cold war years, had the wind at its back. Everybody around the world wanted to be americas friend, enormously powerful economy, engine of global prosperity, i once joked it was hard to find a person who wasnt the cia contractor. I am a friend of america. They are more reluctant to be seen on that side of america. To make their fortune. The wind at our back, a strong head wind. Starting to find people who take those risks when the us does find them, to be protecting them, the secrets they are sharing with the us government. My tense novel, the first was published, what i have seen, has lost its way a little bit, struggles most of all with superpowerful, to be our friend today, we see looking around the world we are not superpowerful, we have stronger rivals and everyone doesnt want to be our friend. Host there is not necessarily a clearcut could guy bad guy. Spy novels as we say are painted in shades of gray, moral ambiguities, what this work is all about, the basic ambience. In my books, operators who are most ruthless and effective, the chief clandestine Operation Agency in my new book, the quantum spy come in terms of being a tough character, if it is simple, ask the state department to do it. If you want something complicated and morally complex we are the right people. Operators like that, the reader will see as competent professionals but there are questions that harris chang, the hero of this book. If they are ruthless to the point of shattering the reason he got in. Host your first book in 1987, agents of innocence takes place in beirut and about that book you wrote it was obvious the only way i could share this was through fiction. What were you referring to . I had written for the wall street journal as middle east correspondent in february 1983, worked on the story for two years, the front page story said the cia the United States recruited chief of intelligence. And terrorist adversary. As cia asset. And in 1980 the 1979 by israel. And taken israeli lives. Two months after publishing that on the front page. And wild ames came and went to visit the cia station, we met with the military attache the same day. Just after 1 00 in april 1983, the biggest car bomb anyone had ever seen in beirut exploded the door of the embassy. I had gone back up the hill. A shattering roar, ran down the hill, the embassy just shattered. The flesh of the building had been ripped away. And this hero of the cia, had been killed along with every member of the cia stationing. They were all at lunch. In the aftermath of the tragedy the arabs who had been working us on this long line case. Chief of intelligence in constant contact. They can be involved in that and knew about it, needed to grieve over the loss of what we believed in. Working on the story for two years i was the only american alive, journalist coming in beirut, they felt they could talk to so people coming to me that a journalist doesnt here. I began to accumulate richness of information about a story whose basic outline, i began to know so much more, what on earth are you going to do with this . The answer was write a novel. I had no idea how it was, at the wall street journal for eight years, i said down, wrote the first draft, second draft, sent it to ten publishers, finally, the publisher was still my publisher, said that we will publish agents of innocence on condition you give us a nonfiction book. They didnt want the novel that much either but the nonfiction books that they thought journalists should write, that is how agents of innocence was published in 1987. It was essentially a true story, page 1 to the end. People who were most involved in the cia and intelligence agencies, israel, all of them knew immediately what when the book came out that it was all real. The book began to get a real cash with readers who knew and it began to be read. People at the cia say they give it out to explain versus what the business was about. I had over the years a dozen at various places around the world walk up to me i cant tell you who i am but i want to tell my mom and dad what i really did. It had the virtue of the basics of what an Intelligence Officer does told through the story of one of the great cases, brilliantly executed. And this guy was a man and that got me started and i never stopped. I taught myself how to write a novel and witness those rejection slips, and i began to learn the craft of writing fiction and got hooked on it and it played off of journalism. There is so much more i would like to say, to unpack ideas, issues in a way i say at the end of this book, when agents of innocence was published, that i would choose between being a journalist or novelist, i am glad i never had to make that choice. Host can we draw any Straight Lines from your column to your novel . You can draw Straight Lines in terms of subject matters. I have written a lot, i visited iran. Fascinated by the Iranian Nuclear program with intense interests. This the perfect setting. Imagining an Iranian Nuclear side, a vw. If you have something to tell us, do it. A lot of people coming in from iran. It is describing assault on the iranian supply chain that is eerily like stuck net, making some lucky guesses, more factual then i realized at the time. Readers read my columns when i was there. I was taking every piece that i could find and guidebook or restaurant, scrolling them all away to try to reconstruct a fictional iran. Host in depth, David Ignatius has anyone ever felt outed by you buy a character in one of your books . Guest people joked with me the other day, former Intelligence Officer said i am the real harry patterson, principal character in the book i just described, i didnt hear anger in that. A bit of a bragging right, the first novel, agents of innocence, was about things that are so sensitive that when a was published i didnt know what the consequences would be. I had never done this before. To get this has right as i can. Initially there was shock. To write sympathetically about that may be so but over the years i have written things that made peoples hair stand on end but never had anybody i try to be careful about not taking any character per se, peoples identities are at risk if they are disclosed. Host you have a former cia director who blurbed your book the bank of fear in 1995. How did you get that . Over the years these books have been read by a lot of cia officers. My new book the quantum spy has emerged from three former directors. I have been shameless in asking people no matter who they are, tv journalists, readers know, the quote on the back page, it could be embarrassing to knock on the door and say please please please read my book. And it was so difficult to get started but pretty much anybody who asks me to write a blurb for a book on a subject like that is a reason to read it, i will say yes. And give somebody else the start, the boost i had as a young writer, including former cia directors. Host good afternoon and welcome to booktv on cspan2 and this is the kickoff addition of our special fiction edition year of in depth. David ignatius is our guest this first month and all year long we will have fiction writers, bestselling fiction writers on the in Depth Program to talk about their books. The number the 2027488200. In the east and central time zone 7488201, mountain and pacific time zone and want to participate in our conversation this afternoon, you can participate in social media and that includes facebook, twitter, instagram and email, just remember, booktv is our handle and email address is booktv cspan. Org. As we mentioned, David Ignatius is a Washington Post columnist on National Security issues and author of these ten books. Agents of innocence which we talked about came out in 1987, hero 1991, the bank of fear in 1995, the firing offense in 1997, the sun king in 1999, perhaps you saw the movie, body of lies came out in 2007, the increment in 2009, blood money 2011, the director in 2014, and the quantum spy just came out in the last couple months. David ignatius, your books have moved from beirut to iran, iraq, washington, keeping up with all the threats. I wanted to write about china very deliberately. In terms of National Security threats Going Forward and opportunities. China needs to be at the top of the list. China announced that it intends to dominate commanding heights of technology. By 2030, sustained through 2050, they have been very specific and task their Intelligence Service to gather information, to reinforce that position, new Weapon Systems to challenge enormous military power in asiapacific. China has set a course that people worry will bring it into the collision, military conflict. I am not somebody who believes that but it is time for thoughtful readers to get inside chinese ambitions, being a world power to get inside the Chinese Intelligence Service, that was part of the fun of this book but you are quite right, we look at the things that are the next big threat. My last book, the director was about how the russians were manipulating the libertarian underground. When that book was written people didnt think about it much. We are in the midst of this Mueller Investigation but if you go back you will find useful guidance as far as where we are now. I hope people will feel the same way about the quantum spy. As we get more focused on china, chinas operations. What is coming at us, a lot of what i like to do in my books is open up the world i am reporting as a columnist in my columns, nuggets in a much bigger way about the issues. Host the cloak and dagger aspect, are they true . Does this stuff happen . Guest what fascinated me in my first novel was the process of recruitment. I get someone willing to share secrets with the United States. How i play on that persons sanity, vulnerabilities and drive at to a secret relationship. Obviously, one reason this interests me and the reason im able to write about it convincingly and so much more than being a journalist. What i do as a journalist every day is go out and pluck people who dont want to talk to Washington Post columnist and gain their trust. That are important for readers, how to protect them so they dont suffer for having to share that information. That part of the intelligence business which has nothing to do with a shoot them up james bond aston martin crazy technology, that simple part of identifying the target, how to make an approach to that target, having initial contact reeling that person is as a potential source. If you look at each of my books the process in every one of my books is the suggestion the United States doesnt know enough about parts of the world where we get so deeply involved to take the risks we do, that is the theme, my first novel, in some ways, persistent all the way through, we just dont know enough to take risks. Our country has gone in a series of wars from the time i have been a journalist. I keep thinking i wish they knew what the characters in my novels know about how often we are flying blind. Host this is from quantum spy, game for anything, sentiment not readily heard. Guest the cia has gotten more riskaverse over the decades i have been writing about it, this idea of the cia as a rogue elephant doing what it once. And that period it ended with the investigations in the 1970s, certainly ended in the investigations, best practices of torture, harsh interrogation with them to be honest, but followed 9 11. Cia officers now and know they can be vulnerable. They often take legal insurance to protect themselves against the possibility they need counsel. This is a cando culture, never want to be the person that says that is not a good idea, you say yes, sir. Yes, sir. That is the culture. There is now, lets talk to the lawyers before we sign off on that operation. Lawyers are a big part of cia operations. Some part of something bigger, that is an interesting issue for the current director, mike pompeo said he would like the agency to be more aggressive, take more risks with china and north korea, things we need to know. When we take more risks, the danger of getting caught increases. The lawyers will always be there to say not a good idea and the congressional committees which plan Important Role overseeing intelligence may go along in the beginning, and pound the agency when something goes wrong. Host the importance to the Intelligence Community of the Church Hearings of the 1970s and 9 11. The Church Hearings really set the basis of limits, didnt have intelligence committees doing regular oversight before this, they exposed secret that the cia sought the hardest to protect, the crown jewels back then. They became public and the public was shocked by what was discovered. I look back and to be honest it is amazing how little of the really nasty stuff they did in those days. There was occasional assassination plots. Mostly they were unsuccessful. They come up with crazy ideas. We live in a world, special Operations Command, routinely engage in targeted killing of adversaries that wasnt done. Through a world in which is at least considered every day of the week and the Church Committee established rules and oversight, set a new framework and we live in that and that is better than what came before. 