this is part of our 2018 special fiction addition of in-depth . >>host: david ignatius what is the premise of the quantum spy? >> the united states is locked in a new manhattan project to build a piece of technology that will change and that is

the quantum computer the principal rival ms. china that the quantum spy is a novel that the characters to be involved to see who can steal the other secret over changing technology but simply it is the story of my hero. of a cia officer who is asked to penetrate the chinese intelligence service and in process learn things about himself and the cia that she came up to his foundation. not so familiar to readers of science fiction like the russian spy world but but it

takes us into the world of security. that is the principal antagonist in the book. >>host: how much is real? >> i always say the preface exist in the imagined world if you take any book that i write the menu and up with the mud pie.e. but that said i try to do a lot of research i research that for many months going to the computer laboratories and i travel to every place

mentioned in the book study the chinese intelligence service. would be those characters o don't exist in real life but it is as real as i could make it be and still be a work of fiction. >> one of those is about science and you write science has no flag. >> it shouldn't. but the problem in this area of the superpowerful technology reason it is so importantf a quantum pewter can tread anything ever devised. to render all adversaries so

it has that real purpose in the world. >> when it comes to quantum computing? >> it is coming at us fast. in my book i describe the technology that is a kind of quantum. they are either on or off. but quantum computers as strange as it sounds they have this ambiguous date that means as you assemble these cubit

begin to build a computer it is vastly more powerful and any supercomputer it would take thousands of years with they could do in a few seconds with the quantum computer with the power. so whoever gets that technology will have an instrument potentially world also like discovering drugs or new materials or anything that involves lots of computation and simulation these computers can do an entirely different way why we're so excited. maybe it is ten or 20 years but the most recent estimate

is possibly five years out. and there is a company based out of vancouver that has built a quantum dealer that has assembled 2000 cubit in some areas. so people get excited but nobody can give you that precise prediction of when it is coming. a lot of computer research obviously it companies that change the world like google or microsoft they own that technology but it wasn't classified. but it was something that has so many military applications, there has been an effort to

take some of the most sensitive technologies involved and do some of that in the classification. with the exposure of the nsa and there was a big chunk of funding. my first thought there is something that there is a battle going on that we share information and ideas with graduate students or china or russia. and others say it is just too valuable to our country. bringing germans into los alamos for the manhattan project. but that is one of the issues.

>>host: that is one of the themes? >> growing up in flagstaff where i believe red white anded blue served in the army and iraq and recruited into the cia. it never occurred to him is ethnic background is subject torr manipulation but both of the chinese who try to manipulate and for some americans it ends up being central as the story comes to realize that people see him in

the way that lets readers describe. >>host: is that true of the intelligence community that somebody's nationality and always eager to use those cultural skills from those case officers working the soviet file for those who speak arabic. so where they were drawn into

that. but the danger to see in stereotypical ways. like this set but not that set. but women for decades felt given those responsible rules to be a part of what the cia does they were not encouraged to go out to recruit spies. they felt limited that is another theme through the novel. that in a sense he was robbed because of her gender.

>> do you start with a conclusion then work backwards? >> i think i was interested with quantum computing as a journalist but then i saw the chinese was the principal rival. that i could teach a and a hotel room i was on the back of the plane and suddenly started but it was our process

in my head to take the themes to make those alive in the places and then to be honest to writee this book and every book is rewriting a first draft to do your first rough sketch then you need to go in ruthlessly to see what works and what doesn't. for those that are fully developed those who are honest with you to say david, go back and do it again. the hardest thing in the world is to see your husband slaving away. he has the first draft done

but he would read it carefully and say i just think it is there yet. this character isn't fully believable. then you have another honest evaluation. even the best riders are capable of writing stuff that isn't veryin good. we need people who tell us that just aren't there yet. do itag again. they will say not good enough. >>host: some of the characters in the quantum spy what are they projecting?

>> that diverse agency of eia terms of every variable. and the one thing that has changed was the iv the playground and yale was the feeder school from every educational background looking for the unconventional interest. but i think there is a blue-collar side to the cia and the white caller side that is not often recognized.

and then to send out the shooters. all the glamour stuff you have to get done. and they carry themselves that way. i try to explore those people. >>host: so with those characters they seem to have unlimited safehouses, unlimited resources and unlimited money. is that real life?on r >> i don't think the cia suffers from resources. it suffers from our difficulties to operate in trulyin clandestine ways. we are not great at telling lies. there is a national straightforwardness.

but what was strongest in the cold war years to have the wind in your back everybody around thea' world wanted to be america's friend. with that engine of global prosperity. it is hard to find a person who doesn't want to be seennt as oneon because today we are much more reluctant. so while we have the wind at our back with a strong head wind, it is harder to find people who want to take those

risks. we are not always as good as we should be. so writing my tenth novel what i have seen as an agency for powerful and to have stronger rifles. >>host: i have noticed there isn't necessarily a clear-cut bad guy scenario. >> we are in shades of gray and moral ambiguity.

with that basic ambience. to be the most ruthless and effective. but just in terms of being a tough character at the end of the book. but to have something complicated but operators like john. diaz competent professionals

that the hero of the book asks more and more. to just wonder if they are ruthless and the reason he got out of the cia in the first place. >> your firstfi book agents of innocence. and it was obvious the only way i could w share this was through fiction. >> the story published february 1983. working on the story for more than two years and it said cia of the united states recruited the chief of intelligence yes, sir. arafat the leading

terrorist adversary that this person was enormously helpful with thousands of american lives.li in that regard it with good reason to take in those israelis talk about the gray zone but two months after i published that article on the front page cia officer a great american hero wrote a book called the good spy. he went to visit the station but it happened i had a meetingg with the attaché the same day and just after

1:00 o'clock the biggest car bomb anybody hader ever seen's floated the door of the embassy. so just the shattering roar down the hill. i saw the embassy was just shattered. i could see the inside. in the leading specialist was killed they were all the lunch in that aftermath so remember

our thoughts are in constant contact. the people that needed to talk about it. and because i was working on the story years i was the only american allies journalist in beirut who was coming at me. and i began to accumulate those outlines that are already written on the front. one unearthly you do with that? so that answer is right a novel.

and working for the wall street journal at that point i sat down wrote a first draft and second draft and was turned down by every publisher. and then to give us nonfiction but it is from what the journalist should write. and essentially a true story and the people that are most involved with the intelligence agencies all over the middle

east knew immediately when the book came out. so it got a cachet but then people give that out to the recruits over the last 30 years i they walk up to me and say i cannot tell you who i am but if my mom and dad ask what i really did i give them your book. it just has the basics told of one of the great cases. those to be executed by a real

professional but that got me started and i never stopped. i taught myself how to write a novel and i began to learn the craft and it is played off my journalism. there is so much more i would like to say if i had the chance to unpack so i see it the end of this new book just like 30 years ago i would have to choose whether to be a journalist or novelist. glad i never had to make that

choice. >> you can certainly draw a straight line to that subject matter. i visited a ran in 2013 and i was fascinated by the every nuclear program i thought this is the perfect setting for novel. but to imagine the iranian nuclear site is called the virtual walk-in. says if you have something to tell us here is how you do it. they get a lot of people comingin in from iran.

that is how that novel begins. with the iranian supply-chain nuclear program so that is where you make some lucky guesses. so that iss an example when i was there just taking every piece i could find. and then bring them back home to use. he seven david ignatius has

anybody been outed by you by a character in one of your books. >> of former intelligence officer that im with that book i just described i did not hear anger in that. but my first novel age of innocence was so sensitive that when it was published and wasn't sure of the consequences. i had never done this before. and they didn't know what

people would do. initially there was shock but over the years sometimes they write sympathetically about the cia. but over the years i have written things that makes people's hair stand on end. . . . . asking people who they are,

journalists, you name it. readers know the quotes on the back page of the book you buy we work so hard to get it, and it can be embarrassing to knock on someone's door electronically and say please, please, please would you read my book and say something nice about it. i made a rule years ago because i felt so difficult getting it started pretty much anybody that asked me to write a blurb for a book subject just hoping i could give somebody else a start and boost i had including former cia directors.

