Damascus Station: Unmissable New Spy Thriller From Former CIA Officer (Damascus Station, 1)

Product Information

From the offset, McCloskey incorrectly characterizes the relations between various religious communities in Syria as religious divisions rather than religious coexistence – which completely disregards the decades of secularism codified by the Ba’ath Party. An American CIA operative is tasked with recruiting a Syrian government official to keep the the American government aware of happenings inside the intelligence services.

We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. The story moves along well, the Syrian characters are well drawn, and there's an intriguing, plausible climax and ending.There's a good novel lurking within in here somewhere but I found it over-concerned with CIA jargon, perhaps unsurprisingly given the author's ex-company background and some of the characters felt a little bit like they had been taken from a catalog. I appreciated how it wasn’t too out of reach as my knowledge of the Middle East isn’t broad, making it approachable.

After the disappearance of an American spy, CIA case officer Sam travels to Paris to recruit a Syrian woman, Miriam, who knows the ins and outs of the Syrian Palace. DS" is well written, and filled to the brim with credible tradecraft and lots of gritty detail about the challenges for intelligence operatives of working in a hostile city such as Damascus. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.Back in the US, he is assigned once again to Syria, the titular Damasus Station, and on the way stops in Paris to recruit a palace official, Mariam Haddad.

The writing is fine, the characters well-drawn, and the action moves along at a pace that's breakneck but often seems unhurried. Few world leaders in recent decades have proven themselves to be more savage than Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. My first spy thriller with a focus on Syria, and with an ex-CIA author, you know you'll get a firsthand account on spycraft. In a program managed by his Republican Guard, officials in the novel are amassing thousands of tons of sarin.For an authentic representation of what it’s like to work in intelligence, look no further than Damascus Station.