9 11 turned from an intelligence collecting agency to essentially a paramilitary covert action, the cia had a point from what to do in the twin towers when they went down, george tenet if you read the history was very clear, we were ready to go and they were on the ground in afghanistan and took down the taliban in afghanistan, brilliant handfuls of americans working with their assets and the alliance in afghanistan. And pleaded with his colleagues, and slipping through, but general matus was loved by somebody at the pentagon. Secretary rumsfeld wouldnt sign a fund that, the 9 11 period made counterterrorism the center of the cias mission, the use of drones, a hightech way of taking people out, the instrument of choice, the cia began running, consumed resources, executing these missions. After 9 11 the cia, no threat of use of biological weapons, chemical weapons, the population at risk, you need to find out what they are going to do across the line, we feel it was a mistake in terms of interrogating people. It does shock the conscience, what Intelligence Officers did for interrogation programs. I think there is nobody yet the cia who would like to get back in that business. It led this to such public criticism. The cia and independents crossed the public and when we see our soldiers at the ballgame, cia officers take similar risks but does get applause, they merely get sharp criticism and they would like to have better basis, to be so worry about that. They dont want to do it. They would like to go back to its basic mission of intelligence and do less of the counterterrorism and related missions. In the years after 9 11, essential it is morale, not a good period. Host ten years ago body of lies came out, in the intelligence game, not its money, not its human intelligence but its ability to overhear any conversation before. The years in the sky, the ability to get into fiberoptic, every phone call these days, a weapon no other country have that swept across and syria. It was obliterated. Tens of thousands of people killed. That has been a war special Operations Command powered by the same information and any digital pain that says someone threatened a french person, electronically visible. A much more Ruthless Campaign people realize and much more journalism needs to be conducted. The scenario where there has not been enough. Host julian assange, ed snowden in the intel community. To quote mike pompeo, the cia director, the hostile Intelligence Service and resides in moscow under protection of the russian government, and someone turned over, to be used by russia, whether that was his intention or not. A pretty hardnosed view of intelligence professionals. Certainly when there has been a suggestion of a plea bargain of ed snowden, my sense is loudly said they want to be sure this is not an easy negotiation to explain precisely what he did. The simple answer there is not a lot. Host who are the hoffmans . Guest in every one of my novels there is a character named huffman. In my first novel, Frank Hoffman is a station chief who is the foil against the hero of the book, tom rogers who is modeled after the real life aberdeens. Hoffman was just an outrageous, foulmouthed, funny guy, the person you meet in real life. It was so engaging, i kept having him or a member of his family, his son, his cousin, in every book there is somebody named hoffman. A lot of spy novels have the same protagonist in every book as we know, the connelly novels i never wanted to do that. I like to start fresh with a new set of characters and issues that interest me. I hate repeating myself but i did decide to keep this continuity through the hoffman family. In this book, it isnt immediately obvious. I hope people, when i look at my work over three years will see in hoffman characters, see the experience, the way it has changed, i would love people to be able to look at this body of work and see in fiction, fairly realistic fiction, a chronicle of the life and times of our Intelligence Agency, what changed and what didnt work. In every book, one basic theme is we dont know enough to do the things we are doing. Host a way to interpret the hoffman legacy throughout your books is the cia is a little parochial. Guest the hoffmans are acting at the margins, they are loudmouth show offs, schemers and manipulators, the cia bureaucracy is ridiculous and we are going to do through the back door because the front door is not going to work. They are iconoclasts. Host speaking of the bureaucracy that is another theme in your books, the difficulty, the politics of negotiating Intelligence Community bureaucracy. Guest that is absolutely right. The bureaucracy is thicker and more viscous in each book. Once upon a time, first novel, Frank Hoffman could order something as it would happen and cross the line. That was true, interestingly, about the reallife operations in which the novel is based, case officer crossed the line and doing the right thing. As legal controls and oversight increased, so has the bureaucracy. The cia has been top to bottom bureaucratic reorganization which made the chart even more confusing than it was before, thinking it has been entirely digested. People spent an awful lot of time, an awful lot of time recovering the backsides. In that sense, it is more the opposite of what you think of in a james bond novel, supercool guy who goes out and shoots people. James bond would spend a lot of time writing a memos from the file in the real world. Host what is the cooperation level between mi 5, mi 6, the cia, nsa, dia . Cooperation with foreign Intelligence Services, liaison partners is, has been since the beginning excellent, the biggest asset because the only powerful, global source of information with these Technical Resources to feed its collection and share things with partners from anywhere else. The leader of a foreign Intelligence Service comes not only to visit, talk with officials in the cia but share information and that extends to people you wouldnt think, russians, chinese, a lot more intelligence sharing issues of common interest then people like to say. The us has a lot of friends around the world and respect the agency and a source of information. You asked about the domestic agencies and there are a lot of silos out there. We have 17 intelligence agencies, analysts doing the analysis. This is a company with 17 sets of accountants going over the same paperwork, it wouldnt last in the business world, a lot of it in the intelligence world, everybody insists my information is so sensitive, my sources, nobody can know about them. It is all controlled by the originators. Even after more than a decade, talking about breaking down the stovepipes. Host dan coatss job . To oversee this, one problem is too big, the cia is too big. More genuinely clandestine, a life and death. Not even including the consultants who multiplied by tens of thousands it is fast and feeds Information Systems that nobody can digest, we generate far more information than anybody could analyze, computers would do the analysis, i hope so but over time that is one other observation. It is too big. We spend plenty of money. Sometimes we are just lucky to distinguish the signal from all the noise. Host if you live in the east and central time zone, 2027488201 in the mountain and pacific time zones, this is the first of our 12 special fiction addictions of in depth in 2018 and we are pleased that David Ignatius, columnist from the Washington Post and author of ten bestselling thrillers is our guest. We talk for an hour, lets begin with david in tulsa, oklahoma, you are on the air. Caller in october and november i had some students in my us history classes attend a talk at the history of the university of tulsa of survivors of the atomic bombs in hiroshima and nagasaki and it heightens the paranoia my students have as to how many have access to Nuclear Weapons and how dangerous is the world today with the dialogue we hear constantly on twitter and on the news and i would like to hear the guests answer to that. Guest the danger of Nuclear Weapons is as great as it was when i was a boy, when we had air raid drills and fallout shelters and national paranoia about nuclear war. That receded at the end of the cold war but no question we live in a world where the danger of accidents leading to a Nuclear Exchange whether it is between the us and north korea which we are all thinking about now the idea of the boasts and taunts about nuclear war, i find deeply disturbing. The danger of a war between india and pakistan, name your other set of Nuclear Armed countries, too large. When we hear again and again, former National Security advisor is about moments when they were told because of mistakes that missiles were on the way. Ple of minutes to decide whether to launch our own missiles in retaliation. The point is this is an area where the danger of miscalculation leading to catastrophic outcomes is so no one should joke about use this that my button is bigger than your button stuff, americans should share the view that its not appropriate peer to dangerous . Host in your paper this morning on the front page is a story about how the us miscalculated north koreas ability when you read the story, given your background like that, how do you read that story . Guest first thing i was struck by when i read the story is what a hard target north korea is. This is a country where its more than usually difficult to get information, to recruit agents, trust with the agents tell you in the North Koreans are good at hiding things. They dont want our spy satellites overhead. They dont let us see things except intentionally do a lot of their search underground. We are not sure where all the underground facilities are, so thats not to excuse not understanding how rapidly their program moved. Its to say this was the ultimate hard target and i think we would all say, okay, so we want our Intelligence Agency to do better. We need to know where the North Koreans are. When you think about what that