>> host: good afternoon and welcome to book tv on c-span2. this is the kickoff edition of our special section addition year of "in depth." david ignatius is our first guest this month and all year long we will be having fiction writers on the in-depth program to talkl about their us. for david ignatius the numbers or (202)748-8200 if you live in east and central time zone 748801 if you live in the mountain and pacific and want to participate in our conversation this afternoon. you can also participate with social media and that includes facebook, twitter, and stick ram and e-mail. just remember@booktv is our handle and the address is booktv at c-span.org. he's a "washington post" columnist on national security issues and is the author of these ten books agents of innocence which we talked about

came out and 1987 and 1991 the bank of the year in 95. the firing offense in 97, the sun king came out in 99 and then perhaps i'll the movie body of lies is a book that came out in 2007. the increments of 2009 bloodmoney 2011 the director in 2014 and the quantum spy just came out in the last couple of months. your books have moved from beirut to tehran, iraq, washington. kind of keeping up with all the threads that usc'threats that ue are in china. >> guest: i wanted to write about china. collaboratively. i think in terms of national security threats going forward and also opportunities but let's talk about the threats, china

needs to be at the top of people's list. china has announced that it intends to dominate the commanding heights of technology by 2030 certainly to sustain that through 2015 and they have been very specific and tasked their intelligence service to go out and gather information okay let's be blunt, it will help reinforce the position that they are building weapons systems to be able to challenge america's enormous military power in the asia-pacific. asia-pacific. china has set the course for people worry is going to bring it into a collision, a military conflict in the united states. i am not somebody that believes that it's inevitable tha is ineo think that it's time for the thoughtful leaders to get inside of the chinese ambitions in terms of being a world power and

the chinese intelligence service. that was again part of this book but you are right i do try to look at the things that are going to be the next big threat. my last one was how the russians were manipulating the libertarian underground. when that book was written people didn't think about much and we are now invested in this huge investigation but going back to read the directorate on where we are now i hope people will feel the same way as we get more focused on china and their operations into the character settings that help you understand what is coming at us. that is a lot of what i like to do withus my books is open up te world that i'm reportin but i'ma columnist in my columns i deal

with them in a much bigger way with these issues. >> host: the cloak and dagger aspects, are they true and does this stuff c happen? >> guest: what fascinated me on my novel is the way thatpr i get someone to be willing to share secrets with the united states and how i play on a person's vulnerabilities and that secret relationship. obviously one reason this interests me in one reason i'm able to write about it convincingly is i it's so much like being in journalism. what i do as a journalist of three days go out and talk to

people who they want to talk to the columnists but over time gain their trust as they begin to tell me things that are important for lay readers and think about how to protect them so they do not suffer for having shared that information. that part of the intelligence business which has nothing to do with the shoot them up james bond crazy technology that simple part of identifying the of something and thinking of how you make an approach to the target and having an initial contact while slowly reeling the person in as a potential source, that interests me in each of my books. the process is central and this is in every one of my books. it is in some ways a suggestion that the united states doesn't know enough about the parts of

the world we get so deeply involved to take the risks that we do. it's the theme so that was my first novel and in some ways it is consistent bol all the way through this book that i just wt don't know enough to take risks. the country has gotten in a series of wars to the time i'd been a journalist after another, and i keep thinking of i wish that the characters of my novel knew how often we are flying blindd. i believe this is from quantum spy you are writing about the agents per game for anything. the sentiment not readily heard of the cia. >> host: they've gotten more risk-averse over the decades that i've been writing about

this idea of this rogue elephant birth once that is period that ended in the investigation of the 1970s and it certainly ended in thens investigation of the practices of torture. the cia likes to call a partial tradition -- harsh interrogati interrogation. the officers now know that they can be vulnerable and they often take out the legal insurance to protect themselves against the possibility that they need counsel. and inevitably, that makes people more careful about operations. this is a can-do culture. you never want to be person of this mr. president, i'm not sure that's a good idea. you want to say yes, sir.

that's the culture. there is now to talk to the lawyers before we sign off on the operation. lawyers are a big part of the cia's operations now. i think that is a really interesting issue for the director who said he would like to see them be more aggressive and take more risks to gather secrets from north korea and china and russia that we need to know when you takeno more risks for getting caught in the danger and that the lawyers are always going to be there to say not a good idea, sir. and the congressional committees that play an important role in overseeing this also they are going to count those officers if anything goes wrong. ththe importance to the intelligence community of the church hearings of the 1970s

and ofur 9/11. >> the church hearings really set the basic limits but they didn't have intelligence committees during regular oversight before. they exposed secrets that the cia had sought hardest to protect him if they became a public and they were shocked by some of what was discovered. so i look back and to be honest, it is amazing how little of the nasty stuff they did in the cia and the plots you can list them.

generally they were not carried out. today, we live in aea world whee the special operations routinely engage in targeted killings of our adversaries where that simply was not done to the world is considered practically every day of the week. so, the church committee established rules and oversight and set up a new framework and we now live in that and i think that frameworkhe is better for l concerned. 9/11 returned for a time from the collection agency to essentially a paramilitary covert action agency. the cia had a plan for what to do after the twin towers went down and if you read the

histories georgetown was very clear that they were readyre too in a matter of weeks and they took down the taliban in afghanistan. it was brilliant, handfuls of americans working with their assets and others in afghanist afghanistan. they let osama bin laden slip away, the current defense with his colleagues to authorize the greaterr force to prevent bin laden from slipping through the mountains and it's one reason that he is beloved by so many. he was right about that andt everybody remembers that secretary rumsfeld wouldn't sign off. it made counterterrorism the center of the cia mission and the use of the drones in this

high-tech way of taking people out if the instrument of choice foof the cia began running the program of sources targeting and executing commissions. after 9/11, the cia told by the president at the white house there's aic threat of chemical weapons, the whole population could be at risk. you need to know and find out what they are going to do cross the lin line but inu which rese all feel like it was a mistake to cross in terms of how there have beehad been a vast discussf that. it does shock theth conscience o read what they did in those interrogation programs, and i

think there is nobody at the cia to get back in thatt business, nobody. it led to such public criticism. they depend onpu the trust of te public. they don't get applause, usually quite the opposite. to go back and do less.

a. of this is the card they had in the intelligence case not its money, certainly not its human intelligence but its ability to over here almost every conversation in the world. every phone call.

the islamic state arose and was swept into 2014. three years later it was obliterated and has almost no territory. tens of thousands have been told killed at there wasn't much written about it that's been a war in the special operations command powered by this every time there's a digital thing that threatened a french person isly visible so this has been a much more ruthless and effective

campaign. much more journalism needs to be done about how thisee was conducted into the human costs were. there hasn't been enough reporting. it resides in moscow on the government seen as someone who turned over some of the most sensitive secrets in a way that they could be used by russia and china whether that was their intention or not.

certainly when there has been at suggestion for a plea bargain. it was biography sai thought tht they want to be sure that thisce is not an easy negotiation he had to explain precisely what he did. in every one of my novels that is a great question and every one of my novels there is a character in my first novel frank hoffman wasa the chief against whom the hero of the book was modeled after real life

and he was just an outrageous foulmouthed cranky funny guy and i found the character so engaging that i just kept having another of his family, his son, his cousin and in every book theredy is somebody in every bok as we know and michael connelly novels. i just like to start fresh with each book with a new set of characters and issues that interest me. i hate repeating myself, but i did decide i would keep this

continuity and again i hope when people look at my work over three years they will see in these characters they will see them experience the ways that it's changed. i would want people to someday look at this body of work and say here's fiction but fairly realistic fiction of the chronicle of life and times of our intelligence agency and with what changed and what didn't and what worked and what didn't. in every book the basic theme is we don't know enough to be doing the things we are doing. another way to interpret the legacy throughout yourt: book is the cia is a little maybe

parochial. >> guest: they are always acting at the margins, loudmouth showoffs and often the people that say this is ridiculous if you're going to do things through the back door because the front door is not going to work. speaking of the bureaucracy that is another theme in your book is the difficulty or the politics of negotiating the intelligence community in the bureaucracy. >> that is absolutely right the bureaucracy gets thicker in each book.

