Intelligence in fiction

Abstract

In this literary lecture, presented in Ottawa at a 2006 conference on intelligence sponsored by the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS), spy novelist Charles McCarry ruminates on his profession as a writer. He reflects back on how his work has been influenced by his first career as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s. After leaving the CIA, he wrote about his experiences in the world of espionage (sans anything classified) while operating in deep cover and engaging in covert action in, as he recalls, ‘some of the world's most godforsaken places’. The key to good spy fiction, in McCarry's view, is to write ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. © 2008, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.