MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
There's keeping a low profile and then there's our next guest, James Wolff - except not his real name. That's a pseudonym. I would tell you what he looks like, except his headshot on the jacket of his novels - not to mention every photo you will find of him online - is of the back of his head, shot from behind so you can't glimpse his face. James Wolff had a career as a British intelligence officer. Now he writes about them. His latest espionage novel is "Spies And Other Gods." He's on the line from London. James Wolff, welcome.
JAMES WOLFF: Thank you very much.
KELLY: I gather from your acknowledgments that even your kids give you a hard time about the pseudonym.
WOLFF: They do. They're young enough that they don't quite understand the reason for it. And...
KELLY: Yeah.
WOLFF: ...In a very nice way, they feel proud on my behalf, and so I think they'd like me to be able to be a bit more front-footed about publicity for the book.
KELLY: Well, let's go to the cast of fictional characters that you have invented for this novel and start with Sir William Rentoul. He's the head of British Intelligence. When we meet him, he is not enjoying it much.
WOLFF: No, he's at the tail end of a long and very successful career, but he's suffering from what the book describes as a brain fog, the descent of brain fog, which is making him struggle to remember names, details, faces even. And he's finding this enormously difficult because he's someone who's been celebrated throughout his life, really, for his mental acuity. You know, to get to the top of an organization like that, you have to be really on the ball, very capable, very good with people, very good with facts. And he feels that that is starting to slip away from him.
KELLY: Yeah.
WOLFF: He's also grieving the loss of his wife, and I think he feels that he's in a bit of a tailspin. You know, in a way, spying is about creating illusions. It's about double bluffs. It's about creating a sense of uncertainty in your opponent. And I think he is a sad figure and, in a way, reflects some of the personal cost of spying - that you spend a lifetime lying to other people and also lying to those people near to you. And I think that he is looking back and counting the personal cost of all that and finding that perhaps it wasn't all worth it.
KELLY: Well, the operation that is threatening to ruin Sir William's last days on the job has to do with an Iranian assassin code-named Caspian, who has killed Iranian dissidents all over Europe. Does it feel strange to be putting out a novel with all these Iranian characters, an Iranian villain, at a moment when in real life the whole world is focused on Iran?
WOLFF: Yeah, I suppose it does, in a way. I mean, when I wrote the book, I think no one was really interested in Iran. There were far more pressing things to worry about with Russia and Ukraine. That felt like the central conflict that the world was focused on. So it definitely wasn't my intention to be, you know, current or contemporary. I'm much more interested in the psychology of spying, in the way that spy fiction reveals character, in the way that it places people under unique stress and in the way that it is a combination of the global but also the personal. I mean, the individuals involved in the book, involved in spying, are often doing something that no one else knows about. And so spy fiction does seem to me to have this unique capability of being - you know, of having the broadest possible canvas - something global that's happening - but also the smallest possible in that it's about an individual isolated in secrecy trying to do their best.
And so I'm always very interested in exploring areas of the spying world that might not have received very much attention before or characters or roles. So in this book, there's a character called Susan who is what's called a building escort. It's one of the most humble and lowly jobs. You basically will escort a tradesperson - a plumber, a painter, an electrician - around the building as they do their work, and you sit with them to make sure they stay in the right area. And I thought it's maybe my duty to introduce some of these less high-profile roles into spy fiction.
KELLY: So the book has intelligence services all over Europe cooperating - kind of - to catch this assassin, Caspian. The only lead that British intelligence has is a mild-mannered dentist. So introduce us to this character, to Zak.
WOLFF: Well, he is someone who the intelligence agencies have tried to use as a way of getting to this Iranian assassin. So the spies think they've worked out who the assassin is. The question then is how they get close to him. How do they find out his movements? How do they find out his intentions? When is he next planning to travel from Iran to Europe? And they discover that the assassin has a nephew, and then they discover that the nephew has an associate in the U.K. But Zak, the character here, is really someone who's struggling with addiction, with divorce, with a life of disappointment.
I don't think he's in a place - where we meet him in the novel - where he is content or feels that he's done everything he could have done. And he sees the brief glimmer of an opportunity to become involved in spying. He sees it as something that will, in a way, redeem him, that will transform his life and give it meaning and excitement again. But I think as he goes down that path and becomes more involved with the spies, I think he develops a more realistic sense of what's involved, and I'm not sure he is always totally happy with it.
KELLY: No. He's - poor Zak. He's constantly being manipulated on your pages by spies, by people pretending to be spies. I was sympathizing with him, and then I got to - I actually want you to read me a few lines that speak to his state of mind as he's trying to figure out what the heck is happening. In my copy, we're at the top of page 197. I'll read a few words, and then pick up.
(Reading) Every book he's read on the subject of spying...
WOLFF: (Reading) Has used the term smoke and mirrors at some point. But he didn't appreciate until now how apt the phrase is, how it's possible to be confused about your confusion, to be unsure whether you're confused about the right things, to suspect that your confusion is a wispy simulacrum of some deeper confusion that you haven't yet experienced but lies just around the corner or something like that.
KELLY: (Laughter) To be confused about your confusion is just the perfect way of putting it. Is that what it feels like some days in your old world, the intelligence world?
WOLFF: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think just before I joined the intelligence world, I probably had this misapprehension that the moment you were on the inside, everything would be made clear.
KELLY: Yeah, you'd get your hands on the classified intel and all would suddenly be clear.
WOLFF: Exactly. The world would make sense, finally. But the truth is that it's frequently just as confusing on the inside as it is on the outside. I mean, I think I'm - I - somewhere in the novel, I make the point that it's possible to pick up an intelligence file and read it and have no idea what it's about, what the spies are doing, what they're trying to fix and whether they're making anything better. You know, I've had the experience of looking at police files before, and police files are incredibly logical collections of documents. There's a crime. Then there's the collection of evidence. There's interviews. They might charge a suspect, and then there's a court case. It all follows according to a pattern that we're familiar with.
But spy operations are, you know, real head-scratchers sometimes. And they begin in confusion and they end in doubt, and then a whole lot of stuff happens in the middle. And it's not always entirely clear what the point of the whole thing was.
KELLY: We've been speaking with former British intelligence officer turned spy novelist James Wolff. His latest is "Spies And Other Gods." James Wolff, thank you.
WOLFF: Thank you.
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