learning about the real-life observations which it was based on the case officer crossed a lot of minds thinking between the right thing. as legal control a legal controe congressional oversight increase comes as the bureaucracy. the democratic organization that's maybe even more confusing than it was before it wa was entirely digested, so people spending an awful lot of times going to meetings and covering their backsides right in the

writing memos. it's the opposite of what you think in a james bond novel. james bond would spend an awful lot of time writing for the file in the real world. what is the cooperation level? >> of the va is on office is and has been since the beginning the biggest asset is because it's only powerful global source of information with all these technical resources to feed its collections and an analysis able

to share things with partners that they couldn't get anywhere else. every day some foreign intelligence official comes to langley to visit and talk and share information andd that extend to people you wouldn't think. there's a lot more intelligence sharing people like to say publicly so that is big on the fact that there are a lot of friends around the world and so respect the agency and the source of information. in terms of internal sharing you asked about the domestic agencies, there's an awful lot out there. the idea is if this were a company and you had 17 different sets of account you would say

that's not i wouldn't last five minutes in the business world, a lot of it continues in the intelligence world. there's been an effort to remove the stovepipe everybody insists nobody can know for them so it's all controlled by their originators and buzzword. even now, after more than a decade. >> host: said his job is to -- >> guest: to oversee this sprawling committee and one problem is that it is too big. i think that this is a situation where less would be more of a

smaller more genuinely clandestineel service that matts between life and death in the united states. i'm just not even including the consultant will be played by the tenslt of thousands. it feeds the information system and generates far more information than anybody could analyze. over time i guess that is one other observation that is too vague. we spent plenty of money and sometimes we are lucky that we managmanaged to distinguishsh te

signal. (202)748-8200 in east and central, eighth 201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. this is the first of our 12 special fiction additions of "in depth" if we are pleased that the columnist for the "washington post" and the author of ten best-selling thrillers is our guest. guest. we talked for an hour and now it's your turn. let's begin with david and wholesale oklahoma. you are on the air. >> guest: thank you for taking my call. in october, november, i hadr: se students in my u.s. history classes that attended a talk at the university of tolls .-full-stotulsa --how many couns

to nuclear weapons, and how dangerous is our world today particularly with the dialogue that we hear constantly on twitter on the news, and i would like to hearr our guest. >> guest: i think the danger of nuclear weapons, as gray as it was when i was a boy when we literally just have these drills and think about fallout shelters and was a general national paranoia about this, it receded at the end of the cold war. there is no question that we live in a word where the nature of the accident leading to a nuclear exchange between the u.s. and north korea are thinking about the idea of having these thoughts aboutic nuclear war exchanged by an american president and leader i find deeply disturbing and the

danger of the war between india and pakistan. one thing we hear again and again from the national security advisors is about. one thing we were told because ofes mistakes they have a couple of minutes to decide whether to launch the retaliation. the point is this is an area where it is a dangerous miscalculation. nobody should joke about or use this as an area where they talk about my button is bigger than yours kind of stuff. these weapons are too dangerous.

.. >> they do a lot of research underground we are not sure where all of the facilities are.

not just understanding to say this was the ultimate and we would say okay we want the intelligence agency to do better. if you think about what that involves or the risks to get into north korea think about that. no question we are too close to contract -- conflict with north korea. but think about what that would involve. >>host: next call from ventura

california. >> caller: i am a reader of his novels i would like to know more about his father's career in the cia and i agree with his comments of the goods by that is a great read and also with autobiography growing up inin the 50s that is very memorableor to me. >>host: while you living in the middle east? >> my father worked in saudi arabia. he was a personnel manager. >> guest: first i need tohe make clear before my dad calls

, he never worked for the cia he worked for the pentagon served in the navy world war ii with an aircraft carrier and came to work for president kennedy as assistant secretary of the army so he had a distinguished career in government but never the cia. >>host: given his military background did that influencece your y life choices? >> no. i was never recruited. but in terms of my life choices i grew up in the 60s

and i felt as a young man strongly the vietnam war was a mistake. those conversations were part of my growing up. but i wanted to do with a passion was the journalist since i was 13 i used to go to concerts and then be backstage at the temptations. so i had a passion for that work. my first job the wall street

journal sent me from cambridge to cover the steelworkers union. there was a more unlikely person i would like to know who itco was but i threw myself into that learning how to talk to the people of the union i just loved it and fell in love with the work. in the later years covering the middle east after 911 often i go to the wars to cover these wars as an embedded journalist in july with the special forces and went to syria a couple times.

so i ended up that there are times that i wonder looking back if i should have served my country i hope my work as a journalist serves the country but it's not the same as working for the government so i look back and wonder and that is something you think about as you get older. >>host: some of your referencesur, are those propaganda services from the middle east? >> pl ai would not that was to be the source of objective news like the bbc for britain

and i think pla has some excellent journalist run by a colleague and friend whose journalism i respect a lot. some are more specifically set up to be a source of information during the years of conflict in the middle east. do you call that propaganda? i am sure journalist would beit offended but quite specifically it was to push the line. >>host: virginia go ahead with your questions. >> caller: first of all thank you so much this is what

people need to hear. i just want to ask mr. ignatius. and also to comment on the importance of journalism that the facts do matter. i was interviewed from the wall street journal back in 1983 to trigger an investigation causing the resignation of the speaker of the house.ig but the book was authored by a high level cia operative. we can get the country back on track. >> tell us about yourself.

>> i can sharee my name but to bring it back to your programming here america. you carlson and i share a common background with president trump and i heard him mention his father if he is still with us and my mother posed for posters with the national archives. >>host: any recognition of that name x. >> i don't know him but i like what he had to say and his fashion mom -- passion that we have to become more united. the division are from the

adversaries. a great intense over-the-top investigator from the wall street journal. to have some great characters to study their move there was a guy and one by the name of jerry lindauer. to be a famous figure in the intelligence world. but my dad is 97. mymy mom is 92.

they are both in good health. but i just mentioneded because i talk about my dad's career serving our government with u.s. navy to launch a missile destroyer this spring named after my father. so i you talking about the man or the ship? it is a great big warship as a wonderful memorial to my dad he knows what a special person he is. >> there is the armenian connection in one of your books. >> and then was the ottoman

empire. and making his way to america. and to be brought to america. but that pno is played sometimes by my own daughter who is a doctor. but my armenian background is something i am proud of to travel to get to know people there with humanitarian causes. but the miracle of our country

as we are all from somewhere. we are americans first but to feel comfortable that is getting to be with their suffering.y >>host: if you are interested in our last caller viewers are sending in e-mails with links with information about him. now our next caller from texas before teen how are you doing? that submarine captain that refused to launch if you remember his name let me know. but the policies reagan used against russia with that

premise of make america great again and explain what happened in the 80s. >> to go last first. with refugees with those covert action program against nicaragua refugees. or the cuban refugees.

but your point about china pushing us into the arms race but the chinese do pose an increasing threat. but the way that we should respond to that is complicated. and to spend massive amounts. and with that traditional power which increasingly of cyberwarfare to spend hundreds of billions for the legacy

systems and not what we need to do for those that will combat the adversaries in the future. this isn't like anywhere we have seen. so i share your view to look at this budget will have enough money to spend but the pentagon traditionally is terrible at making thesewa choices and senator mccain somebody that i respect a lot sense a letter that basically said you need to make choices mr. secretary on what we can

acquire and what we can't. you can't afford everything. >>host: in 2011 blood and momoney came out. here is a tweet from president trump u.s. is foolishly giving pakistan more than $33 million over the past 15 years and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit t1 to say they have given us nothing is wrong. i have seen evidence. that was once invested by the television. as we move to clear that territory. the considerable loss of life.

waziristan ih have seen the joint operations to go after those one by one by one. and then to ask anybody in the military. they did not play straight up with the united states. and with the economy network as it isth called. it is directly responsible for killing americans the u.s. keeps pressuring the pakistanis then go after the economy network. long -- connie it is a mistake

to force thingss to extreme satisfy form policy you cannot do justice to the nuance of the relationship because it is complicated. but to be fully open we have a right to protest. so yes we do. somewhere throw those twitter overboard and this is on the uniteded states to maintain a dialogue and you just don't

walk away from that relationship. >> director of the isi. they dropped their bombs from the sky and they think they can make war and charm us with money. and in my novel it was well researched. without fascinating intelligence so i describe the dialogue. with the checkmark next to it.

it was a generation of american military. in sharing the relationships with some of these groups. and then to protect ourselves. but the haqqani network you just never want us to talk to again. if you are a spy novelist some of the richest terrain cruising around that you could not conjuree up.

now that is still alive does journalist. >>host: where did your protagonist name comee from? >> she also has another name in that book. but i will make a list and i will match the first name and last name. and then the name changes after the second draft. there is a computer programmer to come up with names. check to make sure there is nohe real person but honestly to

have a characters name. >> in my reading too much into names? >> i wanted a characters name that would be consistent and which are all chickens. and the h blacksmith and expectations.

and then to have a flare as you learn more about a charactere that name that they initially thought was appropriate was the head of cia operations. i changed on the final draft something entirely different. and certain details didn't fit to this person could become. so you get to control every detail.