involves about the risks to the people who do that collection and try to get into north korea or recruit to north korean agents inside their establishment i mean think about that as a challenge, but no questionha that we need to know moren or we are toooo close to conflict with north korea not to treat them as absolutely number one collection target. We need to think about what that will involve. Next call comes from richard in ventura california. Go ahead, richard. As a enthusiastic reader of David Ignatiuss novels i would like to know more about his fathers career in the cia and let writers he enjoys reading in the same world of spy novels or politics because hes often on tv and i agree with his comments about the good spy. Its a great read and also his biography crossing because i grew up in the middle east in the 1950s and they were very memorable to me. Host why were you living in the middle east in the 1950s, richard . Caller my father worked in saudi arabia. Host and what kind of position . Caller he was a personnel. Anager host thank you, sir. The first thing i need to make clear before my dad calls on the other line, my father never worked for the cia. My dad worked for the pentagon and served in the navy in world war ii on an aircraft carrier. Or he was in many navalme engagements in world war ii and he came to work for president kennedy in 1961 t as assistant secretary of the army and undersecretary of the armyth and finally secretary of the navy for almost two years. He had a distinguished career in government, but it was never in the cia. Host given his military , did that influence your life choices and have you been up were you ever recruited . Guest second question first, no i was never recruited. In terms of my life choices, i grew up in the 1960s and i felt as a young man strongly that the vietnam war was a mistake, wrong and led to some tough w conversations between me and my dad as part of my growing up. When i got out of college, what i want it to do with a passion was be a journalistt. I had been writing for my High School Newspaper since i was 12, 13. I would cover concerts and pretend i was reporting for my High School Newspaper to get backstage to the temptations, so i had a passion for that work. My first job as a reporter was for the wall street journal and the wall street journal semi to harvard, graduate student at cambridge in england and the wall street journal asked me to cover that Steelworkers Union in pittsburgh and if there was a more unlikely person in america to cover the steelworkers, i dont know who it was, but i threw myself in and learned how to talk to people in the union t and make them sources and Great Stories that i just loved. I fell in love with the work. In later years of my career i covered the middle eastf and after 911, i have often gone into war zones and covered it these wars. In syria in july when our special forces spent three dareor three days there. I spent time in syria and have been often onto a rack about a dozen times, so i ended up wanting to have a window as a journalist on what our military doeswa. There are times when i wonder look in back if i should have served my country and some direct way. I hope as a journalist the work i do serves the country in its own way, but it is not the same as working for a governments and i look back now and think should i have done that. One of the things used think about when you get older about the choices you have made. Host some of the references in your book include references, are they propaganda and are they effective . Guest while, doa i would not describe as propaganda service. Doa wants to be source of objective news much as the bbc is h for britain and i think that doa has excellent journalists now run by a colleague and friend whose journalism i respect a lot. Philadelphia inquirer, and other papers. Some were more specifically set up as a source of pro american information during the years of conflict in the middle east. Would you call it propaganda . Im sure there are some good journalists that would be offended by it. No question what the mist mission was specifically. Host next call for David Ignatius is coming from virginia. Thank you for holding and please go ahead with your question or comment caller i want to say first of all thank you so much for the openness in this discussion. This is what people need to hear so we can unite to bring this country back on track. I just want to ask mr. Ignatius back to his wall street journal days, two names to comment on and also comment on the importance of journalism that facts do matter. Ls i was interviewed by jonathan quit me of the wall street journal in 1983 and triggered the article triggered an investigation eventually causing resignation of jim wright, speaker of the house, in shame and i also read about back then that helped me know how i was being manipulated in the book was often by harry rosinski, a highlevel cia operative and i would love to have comments on those points. Thank you again and we could get this country back on track. Host given your references that you made can you tell us a bit about yourself . Caller if i can share my name i have no fear if youll let me do that and i think would be interesting for your listeners and i would like to bring it back to your programming so we could truly heal america and the right way. My name isam huge trolls and. I share common background with President Trump and i heard mr. Ignatiusun mentioned his father, god bless him, if you still with with us and my what mother was a supermodel in the National Archives in washington dc. N host any recognition of that name . Guest i dont know him, but i sure like what he had to say and i share with a passion the feeling that our country needs to be more united. Our divisions are now our greatest national weakness and our adversaries are exploiting that. On the names you mentioned, jonathan was a great intense since i was overthetop Investigative Reporter for the wall street journal when i worked therest. He was famous. We had in those days great characters who did investigative reporting. I was studying their there was again the Washington Bureau who was one of my mentors named Jerry Landauer who was a great character and wrote stories during that time. Areas a famous figure in the intelligence world. I did not ever meet him, to my knowledge so i c cant comment on that. And you mentioned my dad. My dad is 97. My mom is 92. They are both, thank goodness in good health. I will see them both later today for a visit. Just mention because i talked about my dads career serving our governments. U. S. Navy launched guided missile destroyer this spring named after my father, uss Paul Ignatius so in our family we say Paul Ignatius, the manner that ship. Thats a great big warship that will be at c4 30 years and a wonderful memorial to my dad and everyone who knows my dad knows what a special person he is. Host there is an armenian connection and one of your books does that reflect on your heritage . Guest it does. Theres an armenian connection my life. My grandfather was born in what was then that ottoman empire, a town in eastern turkey. He made his way to america as did the woman he married who came by way of manchester englandy and in my living room we have a piano that my grandmother brought to america from manchester, england. I open the piano bench and saw some of the music she brought with her and that pno is played to sometimes by my own daughter who is now a doctor whose name is lisa. She sits at that pno where her great grandmother sat. My armenian background is something i am proud of. G i have tried to travel to armenia and get to know people there and support humanitarian causes in armenia. The miracle of our country is that we are all from somewhere and we are americans first, but we get to know and feel comfortable with and explore our ethnic groups and in my case that involves getting to know more about the armenians in the story of their suffering and the genocide in 1915. Host if you are interested in our previous caller, viewers are sending in emails with links to some of the information about him and we will move on to thomas in humble, texas. Thomas, you are on with authoror David Ignatius. Caller howre you doing . Guest good. Caller that Russian Submarine captain who refused to launch and if you remember his name, let me know, but i was talking about the policies that reagan used against russia that made him spend trillions on military spending. Kind of using it on us now. Our healthcare is a mass. We elected a process on the premise of make America Great againes. Seems like we are making. Know what im saying . One more thing, refugees from south america. Explained that in the 80s. Thank you so much as. Guest so, let me take the last of those first. I think when you talk about refugees you mean refugees from Central America at the time the cia was running Covert Action Program against nicaragua and the refugees that were involved in that. Maybe you mean that cuban refugees all those groups pretty much have assimilated into american life. Not much of a vestige left. Your point about china pushing us into an arms race that will bankrupt america is a powerful one. Of the chinese do posene an increasing threat, i think, increasing ability to interfere with the United States, but the way in which we should respond i think is complicated. One thing is we continue to spend a massive massive amounts on all of the traditional arsenal of weapons we have had, aircraft carrier, bomber wing, bases everywhere and all the traditional power which increasingly in the age of cyber warfare is vulnerable and so we are spending hundreds of billions for legacy system and maybe not spending the money we need to do to spend for the systems t that will actually combat our adversaries in the future. Future were well be not will be waged in space, which electronically and wont look like anywhere we have seen, i suspect. I share your view we need to be a lot more smart and looking at the budget in america. We dont have enough money to spend on every Weapon System under the sun. Of the pentagon traditionally is e terrible at making these choices. Everyone wants everything and the navy once its own version of the air force different versions. Senator mccain, someone i respect a lot sent a letter to the secretary of defense jim mattis a couple months ago and basically said senator mccain is very ill now and he said you need to make choices. You need to makes choices about what we can choir and what we cant. You need to make strategic choices because we cannot afford everything and i think he was right. Host in 2011, the money came out, so people access the protagonist. Its about pakistan. This is a tweet from President Trump in the past couple of weeks the us is foolishly giving pakistan more than 33 billion in aid over the past 15 years and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit. Guest to say they have given us nothing but lies and deceit is wrong and ive seen the evidence that its wrongec. I traveled with the Pakistani Military and the swamp valley, north of pakistan which was once infested by that taliban and i have been with their military as they moved to clear that territoryy at considerable losses. I have traveled where al qaeda hit out. I is in the joint operations the us ran with the Pakistani Military to go after those al qaeda cells one by one by one and againne i know that the pakistani paid a price in lives lost. That said, its also true as President Trump tweeted, ask anyone in their military that served out there the pakistanis