Brad Thor has made a career out of secrets and espionage, and using them to craft the kind of adventures most people only ever dream about. For the past (nearly) two decades, he's been cranking out a novel a year, (one year, he wrote two) and he’s managed to successfully turn his brand into a business. His personal website is filled with the kind of thought candy that keeps his readers connected and he keeps them buying between novels, by recommending products that have his character’s stamp of approval all over them.
Thor’s last novel, ‘SpyMaster’, was a 2018 summer hit. We caught up with him mid-year, to get a little writing advice, as he works to finish his next book, ‘Backlash’, due out next June.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s jump right in. In our world, here at The Cipher Brief, there are so many real-life spies who feel like they have stories in them, and they just don't know how to write them. You've really turned this into such a successful career, but you obviously exercise some discipline in getting some of this stuff done. What's your best writing tip? What works?
Thor: There are so many good pearls of wisdom that you pick up as you go along. There is this great account on twitter. This gentleman posts writing advice every single day. And it's Jon J. Winokur, and he's got a Twitter handle called ‘Advice to Writers’. And it is really neat because it is advice from writers to writers. Some of the best pearls I've picked up, have been from following his Twitter account. It's just a joy when you see what other writers have to say, and one of the things that's very true, and I forget right now who said it, was that it really is ‘seat of pants’ to ‘seat of chair’. That's really the key, and Jack London said ‘You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.’
The discipline is something each individual has to find within themselves, but it's something that every single writer struggles with. And when you write a book a year like I do, it is a constant battle to stay focused, particularly in the current geo-political environment. If you write thrillers, like I do, you have one eye on the news all the time on what's going on around the world, and what's that old Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’? I don't think in my entire life that they've ever been this interesting.
There are obviously salacious political books that have been written about the current administration, but then there's other stuff that's come out as well. Fred Burton's book, Beirut Rules, which just came out in October, is fantastic. (Ed note: Read The Cipher Brief’s review of Beirut Rules here)
We've got some people who were coming out of the field and are retiring from government service. Back to what you had said, they have great stories to tell. And the real challenge is, how do you entertain while telling that story? That's really where the rubber meets the road. I talk to a lot of people who feel they have at least one book in them, but the real challenge is how do I get it out and get it on paper? And Lucille Ball once said, ‘if you wrote a page a day, at the end of a year, you'd have 365 pages.’ So again, it's just that go after it with a club. Don't wait for it. You gotta just go out and get it.
The Cipher Brief: You do some interesting things besides writing as well. You participated in a ‘Red Cell’ program a while back at DHS. Tell us about that.
Thor: They invited creative thinkers into D.C. from outside the beltway, because even before the 9/11 commission report, they realized that the attacks on September 11th had happened because of a failure of imagination on the part of the U.S. government. So, it was probably one of the most forward-thinking programs I've ever seen the government do, where they said, "Okay, we don't know everything. Let's take all the alphabets in the soup, whether it's CIA, DIA, we'll just get a bunch of these people in the room, along with guys like Brad Thor and Brad Meltzer and Michael Bay, who did the Benghazi movie and the Transformer movies, and let's see where they think targets are potentially, U.S. interests that can be struck, how they think terrorists might do things. It really reaffirmed my faith that the government had its head up. It was looking around instead of what we've seen in some cases, not every case, but fighting in the rearview mirror, expecting the next fight to look like the last fight. 9/11, I think, woke everybody up.
The Cipher Brief: What was your impression when you walked away? The government was better or worse than you thought it was previously?
Thor: Much better. Much better. First of all, the caliber of people that they had running that program, I was really impressed with, because to take creative thinkers, to take artists and put them in a room, and give them a task, and to say, "By the way, we're all leaving at a certain time today. You guys can't just wait for it to kick in at about 9:00 tonight." They were really good at assigning tasks and saying, "Okay, you've got such and such pieces of information. What might you do with this? Or such and such resources." I left feeling very, very reassured that the government was doing all it could to protect us and to stay three to four steps ahead of the bad guys. It really was something that, as a taxpayer, my dad's a Marine, and so I haven't had a lot of direct experience with the government, and that really was a good experience. It really gave me faith. Government can't do everything, nor should it, but in that sense, that's part of one of their primary charters, is to keep us safe. And I was really impressed with that.
And you can't argue with the results of what's been going on since 9/11. We've been very fortunate, short of some small-scale stuff against soft targets, we haven't seen anything on the scope or scale of 9/11. We're very fortunate.
The Cipher Brief: After experiences like that and after nearly two decades of writing about exciting characters, what kind of spy do you think Brad Thor would be?
Thor: It’s interesting. I have learned a lot of granular details. For example, if you have an intelligence officer, then you have spies working for him or her fully. It's very interesting what the general population's opinion or beliefs are about how the intelligence community works, versus what the reality is. So as far as what kind of a spy would I be, I don't know, because now I think about being an intelligence officer and having to go out and recruit assets and get those assets to do the things that I need them to do.
I can imagine it’s probably long periods of boredom, punctuated with incredibly short periods of excitement and reward, and hopefully a little recognition shown to these brave men and women out there doing some of the nation's most important business. But I don't know, to tell you the truth.
Had you asked me 20 years ago, I might give you a different answer than somebody who's now been at this for 20 years. I can definitely see where treachery and experience take over for youthfulness, vigor and excitement. So, I'd like to think, this is part of my gripe with a lot of the Bond movies before Daniel Craig came on, I disliked a lot of the gadgets. I prefer a lot of the thinking man's adventures with Bond and using your brain to get out of situations.