>> have you ever surprised yourself? >> but to take things over to do outrageous things. and then to be more important.is with that pakistani intelligence officers. so talking about blood money but that novel that i am proud of as a writer so what it

would be like to be under the cia drone attack. and then to travel on the one engine plane. to bump over the badlands. so otherwise we would die it isn't complicated. so to describe what it would feel like. to be 10000 feet above you the lien of the body of the drone

and then with the loss of everybody around you. and i understand that drones are supposed to bedr more precise that drones are supposed to be more precise take those readers to see that flash in here that in your ear what would that be like? because we have been doing that every day. >> san antonio go ahead. >> caller: thanks for bringing fiction authors i am enjoying this.

doesn't have your book have the most side in it? >> because i love the books by daniel and i love reading about israel. >> the answer is yes. but in the age of innocence it is a nightmare for readers. sos some very sympathetic israeli intelligence characters that were struggling. and how to approach the americans.

i felt there were so many good authors focused on the massage mom --dash c most side but it would be good to write about those that were less written about. so those operatives are woven through. >> we have invited him on the series and we are holding out hope he will be here in the fall. if you cannot get through on the phone go through social media. twitter, instagram or facebook. texas you are on the air with david ignatius.

>> caller: yes. i appreciate everything you have written. with that incredible work in your future but the comment i would like to make about the incredible hero the unsung hero of the war on terror. but we did not anticipate he was not alone. those that were very difficult and equally in harms way how he managed the children and could purchase their clothing

those who serve our country to be grateful for their wives and children. james bond never had a wife or n family. those who serve our country do and they are right there and i appreciate the opportunity to bring the sentiments to our community. thank you very much for taking my call. >>host: are you a member of the intelligence community? >> not really. the community of all of us in the country. >> i could not possibly say it better. the foreign service officers

overseasng they don't know what their spouses are doing because it is so secret his wife was very courageous person deeply shattered by the loss of her husband. and when the car bomb hit the american embassy i was at the front door half an hour before the bomb hit. but the secretary that walked me down there her name was rebecca but will serving

overseas were not in the military that the things that they live through it was worth rememberingre so if you see a foreign service officer certainly that goes with the families. >> robert hansen how do they get away? just in reading your books i felt paranoid. >> the russians are good at what they do. they cover their tracks, then to conceal their activities.

for those whose names they expose but these were consequential things. we have been lucky historically those are smaller than a lot of other countries with those soviet operations we have had more cases going back to the chinese recruitment their role inside

the intelligence community there are some big investigation underway. so those cases are real they wantnt the cia starting off as a journalist that one of the people it tooke, to lunch repeatedly in the late 70s was james uses the legendary head of caa counter service for all of thesef russian cases. one reason was the manipulation is he had

befriended the british mi six officer and angleton told him everything t they knew then suddenly he realized he shared the secret with a stone cold trader. it was never the same after that. >> recover that last year. type in jamesan singleton and watch it online. we have an e-mail that says i offer you this title iv a future novel, the reluctant pessimist but has the world surprised you in any large

way? >> that my greatest failure i think of a journalist looking for the reasons why something will work. so david pessimism pays. so maybe i should be a pessimist after all of these years. >>host: has the world surprised you? >> i was surprised and pleased and the troubles by the

inability of u.s. military power to create stability in iraq and by that continuing difficulty and there is a real lesson there. i have been surprised, to be honest the way our country politically is recommended. we are so much more divided and angry at the country now than i ever imagined would be possible. sobl much smaller ground that reasonable people can stand to discuss things in degree and what policies make sense. that surprises me and worries me with the current political

leadership. really starting with the white house makes the problem worse like it rips the cap open. >>host: mi to general that throughout your novels the president and the white house are peripheral. >> there are the briefest cameos somebody will make reference to the president. it is easy to write in stereotypes about the white house and it takes away from that granularity could write a

different kind of novel of the national security advisor and then to write that as possible. but maybe in the future i will admit that but i feel like as soon as i got the president he is here with a description of the actual president. >>host: there is at tweet which one of your books has been madech into movies? be the only one so far is body

of lies made into a movie starring leonardo dicaprio russell crowe, that was a big hollywood film i have had other deals that i thought would be movies tom cruise wanted to play the character in my novel and actually paid a lot of money for a project of the screenplay but it never got produced. i would love to see a project with the british television network to do a novel about

secret operations. we will see if that comes to fruition. but it took a long time. >> what is the process? for the one that did get made or the others that did not? >> the one that did that is the easiest to describe. i was doing some writing on anotheror project. he had an idea for a movie as a journalist in iraq falls a month. long -- falls in love. so when i would finish a draft

they are pretty realistic. drawnaw from real settings. trying to get people inside the tent. my agent sent it and then they called me i have been up all night. i am reading your book it is great. so very quickly a deal was made. it happened hollywood was in the moment there was the expected screenwriter strikes everybody was scrambling to lineup the stars. they managed to lineup leonardo dicaprio.

since once you have the director ridley scott you don't need anything else. then the question to get the t script and one prominent screenwriter that was not credited who wrote a new draft that i think is the per. the second one to share dialogues or questions that when they got down to filming it of course i want to do beyond the set. i went to morocco. that turned into jordan in

ardo took so long his girlfriend said that he had to go. so all three daughters went to the premier in new york that was a nice family moment. but what novelists need to accept is that so often people say what he think of the movie? because they flatter the authors to say they like the book. but in this case i love the movie genuinely that people have to accept that the book you have written has to be reimagined by somebody else. it has to become something different.

almost too literally to transcribe something doesn't work. it has to be redone. so some of the things that i loved inbo body of lies is not in the reimagining. if it doesn't then it will not be any good to be optioned means they pay you a small amount of money to make m that movie if all of the stars are in alignment then if they do they pay you more. people say they optioned my book. that is great but you quickly learn the chances it will be made into a movie are slim to none.

the amount of money you initially take is usually prettyy small. sometimes they will buy the property outright. then if there is a bidding war if the price goes up to get into the territory. >> his book has been made into a movie we will show you that trailer and also some of his favoriteou authors

>> a lot simpler to put to an end. [inaudible] >> at hoffman as the guy on the ground and not me. [inaudible] >> this is a part of friendship that matters. >> you do know we are at war.

[inaudible] >> how you got to do it stress me. -- trust me. >> it's 3:00 in the morning. >> saving civilization, honey. ♪ >> host: >> every month for the past 20 years one of the top nonfiction authors is join us for fascinating three hour conversation. in 2018 we are changing course we havee invited 12 action

authors onto our set. daschle s security, science and social commentators. their books have been read by millions around the country if you are a reader plan to join us as an interactive program letting you talk directly to youror favorite authors. ♪ ♪ ♪

>>host: david ignatius your character are reading novels and that is one of his favorites what is that? >> they are a serieses of six novels that we count the story

to becomeil the duke so the reason that i love the book is they are probably the best political novel i have ever read. to take over a long stretch of time of charming and ambitious peoplech making their way through. but we see the rise all of their ambition one of my favorite characters is named

phineas as an irish reform politician. and keeps falling in with the wrong women. but i find these 19th century novel are a wonderful guide for storytellers but often incredible guides to life if you understand good behavior or bad behavior or what those relations are really liking and complexity of how we behave and the mistakes thatd, we make but any reader who doesn't know these novels they should give it a

tr try. trop is famous for his industrial practices. he would write a certain number of words than that was it. the inventor of the famous red letterbox so he had a life as a bureaucrat and another as a novelist. he loved to go foxhunting that was fascinated by men and women with that theme of somebodyso being jilted he

regarded that as the most outrageous with a beautiful woman who was led on to believe that somebody would marry her but then it sounds horny and it isn't for everybody but that is what i love. >>host: what is it like to writee a sexual scene for one of your novels? >> guest: what i have learnedbo that less is more. it is the subtle mood and contact and what's around that

is better to read and less embarrassing to write. in my earlier books i was trying to be more commercial but my most recent novel there is very little sexual conduct but i think one of the things i have learned as a writer to write women characters in a way that is feasible that my first novel there is a scene of two women in a restaurant talking about men and sexual encounters many say that is

their favor in the book but that is actually how women talk. so one of the many small challenges. . . . b .