have not played straight up with United States and have maintained a relationship with a network that operates in afghanistan as one of the most deadly groups in afghanistan and it is strictly responsible for killing americans. The us keeps pressuring the pakistanis and if you say we fight theta same adversary lets go after the network and the pakistanis refuse. I think its usually a mistake in Foreign Policy to force things to extremes. Thats why Foreign Policy by tweet is not a good idea in 140 or 280 characters you cant really do justice to the nuance of the relationship the us needs to have with pakistan. Its way to be complicated, but the basic point with pakistanis being a fully open with us about what they know . No. Do we have a right to protest the relationship with a group thats killing americans, killing americans right now today . Yes, we do. Somewhere between creatures crazy tweet, lets throw the buggers overboard and this Current Situation is good policy. Pakistan will continue to be important to the us. The us maintaining a dialogue with the country that has Nuclear Weapons and says its prepared to use them is really important. Wed just a walk away that relationship. Heres the director of isi, these americans are the cause of the world, are they not my brother . They drop their bombs and when webr get angry they think of friendship. They think they can make war and charm us with money. Really, they bring merck on a summer day. Guest general maleic is the head of the pakistani Intelligence Service in my novel. Thats not what well research. Readers of my column know i interviewed the head of pakistani intelligence several times, so i describe often the dialogue. The pakistanis have driven a generation of american militaryn and Intelligence Officers knots by not fully sharing their relationship with some of these groups in the pakistanis protest, understandably, i guess. We are in the business of protecting information protecting ourselves. The network which you may want to never talk to again, we get valuable intelligence from them g, so dont tell us never to talk to them again, pakistan if you are a spy novelist at some of the richest terrain imaginable cruising around. Its a scene you cannot conjure up anywhere else love is novel 19th century britain khyber pass, grand trunk road, a lot of that is still alive. As a journalist host where did the name soapy marks, your protagonist come from . Guest in that book as you remember she has another name. Shes nervous about the name marks. I always have terrible trouble picking characters names. I will take a list and match this first name at that last name and sometimes a characters name will change after the second draft because i hated the name so muchft there is a Computer Programmer program that you can get that is a name generator for writers to come up with names. Of course, once you come up with a name you have to checke, to make sure theres no real person that could in any way be confused with this fictional character, but sophie marks, honestly she emerged as a characters name after i made a list of 150 other ones that i checked out. Host and my reading too much into names or doo they really create anger . Guest you want a characters name that will be consistent with what the how the character behavesbe. I have always thought the best assignor names to characters was Charles Dickens who has, you know, the blacksmith with great expectation, joe carter he. The imprudent, always something will turn up wilkinson kolber. Dickens just had a flair for these unforgettable names. Often your characters change in the course of writing a novelha. As you learn more about a character and as the character does things on the page the name you initially thought was appropriate changes. The name of cia head of operations in my new novel, the quantum spy , i changed the final draft it was something entirely different and i realized the name i had had certain details that just didnt fit to the person become, so the thing about a novel is good to control every detail and if you decide to give someone a different name, being there it is. Host have you ever surprise yourself with changing a character may be a character becomes good guy bad guy etc. Creates to . Guest characters can sort of take things over. They just do outrageous things. They are more clever than you thought they were and they end up taking more space and that has happened to me often. My middle east pakistani Intelligence Officers were a lot more complicated and interesting, so assigned a smaller role in the tickets larger. We were talking about bloodmoney and that novel opens with something that im a proud of as a writer because it takes readers to a place that we need to gori that is hard to go and it imagines what it would be like to be under aci drone attack in a tribal area of pakistan. I travel to the tribal areas to see what that space look like. I traveled in a one engine plane, bumping over the mountains, bumping over the badlands were the only people underneath us weree al qaeda and their supporters and i asked what would we have if we had engine trouble and he turned to me and said we would die. [laughter] thats not complicated, so i was able to describe what it felt like to hear that home at 10000 feet above you and see that gleam on the body of the drone and begin to run in terror from the place and then a loss of everyone around you who is not able to escape and thats happened over and over again. I understand drones are supposed to be more precise in targeting any other kind of Weapon System. I get thate, but drone is a terrifying one and i felt like if i couldld take readers and make you feel what it would be like and as i said to hear that buzz in your ear and see the flashing lights and the panic and you need to think what would it be like. We have been doing that every day. Lets hear from margaret in san antonio. Caller hello and thank you for bringing fiction to authors. This is a great addition and i am enjoying this today. My question is to any of your books have the mossad in the . Host why do you ask that question, margaret . Caller because i love gabriel, the books by daniel silva and i love reading about israel. Host thank you maam. Guest the answer is, yes. I also like dan dance books. In my first novel, agents of innocence where there is this nightmare for readers and officers at the time where the us is working with that ofin Palestinian Intelligence and there is in intelligence characters that were struggling to learn what the americans were doing and trying to figure how to approach the americans. F israelis made appearances in other books of mine since then. I felt since there were so many good authors to really focus and there was a lot of literature that comes out about it that it would be good to write about things less written about, so i havent intended to make that a primary source. Often there operatives are woven through. I would note we have invited mr. Silva on to be on the series and we are holding out hope he will be here in the fall. Guest good. Host if you want to participate in our conversation today you can do it via social media as well at the tv is our twitter handle and our instagram address and it will connect you on facebook as well and our email is book tv at cspan. Org. Sam, lewisville, texas you are on the air with David Ignatius. Guest goahead. We are listening. Caller mr. Ignatius, i appreciate everything you have written and i look forward to the incredible work you have any future. The comment i would like to make is what you mentioned earlier about the good spy, the unsung hero of the war on terror. What impressed me in the book that i didnt anticipate was that he was alone that his wife and children and they also were serving their country in situations that were very hard, very very difficult and they were equally in harms way and how his wife managed the children and got them educatedag and was able to purchase their clothing through the Sears Catalog at Different Things like that and just a commentin to all of those who served our country, to be grateful for their wives and children that are there with them. James bond never had a wife or a family a, but the people who serve our country do and those lives wives and children are right there along with their fathers and i appreciate the opportunity to bring these sentiments to our community. Thank you very much for taking my call. Yo host when you say our community, are you a member of the Intelligence Community h . Caller no, not really, Just Community of all of us in this country. Host thank you, sir. David ignatius . Guest ike couldnt possibly say it better than sam did. The families of our Foreign Service officers because they are exposed to danger and are Intelligence Officers overseas dont get recognition and sometimes dont fully know what their spouses are doing because its so secrets. Robert ames wife, yvonne , was a very courageous person, deeply shattered by the boss of her husband. I think back mentioned earlier in the showio on the day that robert ames was killed when a car bomb hit the American Embassy in beirutb. I was walked to the front doorke about a halfhour before the bomb hit and i stayed in touch ever since with the woman who is the secretary that walked me down theres. Her name is rebecca. I wont get a last namer r because of privacy, but that, that our people serving overseasng who are not in the military, dont get the applause at the ball games, but things they live through , the risks that they in their family members have taken is really worth remembering. I mean, the next time you see a Foreign Service officer, that coast to their families, also. Host on the flipside, Robert Hanssen, hayes, how for so long could they get away with what they were doing . Justin reading your book , mr. Ignatiusn, i felt paranoid. Guest the first answer is the russians are good at what they do. They have agents effectively. They cover their tracks. There their tradecraft is good. Hansen went to Great Lengths to conceal their activities. The people whose names they exposed and rested their lives for the us to provide information ended up getting killed and these were consequential things they did and real betrayals. We have been luckiest that the number of people who have been recruited from our Intelligence Service has been f smaller with a lot of other countries. Look at Britain Britain is riddled with soviet agents. Turned out they had a anti soviet operation really working. We have had more cases and i know coming back to our original theme of the the quantum spy the number of the chinese recruitments of their versions Baldwin James or Robert Hanssen with moles inside the Intelligence Community. There are two live cases there are big investigations underway about their activities. Of the chinese have gotten more aggressive in going after us personnel, so those cases are real. They haunt the cia. Led i first started out as a journalist getting interested in writing about intelligence, one of the people i took to lunch repeatedly in the late 1970s think i long ago that is was james jesus angleton, the legendary head of cia counterintelligence who wasth retired, but still fascinated to the point of obsession with these russian cases. He was convinced theas russians were literally behind every tree and i think, one reason he was so paranoid about russia manipulation, russian intelligence activity was he had befriended ken selby, british mi six officer who had been in washington as their liaison and they had been pals, had lunch and dinner and a molten told him