I think two decades in, if you asked me ‘what kind of spy would I make now’, I'd probably be somebody who thought very carefully, and had a billion contingencies worked out. I'd probably be a lot more thoughtful and a lot less impulsive than I than I was two decades ago.
The Cipher Brief: You're not just a novelist after two decades either, you've turned writing novels into a business. You now sell items on your website, you recommend products that your characters might like or need along the way. So, you really have picked up some of that business acumen along the way as well. And now gadgets are something you become known for, whether it's the weapons that you're writing about, or the more technical aspects of the book. How important has that become over the last couple of novels that you've written?
Thor: It's important. I think the details are the bedrock of a good thriller. And again, the needle that you have to thread is you're writing something that's supposed to be entertaining. So, my last book, last summer, Spymaster, there would have been, in one particular part of the book, there would have been several cut outs between this particular GRU, Intel officer and this particular asset. You can't write five different cutouts. So, the balancing act as a writer is to try to get as much of it correct, because I call what I do ‘faction’, where you don't know where the facts end and the fiction begins, but it still is fiction. So, sometimes I'm going to have to take shortcuts.
I've had people say, sometimes there's a little bit too much information. "Did you have to say what kind of a scope the particular shooter had on their rifle?" And for me, yeah, I think it's important, because I have people who are long range shooters who are fans of the books, people who are military snipers who are fans of the books.
I love Clancy. I've always loved Clancy. Sometimes I didn't want to read 10 pages about how a guidance system on a missile worked. I wanted to know, "Okay, you've got a team on the ground that's lasing a target and the missile's going to hit where the laser's pointed. There you go." That's enough for me. So that's the balancing act.
But one of my favorite pieces of fan mail is when I hear from men and women in the special operations community, or in the intelligence community, or in the diplomatic corps or wherever who say, "You got this right. You're talking about stuff that I see on a daily basis, and you're getting the details right, and you give a voice to those of us who technically don't exist." Whether it's a quiet, professional at Delta Force, or somewhere else who's out there doing some of this nation's most dangerous business. And that is probably the most flattering fan mail I get, is from those men and women who, let's face it, they can't come out and say, "Wow, look at me and look what I've done." I consider it incumbent upon me to be very respectful of their brand. This is not my brand. I am not an employee of the CIA. I'm not a Delta Force operator. It's important to me that I treat what they do with the highest degree of esteem and respect. And what's great is that I hear from a lot of young people who say, "You know, you've inspired me to go into government service." Or, "You've inspired me to join the military," or, "I want to be an FBI agent," or, "I want to work at the CIA or the State Department because I really like what I've read your books."
So, my books can serve as an on ramp for those communities. And I take that very seriously.
The Cipher Brief: And this is a tough audience. They're a no BS group of folks, and they don't suffer posers well.
Thor: Present company included! I got slammed by somebody at the Cipher Brief because he was upset about the trade craft in one of my books. I get it. He's entitled to his opinion. I believe everybody ought to have a voice and everyone is entitled to their own opinions, particularly someone who has spent a life at the agency and has had their career there. Somebody wants to nick me for something I got wrong in one of the books, I will absolutely own it, and I will work to make it better next time. It's just the way it is. You'll hear from people.
The Cipher Brief: When you think about crafting future adventures in your novels, do you think about things like incorporating more cyberattacks? Your latest novel had a lot to do with Russia. Where do you think the next two or three novels will take us?
Thor: I'm, right now, very interested in fourth generation espionage, which is the marrying up of human intelligence work, human boots on the ground, and tech, and where does that get us? With facial recognition software, you can't just slip into a country now and have a fake passport. There's a lot of challenges that are being thrown at men and women who are, as I repeatedly said, doing some of this nation's most dangerous business.
So, the cyber stuff is something I have definitely talked about multiple times in my books, because I am concerned about how dependent we are on the grid and particularly the Internet in what could happen if any of our enemies were able to take away electricity, take away the Internet, the wheels would come off the bus very quickly. I think it's MI6 that said we're only four meals away from anarchy. So, it's really true. And a lot of people don't even have four meals worth of groceries sitting in their house.
A lot of that interference via social media, botnets and things like that, that's another area I'm very concerned about because it's hard to have a free and healthy republic if you don't even know if the person you're communicating with on social media, or the hashtags that are trending, or the subjects of their trending, if they're legit or if there is a menacing, hostile foreign actor behind those.
Obviously, I'm concerned about the Chinese. I'm concerned about the North Koreans, very concerned about the Russians. And I'm concerned that they're getting smarter. So, if you had told Mitt Romney back in 2012, when he said our greatest strategic threat was the Russians, and if you had said, "Oh, social media, they're going to get involved and they're going to manipulate things." I think if you had told me that in 2012, I would have said, "No, I don't see that. I'm more concerned about what they're doing in eastern Europe and all this kind of stuff and testing NATO, and would they go after one of the Baltics or all three?"
The Cipher Brief: The closing chapter of this interview is a simple question: Who would you most like to have dinner with?
Thor: Bill Donovan. I think it would have been fascinating to talk to him, talk about the OSS, talk about the early days of the Central Intelligence Agency, and I just loved his motto, during World War II, that if you fall, fall forward, fall forward, in service of the mission. That has always resonated with me. So Wild Bill Donovan would be my dinner choice.
Cipher Brief Expert and former Senior CIA Officer John Sipher reviews, Brad Thor’s ‘Foreign Agent’ (Oct, 2016)
See Brad Thor’s piece ‘Writing Faction’ published in The Cipher Brief (September, 2015)
Read more from Brad Thor in The Cipher Brief: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/brad-thor