>> guest: english, the uzbeks, the armenians, all along that periphery. and i also wanted to think

about, write about the experience of a woman case officer, because i had been told that the big problem for women in actually doing operations was that when a woman befriends a man from another culture, says let's go take a walk or come, let's have a drink together and, you know, begins thes process that leads to recruitment, men often just see that in sexual terms. they think this woman's coming on to me, this is about sex, and it puts women in a very delicate, dangerous position. i interviewed a number of women who had been senior operations officers and began to think about that. so i created this character, anna barnes, who embodies all those dilemmas. and she and alan taylor who is

thinking about this play that try to begin to rip at the fabric of the soviet union get involved more and more deeply in what turns out to be a hideously complicated set of problems. here again i was working from real life. the people i went to see -- i think a man at the end of the book who was an use beck who, after the war ended, he'd been recruited by the germans, but was in a vp camp and was picked up by the cia and had an incredible, fabled career. thinking about uzbekistan, thinking about that whole part of the world, incredibly generous in sharing his insights with me. he's passed away now. imagine -- and i traveled to uzbekistan, traveled to all these places. the pleasure of learning a piece

of history. i don't think in nonfiction to this day that this history's really been adequately written, but it's there. it's just waiting more somebody to do the research. and, you know -- >> host: what do you think of that description of your book though? >> guest: i think it's, i think it's, i think it's great. it's kind of corny. it sounds like book jacket copy. but, you know, if it got people to pick up the book, buy the book, read the book, great. the -- in this marketplace the question of how you draw a reader into engagement with your book is not so easy. i mean, a lot of people are brand name buyers of fiction. i like michael connolly. i know that if i buy a michael connolly novel, it's going to be, you know, the basics, the thing that he knows how to do. he's going to have harry bo to

sh or the lincoln lawyer character, and it's got a new woman detective, and there are procedurals. he's going to get all the procedure right. i mean, i've never -- this is of the lapd, but i feel like i know it intimately from all those books. so i'm going to buy michael connolly's next book. i hope somebody who likes realistic novels about the cia, has read ten of my books so when my next one comes out the person will say, ah, i know david ignatius, i'll give that a shot. you build up some brand equity, and you need to be careful not to write a dreadful book because you'll blow that. i think it's harder to break into that world from outside. i know many former intelligence officers who dream, you know, when i get out, i'm going to be a spy novelist. and there are enough examples of people who were intelligence officers starting with graham greene, charles mccurry, jasen mathews, a wonderful new

american novelist, who served as intelligence officers and then, you know, found a way to write good commercial books. but for each one that succeeded, i bet you there's a dozen who tried. i've read some of their books, and they just weren't good novels. people had all the same richness of experience, but they didn't have the ability to translate into something that actually makes you want to stay up late. that's what i always think about when i write a book, what is it that makes you stay up? you know you need to go to bed, you read a chapter, what's the thing that's hooking you? and then try to recreate that for the reader. >> host: you also list graham greene's the quiet american as one of your favorite books. >> guest: i think graham greene, who was a british intelligence officer, is probably my favorite 20th century novelist in general. also my favorite spy novelist. his novels are so good, to call them spy novels implies they're

genre books, and they're much more complicated than that. "the quiet american," written in vietnam in the 1950s, anticipates almost everything that ends up being so poisonous and difficult for the united states when we really go to war there in the '60s, the misplaced idealism, the kind of fatuous belief we could alter the society. there's a character who is the narrater, a journalist, is kind of obsessively thinking about -- [inaudible] in the american embassy, some kind of attache and is forever spouting off about some theorist of the cold war named york harding who's going to, has found the third wave or going to use the third way, we're going to defeat the communists. it's just the perfect and really terrifying introduction to our nightmare in vietnam a decade later. >> host: well, let's hear from barbara in oak bluffs,

massachusetts. barbara, you've been very patient. you're on with author david ignatius. >> caller: great privilege. i am a very interesting person. i'm 70 years old, and my father was in the oss in london in world war ii. and as many americans know, the army developed the iq test with the army recruits and, apparently, my father, joseph go to uld, scored very high. they put him in london in the osss, and that was the precursor to the cia. oss standing for office of strategic services. so my father, joseph gould, welcomed under bill donovan and arthur goldberger who became the supreme court justice, and he did this incredibly creative thing. he recruited german expate rat communists -- expatriot communists who had fled hitler into london, and my father was able to find them through a

bookstore owner -- books, books -- and he recruited them into something that became the tool mission. they were germans, remember, so they spoke german, so he put them in planes and gave them the first walkie-talkies and air dropped them into germany, and they radioed information back. i'm 70, my brother's 69, and my brother jonathan has become a historian of these tool missions of what my father did. and i called in because when david was talking about his father, part of the greatest generation and now we're in our 70s, we're the boomer generation, here we have this two generation relationship to this history. then my brother wrote an article about this for the unclassified cia journal. so it would be great for people to know that there's a journal of unclassified stories. his name is jonathan gould, as i said, a couple years ago. and he's also written a treatment, a movie treatment and a miniseries about this trying to get it produced, so it was

really great to hear about david's trials and tribulations with doing that. but then the other part of me that's so interesting is i'm the widow of ron plesser who was a colleague who david knew socially in washington, and he wrote part of the privacy act and the foia, the freedom of information act. so i, my brother and i are this intersection between secrecy and the intelligence community on the one hand and then freedom of information on the other hand. and now here we are in this christopher steele thing, and in this age of information, and so i would love to hear david talk about, you know, the balance between these two things. and just as an idea, i would love to see the pentagon and the cia create an office of creative history or some kind of place where writers like my brother and historians could go and present their information and get, i don't know, you know, like a seal of approval or something saying, yes, this is valid, this is not. something like that.

i know you understand what i'm saying. and lastly, i just want david to talk about the new crop of journalists that are coming up out of this russiagate thing that he's on television with all the time and how great they're doing, these 30 and 40-year-old journalists and just talk about, you know, becoming a patron to them or a mentor to them. >> host: barbara, thank you. >> caller: all right. >> host: this afternoon. >> guest: so, first, i just have to say, barbara, it's wonderful to talk with you via television. your late husband, ron, as you know, i really loved ron plesser, and i miss him, as i'm sure you did. he was a wonderful man. so many rich things in what you said, the story of your dad and his adventures in the oss sound extraordinary. your brother's right to try and pitch something to hollywood, because it sounds like a natural. i wish him good luck with that, and i'll look and see if i can find the unclassified summary of

this operation that you described. just on a couple of the points you made, the new journalists who are for "the washington post," new york times, other news organizations doing aggressive coverage of the russia meddling story and this unusual unprecedented presidency, it's just fantastic to watch them work. this is a period where we really have to be aggressive, but we can't make mistakes. president news media makes big mistakes -- if the news media makes big mistakes, it makes us very vulnerable to attack. so i love seeing the aggressiveness and the professionalism of these kids. michael schmitt from "the new york times," to take not my paper, but another one, just broke a couple days ago a

fantastic story about the pressure on attorney general sessions not to recuse himself really broke some new ground in this story. you know, he's just a young, hard working, smart person. the great thing is the more, you know, wonderful examples of journalism that we're generating, more movies like "the post" which is out now that people see, the more smart people come into our business. we were just, you know, really in contraction. journalism was fading, and i can remember wondering whether it really made a difference in the world a few years ago. i don't wonder that anymore. every day when i get up, i know value of what my colleagues and i are doing. so i think that's great. just a final thought about how to use this expertise, the things that we know from our