everything he knew and then suddenly angleton realized he shared these secrets with someone who was a stone cold trader and he never was the same after that. Host i think a new biography of James Angleton came out last year and book tv covered it. If you go to book tv. Org, our website, type in James Angleton book and watch it online their. This is an email from ken. He says i offer you this title for a future novel the reluctant pessimist. He also asks has the world surprised you in any large way and hes writing from catskill, new york. Guest i like the reluctant pessimist. I my greatest failing, i think, as a journalist is that i often am an optimist. I look for the reasons why something will work, certainly writing about the middle east. Friend of my said when i first began covering the middle east 1980, david pessimism hayes. May be i should be the reluctant pessimist after all these years. Forgive me. What was the second half . Host has the world surprised you . D guest i was surprised and pleased by unraveling of the soviet union. I was surprised and deeply troubled by the inability of us military power to create stability in iraq after the us invasion in 2003. By the continuing difficulty in using our military power to achieve political ends is a real lesson there. I have been surprised, to be honest, by the way in which our country politically is fraying and fragmenting. We are so much more divided and angry as a country now than i ever imagined would be possible. There is so much smaller ground on which reasonable people can stand and discuss things and agree on the facts and agree on what policies make sense. That surprises me and worries me. I think its our biggest problem as a country. I think our current leadership in the present we can start with the white house making the problem worse every time something is healing in our National Life it seems like theres a desire to rip the scab openn and that surprises me and worries me. Host tell me if im being too general here, but throughout your novels, mr. Ignatius, the president in the white house are relatively poor feel periphery of to what youre writing about. Guest there is the briefest cameos in which someone will make reference to the president or go see the president. I think its so easy to writing stereotypes about the white house in the situation room and it just takes away from the granularity that interests me, the reallife. Write different kind of novel about National Security advisorfe for senior person whos in the middle of that and then try to write that as realistically as repossible, not the world of how some cards, somewhat stereotypical worldwh, but something closer to the way it really happens. Maybe in the future i will write a novel like that, but its partly i just feel like as soon as i get the president involved its a world of cliche. Its hard to write a president. Its either a description of the actual president or a recent oneri or someone very fanciful. Never want to do that. Host chad tweets into you which one of your books have been made into movies . Guest so, the only book thats been made into a movie so far is body of lies made into a movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio and ridley scottar, excuse me ridley scott was the director. Mark strong laid the chief Intelligence Officer, Russell Crowe played leonardo to is boss. I think its a wonderfulth film. Hbo shows it often enough. On i have had other deals that i have thought would lead to movies. Tom cruise wanted to play a character in my novel, firing offense. Happily paid a lot of money for what looks like a project. Three drafts and screenplays. Never got pictures. Ar there are other things bumping along and i would love to see a projectmp and other discussion with the British Television networkje to do my novel, the increment, about iran and secret operations based in britain, cable tv series. We will see if that comes to fruition. Ie takes a long time for these hollywood things to happenor. Host whats the process likely to. Host either for the one that did get made or body of lies or some of the others that did not get made . Guest i will talk about the one that did get made because thats the easiest to describe. I had been doing some writing for ridley scott, the director, on another project. He had an idea for a movie about a journalist in iraq who falls in love with iraqi women journalists also love with an iraqi man and i had been writing of the director and when i finished a draft of body of lies and body of lies again my, books pretty realistic and drew from the real fighting and al qaedast and how really have tried to get people al qaeda. I finished a draft and my agent sent it to Ridley Scotts development person. Of the person called me from i think the sundance some festival and saidan i have been up all night. Im supposed to be and i beenes reading your book. Its great we love it and so very quickly a deal was made. It happened that hollywood was in one of those moments where because there was expected screenwriters strike every studio was scrambling to lineup all the stars. They could do to movies before the strike, so they managed to lineup Leonardo Dicaprio to do this and once you had the director, ridley scott, famous actor you dont need anything else. Then, the question of getting a script that could be shott and there was one very prominent screenwriter who worked on and one uncredited screenwriter, very well known, but his name is not on it n who wrote a new draft that was superb, i think. That second screenwriter asked what often shared dialogue, shared questions so i ended up being involved in the construction. About, not a screenwriter. When they got down to filming it, of course, wanted to be on the set. Went to morocco and took one of my daughters. She got to meet Leonardo Dicaprio and talk to him so long that his girlfriend came over and said its time to go. My daughter still remembers that. Took another daughter to see shooting here in the washington dc area, so i have three daughters and all three went to the premiere in new york. That was a cool family moment. Il i think what novelists need to accept is that so often people say what you think about the movie. I like the book people flatter authors by saying they like the book better. In this case i loved the movie, genuinely. I think people have to accept that the book you have written you can imagine by someone else. A life on the page and it will have to become something different, reimagined in the mind of a screenwriter and director to having life, something too literal to almost transcribe something from one medium into another doesnt work. Has to be redone. Of course its different. Some of the things i loved in body of lies arent in the movie. Got chucked. Were not in it, so you just have to give it up in the suite is. If that doesnt happen and its not reimagined it wont be any good. Host what is it mean to be optioned . Guest means they pay you a small amount of money to the right to make the movie if all the stars are in alignment and if they do make the movie they pay you a whole lot more, so when people go around saying they optioned my book that is great. You quickly learn that chances its going to get made into a movie are slim to none, so bet on slim. The amount of money initially taken an option deal is usually pretty small. Sometimes, on a rare happy occasion they will buy property outright. Not an option to make it, they buy it outright and then if there is a bidding war like i say authors to favorite words are bidding war. If theres a bidding war than the price goes up. Ideally, if you have two studios, two directors, who want to make it, then you begin to get territory where you can your kids school tuition. Thats a lucrative. Host David Ignatiuss book body of lies has been made into a movie. We will show you the trailer and also show you some of his favorite authors and his influence. Its a lot simpler to put to an end than you might think. Its real. At hoffman does not know [bleep]. These people really do not want to negotiate you are blown. This is about the where friendship matters you do know we p are at war. This can save your life. When you are right running a site operation you did what you have to do. You to trust everyone you can right now see that all you have to do is trust me. Timeout im out. Its 8 00 oclock in the morning. Saving civilization, honey. What is that mean . Host well, every month for the past 20 years David Ignatiuss top Nonfiction Author has joined us on our inDepth Program for fascinating to our conversation about their workk. Just 42018 indepth is changing course inviting 12 fiction authors onto our sets. Authors of historical fishing, National Security thrillers,of science writers, social commentators like colson whitehead, Geraldine Brooks and many others. Their books have been read by millions around the country and around the world. So, if you are a reader, plan to join us for indepth on book tv. Its an Attractive Program the first sunday of every month at what you call in and talk turkey to your favorite authors. Host David Ignatius, your character in the the quantum spy, harris chain, is reading a novel when you list that is one of your favorites. Guest they are a series of six novelsst by Anthony Trollope tht recount the story of that alastair family. He becomes the duke by the end of the series and the reason i love the books and the character in the quantum spy urges people to read the book if they are probablyad the best political novels ive ever readad. They take over a long stretch of time. Ambitious people, charming people, scheming people who are making their way and its not all that different than the washington we know. We see the rise and fall of their ambition and their fortune. One of my favorite characters in the novels is actually not a member of his family. Its an irish reform politician, charmer, handsome keeps falling in love with the wrong women, but these are books i find that 19th century novel to which im basically addicted are just a wonderful guide for storytellers like me who want to learn how to unpack characters, but also they are incredible guides to life. If you want to understand what Good Behavior is, what bad behavior is, what relations between men are really like, the complexity of how we behave in the world, the mistakes we make, theres nothing quite like these books. Any reader l who watches book tv who doesnt know novel should give it a try. Host if we describe someone as a trollope, what are we saying about them . Guest hes famous for his industrial practices as a writer he would get a fair rate get up every morning and write foryo two plus hours, read a certain number of words and then that was it. He would go off to his job at the post office. And center of the red letterboxess that you see all over britain, said to be. So, he had this life as a bureaucrats and another life as a novelist. Trollopehe put on airs a little bit. He loved to go foxhunting. He loved the pleasures of a country gentleman. He was fascinated by i mentioned earlier men and women in almost every trollope novel there was a theme of someone being jilted. Of the jilted as one of his novels and he regarded that is the most outrageous thing where ath someone is let off typically a beautiful pure young woman is let on to believeng mr. Soandso will marry her and then shes jilted. Sounds corny. Not for everyone, but they are books i love. Host what is it like to write a sex seen one of your novels . Are you comfortable doing that . Guest what i have learned about writing about sex is that