Moscow X Hits the Mark
BOOK REVIEW: MOSCOW X: A Novel
By David McCloskey/ W.W. Norton
Reviewed by Cipher Brief Expert Paul Kolbe
The Reviewer — Paul Kolbe is former director of The Intelligence Project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Kolbe also led BP’s Global Intelligence and Analysis team supporting threat warning, risk mitigation, and crisis response. Kolbe served 25 years as an operations officer in the CIA, where he was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, serving in Russia, the Balkans, Indonesia, East Germany, Zimbabwe, and Austria.
REVIEW — Asking a Moscow veteran to review a new spy novel about espionage in Russia risks condemning the poor writer to a witheringly critical deconstruction. Modern espionage fiction on Russia is littered with examples of poor tradecraft, clunky dialogue, and unconvincing plots. False detail that may pass for a general audience can evoke snorts of derision and scorn from grumpy old agency hands.
I approached David McCloskey’s newest novel Moscow X prepared for righteous critique but found myself intrigued by and ultimately immersed, in a terrific plot seasoned with classic tradecraft, new methodologies, and compelling characters. Moscow X is a great read filled with layers of nuance and detail. It captures the contradictions of the spy world and of Russia itself.
The title Moscow X is based on the practice of setting up external stations to work particularly hard denied area targets – the countries where the physical or counterintelligence risks make local recruiting dangerous for both agency officers and potential assets. In Moscow X, a team of case officers, led by the delightfully profane and cynical Artemis Procter, work to recruit Anna Agapova, the daughter of a Russian oligarch who is connected to, but in conflict with, “Goose” the head of the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopastnosti (FSB). Agapova holds the information keys needed to unlock an Agency covert action to disrupt and divide Russia’s leadership.
Naturally, the Agency’s prey is also a predator. Anna is herself, an officer of the Sluzhba Vneshni Razvedki (SVR), Russia foreign intelligence service. In a mission to help her father in his existential fight with FSB Director “Goose” – a childhood friend turned enemy – Anna aims to recruit a source inside a London law-firm which moves illicit Russian money from a variety of unsavory sources – including President Putin.
Anna’s targeting research turns up Hortensia Fox, a South African born lawyer who handles shady Russian money from her respectable Mayfair law office. Naturally, Fox just happens to also be a CIA Non-official Cover (NOC) officer.
There are many things McCloskey gets right in Moscow X – including telling detail of operational considerations and planning that nail the nature of espionage in a digital world of ubiquitous surveillance, vast data sets, and lives laid bare in clouds of digital exhaust. His description of the profile Anna develops on Fox from her desk in St Petersburg, neatly captures the powerful, vulnerability-revealing tools available to any intelligence service. Social media accounts, cellphone records, travel data, geolocated pattern analysis, tax databases, and surveillance cameras give Anna a remarkably detailed picture of her quarry.
McCloskey also gets the big picture right – the nature of today’s Russia and its leadership of ‘silovikhi’, Thieves-in-Law. This little soliloquy by C/O Proctor to her boss sums it up.
“For the past ten years or so we’ve all watched Putin poke and prod and generally f*ck with the CIA and United States with complete impunity. He crosses lines, we do nothing. He invades Georgia. He carves up Ukraine…then properly invades and commits a freak-ton of war crimes. He shut down power grids…poisoned and murder people…. tried to orchestrate a coup in Montenegro…shot down a Malaysian airliner….” Well, you get the idea. McCloskey’s characters, like my former colleagues, hold a dark view of Russia’s past, present, and future.
McCloskey unerringly sums up CIA headquarters and the Washington policy establishment. His description of the hand-wringing machinations which precede any Covert Action Finding ring unfortunately true.
Faced with a deputy National Security Advisor perseverating on what Russia might do if it discovers an agency CA program, C/O Procter uses this apt analogy which will resonate with any CIA operations officer who has worked Russia.
“We are playing a game with the Russians where both sides stand facing each other. Every few minutes the Russia guy punches us. Shoulder. Ribs. Junk. Face. Whatever.”
The policy official wrinkles his nose and asks, “What if we don’t punch them?” To which Proctor responds, “They still punch us. That’s the thing we don’t get. They still punch us.”
“And what if we punch back?” The official asks.
“Then they punch back. Maybe harder. Maybe softer. Maybe they stop going for the crotch and face. They punch the shoulder a few times. We can take those.”
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The aim of the finding under discussion “is to make Putin think a nasty little cabal is coming for his crown, that a few of his boyars are fixing to snuggle his head onto a spike for display on the Kremlin ramparts.” Prigozhin anyone? “This idea is not about Russia becoming a friendly country, a democracy, or whatever. Not in the cards.”
Later in the story, these words are echoed by Anna. “I have no interest in changing the system because I do not, quite honestly, believe another system is possible. There would be new faces, new names give to institutions, but nothing would truly change.”
As the story reaches its denouement, Proctor and Fox discuss Anna and what she was. “Asset? Handler? Friend? Enemy? All of them.” McCloskey has tapped into the questions that fuel every case officer’s thinking about his or her assets. Every source is a bundle of characteristics and contradictions that make the physics of fluid dynamics seem simple. And the very drivers that make the best agents also contain the seeds of their own destruction.
Is every scene in Moscow X true to life? Thank heavens no – there is just enough unrealistic, but cinematically plausible action to make for a fun read and I’m expecting, a terrific screenplay.
In Procter and Fox, McCloskey has created a pair of interesting, fun, and non-stereotypical characters. He has also captured the Agency’s ethos of can-do creativity tempered by sardonic, gimlet-eyed realism.
Moscow X is an entertaining ride, but it also shows the power of espionage fiction to reveal truths that non-fiction cannot.
Moscow X earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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