families, from our lives, my friends at harvard -- i occasionally teach at the harvard kennedy school -- like to talk about applied history and almost as a discipline of applied history like we have applied mathematics, applied different disciplines. applied history is a good one where you look at the lessons, the experience that people had during the cold war, during any period in our history, and you think how do we apply that to what we're living with now and make better decisions? i love that. in a future life, i'd love to be an applied historian. >> host: well, two of the people you listed as being influenced by, ben bradlee and katherine graham, what'd you think of "the post" movie? >> guest: i thought it was wonderful, it's a hymn to my newspaper and my profession, so of course i love it. i thought what was unforgettable

about the movie was the portrayal of mrs. graham. i am lucky enough to have joined the post in 1986, to have known mrs. graham well, to have interacted with her often. i can hear her voice, you know, when i would say something particularly stupid, she would say, david, you know, how could you. she was just, she was so funny, she was so mischievous. meryl streep, it's uncanny how she captures the little quirks, the way she carried herself, her voice. it's just, it's a brilliant portrayal. and it captures the moment in which she became a great, a great owner, great publisher when she, you know, business side said as they had to, this could cost you your business. and ben bradlee, my boss, my friend said -- as he had to -- you've got to publish.

and mrs. g., as i always called her, had a tough decision to make, and on that decision is built our fantastic success as a newspaper and also as a company. so i love -- people want to see the real characters who lie behind that, it's wonderful. there's an hbo documentary about ben bradlee which premiered about a mornghts six weeks ago. it's -- a month, six weeks ago. it's narrated by ben, ben voiced his autobiography. and it's -- check that out if you want to see. ben bradlee shaped my career. i'm a godfather of ben's youngest son. ben was absolutely central to my life and growth. ben kept trying to hire me at "the washington post," and i kept saying no in the early 1980s, and ben finally said, jeez, i've done more to raise

your salary than you have. [laughter] every time the post would make an offer, i'd go back to "the wall street journal" and say they just offered me this, and i'd get a little more money. but, you know, these were -- what a blessing to to have liven the period when the real ben bradlee and the real katherine graham stalked the earth, roamed our newsroom. unforgettable. >> host: i think you dedicate or thank don graham jr., i think -- [inaudible] >> guest: to don, each of my books i've thanked don. don was katherine graham's son. don was our publisher. don literally knew the names not just of every reporter and editor, but every press operator, every person who delivered the paper. i i mean, don was an owner the likes of which we'd never seen. he'd been raised to run the post, believed in it, and he did the most courageous thing for

which he doesn't get enough public credit. so i just want to say don saw that his family and structure of "the washington post," the publicly-traded company, just was not sufficient to keep the post healthy enough to do the great journalism that it needed to. and so he took this thing that he loved as much as anything in his life, "the washington post", and he found a buyer who would be able to run it at the level of investment energy that it needed, and that's jeff bezos, the founder of amazon, who purchased "the washington post" on his own with his own fortune who's been a fantastic owner for us, who gave us money and confidence and knew this new era of "the washington post" is under jeff's leadership. but it was don who, you know, did, in a sense, the most unselfish thing of knowing that

he had to sell the paper, give up this thing that he loved, that his mother had built to keep it healthy, to keep it alive. great thing. >> host: evelyn, clearwater, florida. please go ahead with your question or comment for david ignatius. >> caller: after i'm listening to all these brilliantly outstanding people, i thought i wonder if i should even open my mouth. [laughter] however, i will. [laughter] first of all, i want to thank c-span for existing. i'm 88 years old, and every weekend i turn on c-span from early friday until sunday night. i have something to watch. and the facility which i live, which is a senior facility, has told me that if i give them a collection of books, they will order some special books because i read weird books. weird books meaning books unlike

the mystery books that everybody is reading, nora roberts, etc., etc. i read weird books. i want david mccullough, david ignatius. those are weird books. so i'm getting together a collection of weird books. but my original question was there are two things that i wanted to say. number one, i wrote a book nothing like david ignatius, and it didn't become a bestseller. it was living beyond our sell by date. and the reason i wrote that is because everybody is in a rush to retire, and the truth is that we do live beyond our sell by date because there really is not a lot for older people to do. unless they've done something if

you become a well known writer or an artist or have some particular skill, you really are no longer needed. there's nothing for you at this particular point. you are just there. and it was interesting to me because i didn't realize -- i read one of your books and enjoyed it very much, mr. ignatius, but many years ago my husband who was not a reader got on the train, we were living in new york, and he got on the train to white plains, and he struck up a conversation, and this man said he had just written a book, "the spy that came in from cold." and my husband said, that's a strange title. and he said to my husband, yeah, my name is david cornwall, and he gave him his phone number and said why don't you call me, and we can get together. and my husband was a very, as you can see, he wasn't a great

intellectual. and he had never heard of the book and never heard of the man. when he came home and told me, i got all excited. i probably would have screwed up the conversation because i probably would have been so excited, i wouldn't have known what to say to him. but my husband just didn't pay much attention and never really followed through. david cornwall, alias john he carry -- lecary, and my husband never got in touch with him, and i continue to read his books. i do like spy books. i like your books. i know you don't think he was much of a writer, but i'm curious as to what sort of writer you thought he was, what your opinion was of him. >> host: evelyn, thank you for calling in, and thank you for watching booktv every weekend. it's 48 hours of books, television for serious to readers. david ignatius, your opinion of john lecarre. >> guest: i think he is a wonderful novelist.

some of my favorite certainly spy novels are his books, the smiley novels. i think he went through a period over the last 15 is years maybe -- 15 years maybe in which i didn't enjoy his novels as much. i thought they were a little one-dimensional, the american characters in particular just seemed like, you know, the face of evil and just not all that interestingly drawn. i just reviewed his latest book, "a legacy of spies," which i loved. which is a kind of tour of his characters from the spy who came in from the cold, alex lemas, other characters from that, peter is the central character in this book, and i recommend that highly to people. just want to say one thing about what evelyn said which i found quite moving. the role that c-span plays in

giving people a way to talk about intellectual subjects, the a way to talk about -- now happily novels with the beginning of this new show -- is so wonderful. it's part of the texture of american life that i've always, i've known brian lamb since he first started c-span, and i think it's just such a gift. the idea of you being in retirement wherever you are and having a weekend that you know you can look forward to where people will talking and think, that's great. i always think about when i retire, the only thing that cheers me is all the books i haven't read yet, all the books that are still there to be read. so anyway, i'll think about evelyn and all other people who are in wherever they do their reading are watching c-span. >> host: this e-mail from brad: i remember hearing some time ago that mr. ignatius was co-writing an opera about machiavelli.

would he comment on that experience and tell us what the status of that opera is. >> guest: i'm happy to answer that question. i did write for an opera called the new prince which is about machiavelli set in florence in 1512 but then set in the future on the 500th anniversary of the publication of the prince. and this opera, the music is written by mohamed feruz, a wonderfully gifted young american composer. it had its world premiere in amsterdam with the dutch national opera in march of last year, and i'm happy to say that your humble lo bretist got to take two curtain calls to a standing audience at the opera house in amsterdamment so -- amsterdam. so that was, you know, for me as a writer just kind of, you know,

reach goal. i don't know much about opera, but i have read machiavelli. i loved working on this. of all the pieces of writing i've done, weirdly, this is one of the things i'm proudest of. i hope, i'd love to be able to tell viewers that this is going to be shown in america, that some opera company is -- i hope that'll happen but not yet. >> host: well, one of the key scenes in the quantum spy takes place in a theater in amsterdam. the theater is richly described. is there a relationship? >> guest: that theater in which this takes place, which is an unpronounce bl dutch word, is, in fact, the theater where my opera premiered. i still remember, i had not heard to to the opera. i was terrified it was going to be a flop, of course. and i i remember sitting there holding my wife's hand and practically crushing the bones in her hand because i was so

nervous to see this. but, yes, the opera house has an important fictional role in "the quantum spy." >> host: has there been a lead woman protagonist in your books named eve yet? >> guest: i would never dare name a character after, after my wife, eve. i do let my, some of my characters wear, you know, suits, jackets, things that she, i've bought her at various, you know, design houses. but they never look as good on the character as they do on eve. >> host: gene is in hillsborough, north carolina, and, gene, you're on booktv with david ignatius. >> caller: hi, david. i was curious if you had an idea of who might be the most likely

successful person as far as -- or company as far as quantum computing? university or maybe start-up or a big computer company like ibm or maybe a government contractor like lockheed? what's your feeling as far as where that's going to end up going? >> guest: so as you may know, there are different companies that are pursuing different pathways to building a quantum computer. companies are -- the problem of building a quantum computer is creating an environment in which the cue bits, these, you know, particle bits that are 0 and 1 at the same time don't de-cohere. in other words, they last long enough to do some actual computing. that ends up being the biggest technical challenge, and there are different pathways to do that, to delaying de-coherence. the ones i studied most carefully are microsoft's.