less is more, that is the subtle invocations of mood, contact. Its what surrounds sex thats more interesting to read, also, less embarrassing to write. I think in my earlier books i was trying to be more commercial and so probably went violated the ruler just set forth , but my most recent novel, the quantum spy there is very little sex, but i hope theres a richness of characterization of it many women. I think one of the things ive learned it to do as a writer is torn write women characters anyway that is w believable. Im always happy when women to say to me that they love a characterdo. In my first novel, theres a scene with two women in a restaurant talk about sex, talking about men. There in the world the beirut in which they live in many women have said to me that there seen as their favorite in the book. How did you know thats actually how women talk, so one of the many small challenges of being a novelist. Host if you live in the Eastern Central time zones. We will cycle through our social media addresses00pl if you want to participate in our conversation with novelist and Washington Post t columnist David Ignatius. I went to read a y description of one of your books which came out in 1991. This was i dont think you wrote this, but i just want to see what you think about this, the description in the book jacket. Made restless by the tightening restrictions of cia brought receipt, agent alan taylor oversteps moral and legal bounds in a topsecret mission to destabilize the soviet union. His new recruit, the beautiful anna barnesit who struggles with complex feelings for taylor receives a deeper education then she signed up for. Ve at 10 David Ignatiuss trademark world of shifting international and domestic pressures, hidden loyalties and secret adventures. Guest so, that book was really fun. It was my second novel. I had some success with agents of innocence, so i got interested in the story of how in the later cold war years the cia had played on russian nationalities. I also wanted to think about, what about the experience of a woman case officer . The problem for women in actually doing operation this, when a woman befriends a man from another culture, says lets take a walk or lets have a drink together, begins the process that leads to recruitment. To see that in sexual terms, this is about sex, it puts women in a very delicate, dangerous position. And begin to think about that. She and alan taylor thinking about this fabric of the soviet Union Getting involved more deeply in what turns out to be a hideously complicated set of problems. Here again, i was working from real life. People i went to see, lucy is back after the war created recruited by the germans during the war, it was picked up by British Intelligence and the cia, had a fabled career thinking about uzbekistan and that whole part of the world, incredibly generous. When i travel to uzbekistan, the pleasure of learning a piece of history, in nonfiction, this has been written. Waiting for somebody to do research. Host what do you think of that . Guest it is great, kind of corny, book jacket copy, if it got people to pick up the book, read the book, in this marketplace the question of how to draw the reader into engagement, a lot of people are brandname buyers of fiction, it is going to be the basis, the thing he knows how to do, the lincoln lawyer character. And i know intimately from all those books, i will by Michael Connellys next book. I hope somebody who likes realistic novels about the cia has read ten of my books, i should give that a shot so you build up some brand equity and be careful because you will blow that. Intelligence officers, i will be a spy novelist, those starting with graham greene, charles macario, jason matthews, serving as Intelligence Officers, found a way to write commercial books. For each who succeeded i bet there are a dozen, they were not good novels, people had all the same experience but didnt have the ability to translate it into something that makes you want to stay up late. What is it that makes you stay up needing to go to bed, finish one chapter and read the next chapter. What is the thing trying to recreate that. Host Graham Greenes quiet american is one of your favorite books. Guest graham greene, british Intelligence Officer and in general, some of my favorites by novels, implies genre books, quiet american, in the 1950s anticipates almost everything that ends up being so poisonous and difficult when we go to war in the 60s, placing idealism, fatuous belief to offer society, a journalist obsessively thinking piled in the American Embassy, attache, forever spouting off about theorists of the cold war, found the third way to defeat the communists, it is the perfect introduction a decade later. Host lets hear from barbara in massachusetts. You have been patient, you are on with father David Ignatius. Caller great privilege. Im a very interesting person, i am 70 years old and my father was in the oss in world war 2 rebecca. As Many Americans know, the Army Developed the iq test with army recruits, and they put him in london in the oss. It is the precursor of the cia standing for office of strategic services. Working under bill donovan and Arthur Goldberger who became Supreme Court justice, hit did this incredibly creative thing, he recruited german expatriate communists who fled hitler into London Bridge my father was able to find them through a bookstore owner and recruited them into the tool mission. They were germans so they put them in german Army Costumes and gave them the first walkietalkies and dropped them into germany, radio information back, and my brother jonathan has become a historian because of what my father did. David was talking about his father, the greatest generation, we are in our 70s, we are the boomer generation, and the relationship to this history, then my brother wrote an article about this, a journal of unclassified stories, a couple years ago, has written a movie treatment and miniseries to hear about davids trials and tribulations. The other part of me, a colleague, and part of the privacy act, and the freedom of information act. And freedom of information, here we are in this Christopher Steele thing in this age of information. I love to hear david talk about the balance between these things. I would love to see the pentagon and the cia create an office of creative history or some kind of place where writers like my brother and historians can go and present their information and get a seal of approval saying yes, this is valid, Something Like that. I want david to talk about the new crop of journalists coming out of his russiagate thing, how great they are doing, 30 and 40yearold journalists and talk about becoming a patriotism or a mentor to them. Host thank you for your time this afternoon. Guest it is wonderful to talk with you by television, your late husband, ron, i really love ron and i am sure you do, a wonderful man. So many rich things in what you said, the story of your dad, adventures in the oss sound extraordinary, your brother is right sound like a natural. Wishing good luck with that which i will look and see if i can find a classified summary of the operation you described. A couple points you made. The new journalists for the Washington Post or new york times, aggressive coverage of the russia middling story and this unusual presidency is just fantastic to watch them work. This is a period we have to be aggressive but cant make mistakes, make big mistakes, makes us very vulnerable to attack. I love seeing the aggressiveness and professionalism of these kids. Michael schmidt from the new york times, another one just broke. A fantastic story about the pressure on attorney general sessions not to recuse himself, broke some new ground in this story, just a young, hardworking, smart person. The great thing, wonderful examples of journalism we are generating, more movies like post, the more smart people come into the business. They were in contraction. I can remember wondering if it made a difference in the world, i dont want to that anymore. Every day when i got up i know the value of what my colleagues do. That is great. The final thought about how to use the expertise and things we know, at harvard i teach at the Belford Center at the kennedy school, talk about applied history, a discipline of applied history, applied, different disciplines, applied history, you look at the lessons people had during any period in history. How do we apply that to what we are dealing with now . I love that. I would love to be an applied historian. Host two people you listened as being influenced by, ben bradley and Catherine Graham. Guest i thought the post movie was wonderful and stirring, almost a him to my newspaper and my profession. I love it. I thought what was unforgettable was the portrayal of graham. Im lucky enough to have joined the post in 1986, to have known graham well and interacted with her often. I can hear her voice when i would say something, she was just so funny, so mischievous. It is uncanny how she captures quirks, the way she carried herself, her voice, brilliant portrayal, the moment in which she became a great owner, great publisher on the business side, they had to, this could cost your business, ben bradley, you got to publish. The tough decision to make. On that decision is built fantastic success and as a company. Love the people want to see the real characters who lie behind that is wonderful, there is an hbo documentary a month or six weeks ago, and then voiced his autobiography. And the youngest son absolutely central to the life and growth at the Washington Post in the early 1980 raise your salary then you have. And guy get a little more money. What a blessing to have lived the real ben bradley and Catherine Graham starting in the newsroom. Host to think don graham junior, the son of king. Guest he was Catherine Grahams son, don was our publisher, he knew the names not just of every reporter and editor and press operator to deliver the paper, the likes of which raised to run the pauls, he doesnt get enough public credits, the Washington Post, the publicly traded company, not sufficient to keep the post healthy enough to do the great journalism and took this thing that he loves as much as anything in the Washington Post and found a buyer able to run it at the level of Investment Energy needed and that is jeff bezos, the founder of amazon who purchased the Washington Post. Has been a fantastic owner who gave us money and confidence, it was john who did the most unselfish thing of knowing about selling the paper, to keep it healthy and keep it alive. Host evelyn, please go ahead with your question or comment for David Ignatius. Caller after listening to these outstanding people i wonder whether i should even open my mouth. However, i will. First of all, i want to thank cspan for existing. Im 88 years old, every weekend i turn on cspan from early friday until sunday night, the facility in which i live which is a senior facility, told me that if we get a collection of books, i read weird books meaning books, mystery books that everybody is reading, i read weird books. I want david mccollum, David Ignatius, those are weird books so i am getting together a collection of weird books. My original question was there are two things i wanted to say. Number one, i wrote a book, nothing like David Ignatius, didnt become a bestseller, it was living beyond ourselves and the reason i wrote that is because everybody is in a rush to retire, and the truth is we do live beyond our age because theres not a lot for older people to do unless they have