London Station: David McCloskey on the CIA, MI6 & the End of the Special Relationship

“What if we fell out with the Brits? What if the agency and the Brits started spying on each other again?” — David McCloskey

What if the Americans and the British started spying on each other again? That’s the premise of London Station, David McCloskey’s fifth novel, out today. It isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Before the Second World War those perfidious Brits did spy on America, breaking American ciphers and running influence campaigns in New York to drag the United States into the war.

McCloskey spent eight years as a CIA analyst working on Syria, then a spell at McKinsey, before writing a series of successful spy novels and co-hosting the popular The Rest Is Classified podcast. The Dallas-based author has also, he admits, become an Anglophile — which hasn’t stopped him giving MI6 what the Brits would call a “good kicking” in London Station.

His returning heroine is Artemis Aphrodite Procter, so named by a father obsessed with Greek mythology and raised on a Florida alligator farm. Described by another of McCloskey’s characters as a competent extremist, she is short, dark, hard-drinking and equally mirthful and menacing. Probably not the type of Yank best suited to a pseudo-diplomatic posting in the capital of the former empire. Although I’m guessing there are many British fellows, both inside and outside MI6, not averse to spying on Ms Artemis Aphrodite Procter.

Further Reading:

• London Station by David McCloskey (W. W. Norton, September 29, 2026) — his fifth novel, after Damascus Station, Moscow X, The Seventh Floor and The Persian.

• The Rest Is Classified — the espionage podcast McCloskey co-hosts with the BBC’s Gordon Corera, where he and Gordon Corera have also discussed Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling.

• London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, a recent guest on this show — the dark-money London that runs in parallel with McCloskey’s subterranean city of espionage.

• Earlier this year on Keen On: Daniel Silva on Gabriel Allon — the other American spy novelist with a thing for the Brits. 

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       What If We Fell Out With the Brits? McCloskey never expected to set a novel in Britain, for a technical reason: the CIA–MI6 relationship is so institutionalized that it is hard to get the stakes right, and a thriller needs life or death. Then the question arrived — what if we fell out? What if the two services started spying on each other again? That is not fantasy, and the history is the reverse of what most people assume: before the Second World War the British spied on the Americans, broke their ciphers and ran influence campaigns in New York designed to pull the United States into the war. The novel imagines a new administration installing a brash CIA director skeptical of the cousins across the Atlantic, agents on both sides beginning to die, and a thriller that turns into a mole hunt. He is rude about MI6 throughout, which his British friends appear to enjoy — his theory being that Brits are self-deprecating enough to relish being picked on.

•       Classified Journalism. He joined the CIA in 2006 as an undergraduate intern and left in 2014, working almost the whole time on Syria. His description of the job is the best short account of intelligence analysi