microsoft introduced me to its key team members, physicist michael friedman at uc-santa barbara, and others. their idea is to, in effect, braid the q-bits in a kind of nanowire, in a material so that they're more stable, they can be shielded better from the things that lead to de-coherence, heat, any kind of energy that interferes. there's a different approach that the university of maryland and some big companies have chosen called the single ion pathway. i've been to see that at the university of maryland. that's fascinating. they're able to entangle, to gather together more q-bits than some other approaches. every major company in the i.t. space and every major university is involved in one consortium or another. yale has a big program like the university of maryland.

the technical puzzles are so interesting. one reason that i've become more hopeful that they'll actually succeed in building a quantum computer is just there's so much brain power now in the united states, in china, around the world devoted to solving problems that you've got, nuts you've got to crack to build one of these computers. but the simple answer to your question is there are many different pathways. almost every big company is involved in some way. >> host: peter, lewiston, maine, e-mail: work with habits; how, long, when, how long a stretch? [laughter] >> guest: so there are two, really three phases of writing a novel for me. the first is research. i'm now researching my next novel, my 11th novel. so i'll do that, oh, a couple times a week i'll be going off to interview somebody to gather information for the book. ..

it is like a baby that wants to be born. it finds nourishment it needs. and so other than time to accommodate that. >> host: finally it took me a while to understand, process of editing. is this ready, is it there? and people say it needs more work great needs help. and i think you need to leave enough time as a writer to do

that regarding to write not just the second draft but the third, in my recent novel even the fourth draft. it is a series of phases and i steal time from other processes of life. i hope it is my calm, is not too obvious to them that i must be working on a novel because the columns are all ãit does crowd out other things. >> host: he did not write a book from 1999 until 2007. we do not publish a book in that time. you've been kind of on a stent. >> guest: i moved to paris in 2000 to become editor of the international herald tribune. it was a good job i always wanted to run a newspaper. he was a chance to run one. in this city, we were

overlooking when next to the eiffel tower. i thought david, you would be an idiot if you, you have this incredible adventure with your family. my children were in school then. if you were a judge, spending all of your free time writing a novel, just give it up for a little while. and so i did. and we had a ball in paris but that we moved back in 2004 and was time to start again furiously when next caller is steve from holbrook new york. now you can go ahead and talk. >> caller: hello david. yes, hats off i was just skimming by and i was reading a chapter by the subject. would you do me a favor and pick up one of your books which have a read it would be best to enjoy the rest of them?

>> host: actually have mac in dallas that email the same question. where to start? >> guest: parents never alleges they were their favorite child is because they love everyone. that said, if you want to get to know my work, the right place to start is with my first novel. it was published in 1987 like every first novel, i think, it pours everything the author knows about life into the book. it is a book i am part of. it is about the torments in the middle east, there is not a word i would change in terms of where we have ended up living through every year since 1987. i would start there. i am proud of all the books. i think a firing offense about a journalist that gets tangled in ci operations is a book i am proud of.

i think body of lies, which was made into a movie, people still read and enjoy. i think the increments that in iran, is a book that takes it to a place that he almost certainly have never been. those would be some favorites but the author would not be unhappy if you read every one of them! >> host: you reveal the spies, treachery, the whatever early on in your book. or do you save that for page 400? >> it depends. i think over time i've learned fun of the book turning cartwheels in the last hundred pages and giving a triple back within the last 20 or 30 pages. and say need to satisfy that. there needs to be some surprises where the reader thanks he or she knows what's ahead.

needs not quite know what is ahead. i think that is important. i do try to think about the plot points carefully before i start. it always ends up being complicated or more complicated and different than that. but i am a believer that books like the ones i write are meant to be entertaining. we are not writing ãyou know this is not, i hope my books are good but this is not great literature. these are spy novels. they are written to entertain so that i know with the pleasure of a spy novel is. it is you know that funny mind game. you just did not see it coming. and so you want, as i said earlier, it is the thing that makes you step the extra 15 minutes. i want to make sure i don't forget that. 22 high-minded about this or that and remember that i am in the entertainment business. >> host: he also said that if

you read one of your books, you think you are making your case you end up with a mud pie. you said earlier, you have all the ingredients 2.haven't you? >> i have assembled ingredients. that does not mean that they are right. been brother, my beloved boss used to say that although we had a responsibility to read about intelligence matters if they affected our readers, we did not necessarily need to write about the wiring diagram details. and the wiring diagram is not typically in my novels. usually it's because i've no idea what the diagram is. there are secrets to people. if you try to find out you couldn't. but the details that are there are plausible. i think you try to combine them the way my books does, you'll end up with a hodgepodge. hopefully on the page it does not seem that way.

so -- >> host: now we have roy from pennsylvania. i read -- what is it about the romance of a spy story that continues to fascinate readers and writers? >> guest: i think, the things in tim's account of the cia, which i do not, it is not the definitive history certainly. that lead to disasters are typically the covert actions. really. united states seeks to many great another country. as i said earlier, the ability of multicolor were intelligence operations to alter in a country in a way that works in the long run, not a lot of

evidence. i think that is the lesson of tim's book. it is about covert action. i think a better account of that same theme is evan thomas is book -- which is richly reported in character detail, it is just unforgettable. the people who made that understandable but misconceived effort to manipulate other countries. why does it continue to be interesting? the people are interesting. the people who like to read military history know what makes them good officer or commander or noncommissioned officer.certain qualities that are just unforgettable when you read the account of world war ii in europe and i was saying to earlier when i read -- i come across like with

my dad story spacing with intelligence worker dilemmas that people face, the way they operate, the condition in which they operate, the fear that is just a constant part of their lives as they do their work. it interests me. i liked it established between my work as a journalist, columnist where and so this is terrible, some declaratory judgment we should think about. at the end of the novel i don't have to do that. i just described this world and you get to make up your mind who you think they are. you paint a bigger canvas. so again, i think that is one of the reasons you come back to it. you are not making sort of, declaratory judgment, thumbs-up

or thumbs down. you are just describing. >> host: according from washington. please go ahead. >> caller: hello mr. david ignatius. can you hear me? >> guest: yes, sir. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. just a brief background. i am a 77-year-old retired marine, retired lawyer. i led an infantry unit but it was probably not relevant to my questions. you mentioned earlier some political matters that triggered my interest and i understand you write a column twice a week in the post. i've not read the post for quite some time. i am probably going to start reading it again, and read your columns because i'm very impressed with your addition

and intelligence. but getting to the point, maybe you have some comments on why mrs. clinton did not win last year. and to preface or to add to that, i did not vote for her, i did not vote for donald trump. i agree with your characterization that the current polarization is country is almost unbelievable. i characterize myself as a radical moderate that liens a little bit right but certainly not completely so to the alt-right. >> host: we will hear from mr. david ignatius and we appreciate you calling in and watching. >> guest: i am with gordon, i

am the angry central or radical moderate. that is what i feel. why didn't mrs. clinton win? i would say, beginning of the answer is that she did not, obvious, she was not able to present a program of where she would take the country that was compelling enough to overcome the obvious weaknesses that donald trump as an alternative. she could not do that. she had a lot of negatives to begin with. a lot of people did not like hillary clinton. she never was able to build sufficiently to give people confidence that she would be a good leader for our country. give enough people that confidence. i will just say one more thing. i think the strategy that the clinton campaign adopted was to basically let donald trump demonstrate through his statements, through his