done something if you have become a wellknown writer or artist or have some particular skill, you are no longer needed. There is nothing for you at this particular point. You are just there. It was interesting to me because i didnt realize, i read one of your books and enjoyed it very much, but many years ago my husband who is not a reader got on the train, we were living in new york and he got on the train to white plains and struck up a conversation and this man said he had written a book, the spy came in from the cold and my husband said that is a strange title and he said to my husband my name is David Cornwall and gave his phone number and said why dont you call me and we can get together . My husband as you can see was not a great intellectual. Never heard of the book, he told me, i got excited, i would have screwed up the conversation because i would have been so excited i wouldnt have known what to say to him, but my husband didnt pay much attention and never followed through, David Cornwall went back to england and my husband never got in touch with him. I do like spy books, i like your books. I know you dont think he was much of a writer but im curious what writer you thought he was . What is your opinion of him . Host thank you for calling in and watching booktv every weekend, 48 hours of books, television for serious readers was David Ignatius, your opinion . Guest i think john mcrae is a wonderful novelist, some of my favorite spy novels or his book, the smiley novels. He went through a period, the last 15 years, i didnt enjoy his novel as much, i thought they were a little 1dimensional, the american characters in particular just seemed like the face of evil, not all that interestingly drawn. I just reviewed his latest book, a legacy of spies, which i loved, which was a tour of characters like the spy came out of the cold, other characters from that. Peter willem, central character in this book and i recommend that highly to people. I want to say one thing what evelyn said which i found quite moving. The role that cspan plays giving people a way to talk about intellectual subjects, books, novels, with the beginning of this new show is so. It is part of the texture of american life. I have known brian lamb he started cspan. The idea of you being in retirement wherever you are having a weekend you can look forward to where people talk, that is great. I about when i retire, the only thing that shears me is all the books i havent read yet, all the books there still to be read. Evelyn and all other people wherever they do their reading, watching cspan. Host email from brad. I remember hearing David Ignatius was cowriting an opera about nokia failer machiavelli. Telus the experience of that . Happy to answer that question. I did write an opera called the new prince which is about machiavelli said in 1512 but then set in the future of the 500th anniversary of the publication of the prince. This opera, music is written by mohammed, a gifted american composer, World Premiere in amsterdam, but National Opera in march, i am happy to say loretta got to take two curtain calls to a standing audience that the opera house in amsterdam. For me as a writer, i dont know much about opera but i loved working on this, of all the pieces i have done, this is one of the things im proudest of. I hope, i would love to tell viewers this is going to be shown in america. I hope that will happen but not yet. A key scene happened in amsterdam, theater richly described. Is there a relationship . It takes place in an unpronounceable word, the theater where my opera still remember, i have not i was terrified it was going to be a flop and i remember sitting there holding my wifes hands crushing the bones in her hand because i was so nervous to see this, and opera house as an important fictional role. Host has there been any lead woman protagonist in your books yet . I would never dare a character after my wife. Some of my characters, suits, jackets, various design houses but they never look as good on the characters. Host gene in hillsboro, North Carolina on booktv with David Ignatius. Caller i was curious if you had an idea who is the most likely successful person as far as quantum computing, university or maybe a startup a big Computer Company like ibm or a Government Contractor like lucky it. What is your feeling where that is going to go . There are Different Companies pursuing different pathways to building a quantum computer, companies the problem building a consul computer is an environment in which the cubits, bits that are 0 and one at the same time, dont decode here, they last longer to do actual computing, that is the biggest technical challenge. There are different pathways of doing that, delaying coherence. Microsoft introduced me to team members, michael friedman, Santa Barbara and others, their ability is in effect to braid the cubits in a nano wire, material so they are more stable, they can shield it better from things that lead to decoherence, any kind of energy that interferes, theres a different approach in the university of maryland and Big Companies called the single ion pathway, to see that at the university of maryland, they are able to entangle and gather more cubits than other approaches. Every Major Company and university is involved in one consortium or another like the university of maryland. The technical puzzles are so interesting. One reason i am more hopeful about building a quantum computer, there is so much brainpower in the United States and china and around the world that voted to solve the problems, nuts you got to crack but the simple answer is there are many pathways. Every big company is involved in some way. Host peter in maine, email, work habit, how, when, how long . There are three phases of writing a novel, the first is research and now my 11th novel so i do that a couple times a week, i have gone to interview somebody to gather information from the book about locations. Once i have character and plot said, the book takes over. I write two columns for the Washington Post but what begins to fill my conscious, preconscious is this story taking shape in my mind, i fall asleep thinking of it and wake up in the morning thinking about it and dream a little bit about it and it crowd out Everything Else so it is like a baby that wants to be born. It finds the nourishment it needs so other things have to accommodate that. Finally took a while to understand the importance of the process of writing. We look at the weaknesses of what you have done and ask friends, ask my wife is this freddie . Is there . It needs more work, more help and you need to leave enough time as a writer to do that, to write not just a second draft but the third or fourth draft so it is a series of phases. I steal time from other parts of life. I hope readers of my column, not too obvious because these columns are thin but it does crowd out other things that you are doing. Host column twice a week. You didnt write a book from 1999 to 2007, to publish from 1999 to 2007 but you have been on a two your schedule. Why . I moved to paris in 2000 to become editor of the International Health tribune, i always wanted to run a newspaper and there was a chance to run one. The nicest apartment in paris, overlooking next to the eiffel tower, you would be an idiot if you have this adventure with your family. If you were a drudge spending your free time writing a novel just give it up for a while. I did and we lived at a ball in paris but we moved back in 2004, time to start again and began working on that. The next call from new york, steve, now you can go ahead and talk . Caller hello. Hats off to cspan. I was just getting by and captivated by the subject. I was a newcomer to your material. Do me a favor and pick out one of your books which having read it would be best to enjoy the rest of them. Mac in dallas email the same question. Where to start . Parents never like to say who their favorite child is, they love every child, i feel the same way about my books. If you want to get to know my work, the right place to start is my first novel, agents of innocence, published in 1987. Like every first novel, the author pours everything he knows into the book about life. It is a book im proud of, torments the middle east, there is not a word i would change in terms of what we have ended up living through every year since 1987. I am proud of all the books, firing offense about a journalist who gets entangled in cia operations, book i am proud of. The increments that it ran takes you to a place that you have never been. Those are some favorites but the offer would not be unhappy if you read every one of them. Do you reveal the spies, the treachery, the whatever early on in your book or do you save it for page 400 . It depends. I have learned readers of spy novels like the fun of a book turning cartwheels in the last few pages and in the trouble backflip in the last 20 or 30 pages. They dont know quite what is ahead. I think that is important. I do try to about the big plot points carefully before i start. It is always more complicated. I am a believer that books like the ones i write i meant to be entertaining. We are not writing tolstoy here. This isnt great literature. These are spy novels. They are written to entertain. I know the pleasure of a spy novel, the funny mind game, didnt see it coming so as i said earlier, the things that makes you stay up the extra 15 minutes. I want to make sure i dont forget that ill get too highminded about this or that, remember im in the entertainment business. Host if you read one of your books and think youre baking a cake you end up with a mud pie, you said that earlier but you assembled all the right ingredients to make that cake, havent you . Guest i have assembled ingredients that are coherent, plausible but that doesnt mean they are right. Ben bradley from the Washington Post used to say we had a responsibility to write about Intelligence Matters and their effect on our readers, we didnt necessarily need to write about the wiring diagram details. The wiring diagram is not in my novels because i usually have no idea what the wiring diagram is. If you try to find out you couldnt but the details that are there are plausible. If you try to combine the way the book says you would end up with a hodgepodge. Hopefully on the page it doesnt seem that way. Host roy in pennsylvania. I read tim weiners legacy of ashes, history of the cia, what is it about the romance of the spy store that overcomes the reality and hopeless outcomes that continue to fascinate readers and writers . Guest the things in his account of the cia that lead to disasters are covert actions that seeks to manipulate other countries and i said earlier the ability of the military power or intelligence operations that works in the long run. Not a lot of evidence of that is about covert actions. Taking better account of the same theme, evan thomass book the very best men which is richly reported with character detail, unforgettable, misconceived to manipulate other countries. The people were interesting. And military history, what makes a good officer, noncommissioned officer, unforgettable when we read rick atkinsons accounts of world war ii in europe, when i read first two volumes in the pacific i come away with a character of the commanders, what war is. Same with intelligence work. The way they operate, conditions under which they operate, the fear that is the constant part of their lives. I would like to distinguish at the end of 750 words, this is terrible. Dont have to do that. Who you think that is one reason you come back to its because you are not making declaratory judgments, thumbs up, thumbs down. Host david in port gordon, washington, please go ahead. Caller can you hear me . Guest yes, sir. Caller thanks for taking my call, quick background. I am a 1770 a 70yearold retired marine, retired lawyer, led an inventory unit in vietnam in 1968. Probably irrelevant to my questions but you mentioned earlier some political matters that triggered my interest. I understand you write a column twice a week. I havent read the post for quite some time, probably going to start reading it again, read your column is because im very impressed with your addition and intelligence, but getting to the point, maybe you have some comments on why mrs. Clinton did not win last year and the preface, to add to that, i did not vote for her, i did not vote for trump. I agree with your characterization, the polarization in this country is almost unbelievable. I characterize myself as a radical moderate that leans a little bit right but certainly not completely so to the idiot sticks on the alt right. Host we are going to hear from guest appreciate your calling in and watching. Im the angry center of radical moderate. That is where i feel. Why didnt mrs. Clinton win . I would say the beginning of the answer is obvious, she wasnt able to present a program of where she would take the country that was compelling enough to overcome the obvious weaknesses of donald trump as an alternative. She couldnt do that, she had a lot of negatives to begin with, a lot of people just didnt like Hillary Clinton but she was never able to build sufficiently to give people confidence that she would be a good leader for the country, enough people. One more thing, the strategy the Clinton Campaign adopted was let donald trump demonstrate through his statements, his behavior that he was unsuitable to be president , that he did not temperamentally have the right qualities to be a leader for the country and they thought overtime he would reveal that and people would make a rational judgment and decide he wasnt the right person and he did reveal that suitability during the campaign. We have seen in the last year his behavior as president a lot more about that unsuitability of his temperament. I do right through this period, it is a lot of momentum. The citizens of the United States take responsibility and good judgments, and if we learned about Donald Trumps temperament since he took office that we didnt basically know inauguration day. People did not pay sufficient attention to it, they were too angry about things or for whatever reason, we have to be good citizens, to be informed, to keep the country strong and stable, our troubles only get worse. Host from the sun king in 1999 the authors note says washington has become so outlandishly unreal that any disclaimer about a novel set in the Nations Capital should be redundant. Guest that was 1999, the time of the clinton impeachment, we had periods of craziness, undamaged oscillations, gets wider and wider, i mentioned my dad earlier, got a smile, analogies for that. The spinning top, a top spinning on a countertop and you can give a top a real knock, it comes back to the center point pretty quickly. When it is not spending as fast as it should, give that knock and it wobbles more and falls over and my dad is right, it doesnt have enough spin, needs to spin faster, to be more integrated. Otherwise the knox the we get. Host email from mark, what do you think of michael flynn, what characters he would make in a novel. Guest he would be a fascinating character. The head of the ia, not the apex of his career. In afghanistan or iraq, mike flynn is an Intelligence Officer, one of the people who drove a fusion of intelligence that drove al qaeda and iraq. Was really in innovator, they found a way to hit a target, in that 24 hour cycle that analyzed the intelligence of cell phones, the flash drives, and they knew how to strike the next thing. Mike flynn, an outstanding officer. Hearing his comments, good ideas in that war. This whole career, people who spend their lives in supersecret part of the government, mike flynn was a military officer in one of our supersecret Task Force Operations that dont even disclose their names or locations, when people come out of the supersecret environment into something more open they dont have good judgment about what to say and what not to say. I saw that in the beginning of my career, when he came out of the darkest recesses of the cia he couldnt stop talking and that is true of a lot of these people. General flynn as much as people should respect what he did in his military career, in more open roles, he became a political figure in the campaign, all we need to do is look what he pleaded guilty to in a plea agreement with special counsel robert mueller. There is a deeper point about secret parts of our government, the cia, nsa, maltese military units, need more exposure so they make better judgments. When they come out, they will have more success. Host a few more minutes with our guest David Ignatius. David, you are on the air. Caller so glad i got in which i very much appreciate what you just said about general flynn, i have been involved with his real all my adult life and i use a quote which i believe is from you, to the effect antisemitism is the elevator music of the arab world. Am i right in attributing that to you . If so do you still believe it . Guest sound like something i said in the past, not sure exactly where, but it is a fact that antisemitism has been too common and easily accepted, too unchallenged in the arab world as long as i have been traveling. I hope that is changing. Even in saudi arabia, you used to hear people say things that would make your hair crawl, that is beginning to change. I do think the problem so many countries is people didnt speak out and challenge a strident antiisrael rhetoric that did sometimes verge if not israel, the jews, people needed to call that out, views about his relapse actions, critically about things israel has done, not the same as uniform, unceasing criticism. I cant give you a citation for having said that but not disagreeing that that elevator music constancy to that rhetoric. Host when you talk about official, nonofficial and integrated covers for cia nations what are we talking about . Official cover, the political officer at the us embassy and cairo. Host are you presumed to be cia or you are cia . Guest you are a cia officer, often declared the cia station chief in whatever city it is will go to the head of their Security Service and declare who are the cia officers and often they will be the ones with liaisons, they will travel often, Intelligence Headquarters nonofficial coverage, traveling for xyz trading core and a home office in buffalo, Branch Office in dubai, and business cards and a backup, that a private company, an Intelligence Officer under nonofficial cover, they are described as knocks taking the initial integrated cover offers people who cover jobs and carefully prepared. Lets say somebody as a counselor officer, doing real counselor worked to try to scratch that, you get suspicious and find backup all the way down. These cover issues are interesting. Really interesting issues today in the era of digital footprints, every move we make is being recorded by cameras somewhere. Anytime we Cross National frontier, our biometrics, fingerprints, digital retina scan is taken. How do you move people secretly across borders in a world where their real identity that is the interesting puzzle, one thing i am researching for the future. I can guess the answers but the question of digital exhaust in the intelligence world, how you vacuum it up, deal with where others are capturing it, a reallife 2018 spy problem. Host your books have moved into the cyber world very extensively. Guest i decided two books ago that every theme of the spy novel, penetration, manipulation, go down a list of the things going to 0s and ones, going digital. That is where espionage and intelligence live now and time to recognize it. Two novels ago i went to the Hackers Convention in las vegas and hung around with hackers and watched them talk about how to break into servers, walking into this convention in las vegas, a big screen scrolling in real time, the names, usernames and passwords of every account being hacked, everybody that is there in real time. The new novel im working on has these issues. The real world people are operating on. Host chuck in illinois. Caller what is the difference between the russia of today and the china of today, the federal government, the flavor between the two, how they do that. I will hang up the phone and listen to your answer. Guest we know from historical reading and spy novels about the meticulous trade craft the russians have used, it has been the mothers milk of Russian Operations going back to the czar time, about fake news and russian manipulation, russians were buying up newspapers, the time of the early soviet service, we understand how they operate, they are meticulous, stage operations with great care. The chinese were thought to have more distant approach. It was often said the chinese would not try to plant a mall in the top of adversary service so brilliantly, they would gather 1000 grains of sand, the mosaic that showed their adversary. The chinese are very aggressive, a series of cases the chinese sought to recruit in the Intelligence Community, not necessarily chinese ancestry, had gone for the targets that pay off. Every indication is they will do that more aggressively. Looking at china, understanding how they play the influence game. Shaping the political events in countries that matter to them. Australia just issued a fascinating report on the counterintelligence threat posed by china. The chinese manipulate australian politics to keep your eye on. Host for the past we 3 hours David Ignatius has inaugurated our 2018 fiction addition of in depth. We appreciate your time. s books, First Published in 1987, agents of innocence, 0 came out in 1991, the bank of fear in 1995, a firing offense 1997, the sun king in 1999, body of lies 2007, the increment 2009, blood money 2011, the director in 2014, and his most recent is the quantum spy. Next month on in depth, National Book award winner and Pulitzer Prize winner. Whitehead will be our guest. You are watching booktv on cspan2, nonfiction not as every book and weekend, television for serious readers. Three days of nonfiction books and authors on this holiday we can. On afterwards former Clinton Administration official at Georgetown University law professor Peter Adelman argues courts are exploiting the court by charging excessive fees for minor crimes. He is interviewed by representative hank johnson of georgia. He will also hear from conservative historian lee edwards on his life and career and key moments in the conservative movement and Vanessa Newman will report on how many from illegally purchased goods is filtered to organized crime and terrorist groups. Neil allen Angela Gershon fell discuss what they call the third digital revolution. [applause] good morning. We, this is the last regular convocation of the semester, right, david . [cheers and applause] huh . [inaudible] i know, harlem globetrotters, but they had to use their gifts by the end of semester, right . Okay. So i see a lot of them are using them today. [laughter] thats my fault. I gave didnt we give them an extra one . We gave them an extra gift, corey and robert, because they turned out in such big numbers to vote. So a lot of them are using it today. Dont take it personally,