behavior that he was unsuitable to be president. he did not temperamentally have the right qualities to be a good leader for our country. and they thought that over time, he would basically reveal that people would make a rational judgment and decide that he was not the right person. i think he did reveal that unsuitability during the campaign. we've seen in the last year, his behavior and in my judgment a lot more of that unsuitability. and the problems of his temperament. i think that was before the time of the election. i do, we will get through this. institutions to make america strong are pretty there but i do worry that the cynicism of the -- the citizens of the united states will have to make

good judgments. there is nothing that we have learned about his temperament since he took office that we did not basically know on election day. i think people do not pay sufficient attention to it. they were too angry about things worth for whatever reason, so i think that is the bottom line is we have to be good citizens. we have to be informed, let's put the time in to keep our country strong and stable in the future. if we don't, if we are just angry at each other, our troubles will only get worse. >> host: from the sun kings that came out in 1999, the authors noted washington itself has become so outlandishly unreal that any disclaimer about a novel set in the nations capital should be redundant. [laughter] >> guest: so, yeah. that was 1999. it was, the time of the clinton impeachment and that kind of

crazy -- we had periods of craziness. none of like you know, this gets wider and wider in the country gets crazier and crazier. i mentioned my father earlier. i know he is watching so i recall one of his analogies from politics. he talks about a spinning top. any think about the top spinning on a countertop. you can give a top a real knock. but if it is spinning fast if it comes back to its spinning point pretty quickly. but if it is not spinning as fast as it should and you give it a knock, it wobbles more and more and eventually falls over. my dad is right. america's light a spinning top -- america is like a spinning top. he needs to spin faster, be more integrative.

otherwise, when we get a knock, it would seem more viable. >> host: email from mark. i was wondering what david thinks of michael flynn and what character he would make in a novel. >> guest: would be a fascinating character in this sense. michael flynn was head of dia but that was not the apex of his career. i first met michael flynn either in afghanistan or iraq. probably afghanistan. michael flynn as an intelligence officer, and as one of the people who drove the fusion of intelligence, it turned the raids against al qaeda in iraq and the leadership was really an innovator. they found a way to you know,

hit a target, extract intelligence. in that 24 hour cycle, analyze the intelligence of cell phones, the computers, flash drives. and then know where to strike the next time. and then again, more intelligence, and michael flynn was at the center of that. an outstanding officer. i remember being in afghanistan, his comments about good ideas, but what to do and be more effective. one thing i noticed my whole career is that people who spend their lives in supersecret parts of the government and michael flynn was a military officer, typically in one of the supersecret task force operations that don't even disclose their names or locations. when people come out of the

supersecret environment often cannot have good judgment about what to say and not to say. i mentioned james angleton. when he came out of the cia he could not stop talking. that is a true thing with a lot of these people. i think general flynn, as much as people should respect what he did in the military career, he needs more open roles and running the dia was not a success. as he became a political figure and all we need to do is look at what he pleaded guilty to. in this recent special counsel. i think there is a deeper point about, the secret parts of our government. cia, nsa, these military units. they need to be ventilated more. people need more exposure so that they will make better judgments in them when they

come out, they will have more success. >> host: we have a few minutes left with our guest, david ignatius. this is david in pennsylvania. you are on the air. >> caller: i am so glad i got in! i very much appreciate what you just said about general flynn, mr. david ignatius. i have been involved with israel my entire adult life. i've used, on many occasions, a quote - which i believe is from you. which i saw in a documentary to the effect that anti-semitism is the elevator music of the arab world. am i right in attributing that to you? and if so do you still believe it? >> you know, it sounds like something that i have said in the past and not sure exactly where. it is a fact that anti-semitism has been to common, too easily accepted, to unchallenged in

the arab world for as long as i have been traveling there. i hope that that is changing in countries like the uae and saudi arabia. we used to hear people say things that will make you make your hair grow. that that is beginning to change. i do think that the problem in so many of these countries is that people did not speak out and challenge what was strident anti-israel rhetoric but they did sometimes merge on, it is not israel it is the jews we are to blame. people needed to call that out. you can have views about israel's actions, i have written critically about this but it is not the same as this sort of uniform, unceasing criticism. so i can't give you a citation for having said that but i'm not disagreeing that it is true

that there is an elevator music constancy to the rhetoric that always bothered me. >> host: we talk about professional, nonofficial and integrative covers. for the cia agents. what are we talking about? >> official cover is you are the political officer at the us embassy and harare or cairo. >> host: are you presumed to be cia or you are cia? >> guest: you are a cia officer. often declared is the term. the cia station chief, and whatever city it is. paris, london, cairo, will go to the head of the security service and declare who the officers are inducted they will be the one to conduct the official liaison of the travel. they will sit down and talk.

nonofficial cover is someone traveling for x, y, z and he has a home office in buffalo and branch office and dubai and you have got you know, business cards and the back of the says he works for x, y, z company but he is actually an intelligence officer under nonofficial cover. those people are often described as nocs. >> host: and often people whose cover jobs have been carefully prepared so that -- let's say someone is an officer and it is integrated cover where the person is doing real work and you try to scratch that. if they got suspicious she would find out that there is

backup all the way down. these cover issues are interesting that the really interesting issues today, in the era of digital footprints. every move we make is being recorded by a camera somewhere. every time we cross national frontier, our biometrics, often the prints are, there are additional retina scans taken. how do you move people secretly across borders? in a war where the real identity, i don't know what it says on passport, is known to transport as competent. that is an interesting puzzle. and it is one of the things i am researching for the future. i can guess at some of the answers but i think that is this question. the digital exhaust as people

in the intelligence world sometimes say. how you backing up. how you deal with a world where others are capturing the digital exhaust. it is a real life 2018 spine problem.>> host: in the past 30 years your books have moved into the cyber world very extensively. >> guest: i decided to books about every theme of the spine novel, penetration, going on the list was zeros and ones. it was going digital. that is where espionage and intelligence live now and it was time for me to realize that in recognize it so and the director two novels ago, i went to the hackers convention in las vegas. i just hung around with hackers and watch them talk about how you break into servers and how you, i will never forget walking into this convention

and there was a big screen scrolling. it has gotten real-time, the names, usernames and passwords of every account being hacked of everybody in real-time. it is stunning. so my new novel i'm working on, i think that this is where the spy business lives now. if you want to write spy novels, that are about the real world that people are operating in this we have to go. >> host: we have chuck from carbondale illinois. >> caller: hi. i have a simple question. it goes like this. what is the question between the rush of today and the china today, the federal government and is there a favorite between the two how they -- i will hang up the phone now and listen to your answer. >> host: thank you for that. >> guest: is a great question. we know from historical reading

and from spy novels, about the meticulous tradecraft that the russians have used. the intelligence has been the mother of russian operations going back to the czar time. we would write about fake news and meddling and manipulation. russians were buying up newspapers. newspaper reporters you know again and that time in the early soviet services. understand how they operate. they are meticulous, they stage their operations with great care. the chinese were always thought to have a kind of more distanced approach.it was often said chinese would not try to plant the mall in the top of the adversary service. as they so brilliantly did. they would gather a thousand

grains of sand. that was afraid they would often use. and from those thousand grains of sand they would put together a mosaic which show the picture of the adversary. it has not been true once. the chinese now are very aggressive.as i said earlier in the show, there are a series of cases in which the chinese have sought to recruit people in the intelligence community, not necessarily chinese ancestry for the targets that really will pay off. and every indication they will do that even more aggressively. i think looking at china, understanding how they operate, understanding how they play the influence game as they become a richer country. they're in a position to shape the political events in countries that matter to them. australia has just issued a fascinating report on the counter intelligence threat posed by china. the threat that the chinese to

manipulate strain politics and society that something not you can keep your eye on. >> host: for the past three hours, david ignatius has inaugurated our 2018 action addition of "in depth". we appreciate your time. >> guest: thank you. >> host: his books, first published in 1987, agents of innocence. hero in 1991, the bank of fear in 1995, a firing offense 1997, the sun king and 99 and body of lies 2007. then blood money 2011, the director in 2014 and his most recent, the quantum spy. next month on "in depth". national book award winner and pulitzer prize winner -- will be our guest.

>> c-span where history unfolds daily. was created as a public service by america's cable television companies. brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider