For David Ignatius, a young correspondent on his first tour of the Middle East, it was a major coup. After two years of reporting, he wrote a story for The Wall Street Journal detailing how a CIA legend, Robert Ames, had penetrated the highest ranks of the Palestinian Liberation Organization by befriending the man who would become Yasir Arafat’s chief of intelligence, Ali Hassan Salameh.
That was in February 1983. Two months later, Ignatius returned to his hotel in Beirut after a meeting at the U.S. Embassy. It was then that he heard a shattering explosion.
Ignatius raced back to the embassy and found it in rubble, destroyed by a massive car bomb. Inside, 60 Americans, including Ames, were dead. In short order, Arabs who knew Ames began calling Ignatius to tell him how they admired the man and the way he worked.
“In that culture, people need to grieve, they need to tell you, they need to share,” Ignatius said. “I heard the kind of detail that journalists rarely hear. I thought the only way to use this material was by writing a novel.”
Spies, columns and Leonardo DiCaprio
Ignatius on the CIA: “I write often about the CIA and I write about it with some sympathy. I do feel we need a strong intelligence service. The stronger our intelligence service, the less likely we are to get into the kinds of military conflicts that can really hurt the country. … The people who work at the CIA would like the world to understand, to the extent possible, what the hell they do every day.”
On spy novels: “Spy novels that we usually read are so completely unrealistic. The real work isn’t that glamorous. It’s a lot like journalism. It’s a lot of sitting around, waiting. It’s a lot of preparation. It’s the moment of human interaction between one person and the other when you gain that person’s trust and you get that person to tell you things that, initially, he probably wasn’t going to tell you. If I understand the intelligence business at all, it’s because it’s so similar to my business of journalism.”
On column writing: “When people say, ‘I don’t know which way you vote,’ that pleases me. I don’t want people to look at my byline and instantly know what I’m going to say. I want them to look at my byline and say, ‘Well he’s going to think about it, he’s going to think it through.’ That infuriates some people, some people find that unforgivable, but that’s the way I like to do it.”
On ‘Body of Lies’ becoming a movie: “It was unbelievably cool, are you kidding? This is the first thing that I’ve done in my life that my three daughters take seriously. A newspaper column doesn’t cut it. But they loved this.”
On teaching Leonardo DiCaprio to walk: “DiCaprio came to this house and was in our family room and he wanted to know how does [the character] Roger Ferris walk. That never would have occurred to me, but of course if you’re an actor and you have to occupy space, that’s the first thing you think about. How does this person fill up the space?” Ignatius thought DiCaprio’s first attempt was too “loose-gated,” too American. “He immediately walked back across the room and said, ‘You mean like this?’ and he did another version of Roger’s walk. It was hypnotizing for me. … It was more fun than I can describe to see it happen.”
– Bob Kemper
The book he produced, “Agents of Innocence,” became an instant sensation when it was published in 1987. It was so true to life that it became a must-read for agency directors down to new recruits at “The Farm,” the CIA’s famed training center in Virginia.
“I had many intelligence officers come up to me during my travels and say to me, ‘When I needed to tell my family what I really did, what it’s like to do my job, I gave them a copy of your book.’ ”
What Ignatius had captured in “Agents” was the essence of spy craft, the delicate art practiced by nations in a fragmented, violent and often ambiguous world. It is a world in which their security sometimes comes down to the relationship that a person on one side has with a person on the other. It is a world in which enemies can be partners.
“The typical spy novel wants to tell you that being an intelligence agent is totally different from anything else,” Ignatius said. “It’s Jason Bourne leaping across buildings and jumping from motorcycle to Ski-Doo to whatever. And the truth is that being an intelligence officer is like other things. You’re in a bureaucracy, you’ve got to get permission, it takes a long time to set things up, they get screwed up.”
Evan Thomas, editor at large of Newsweek who has written extensively about the CIA, said of Ignatius’ style: “He takes out the flash and bang because that’s rarely ever a part of real life, and yet he maintains the tension. That’s part of his genius.”
Ignatius, 59, is also associate editor and a columnist for his hometown paper, The Washington Post. He still travels regularly through the Middle East and writes about it in his columns and books. He’s written six more novels since 1987, and one of his most recent, “Body of Lies,” was made into a movie in 2008 directed by Ridley Scott and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.
His new novel, “The Increment,” which Ignatius fans consider his best yet, just hit bookstores. Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer already has bought the rights to make it into a movie with the working title “Persia House.” Work on an eighth novel has begun — Ignatius is mum on what it’s about — and negotiations for another two-book deal are under way.
Over the past three decades, Ignatius has built a network of sources within the U.S. intelligence community and a number of foreign agencies as well, including Jordan’s. “The truth about life,” he said, “is that people want to talk to somebody who’s interested in what they do.”
Garrett Epps has known Ignatius since their days together at the Harvard Crimson and reads the first draft of each of Ignatius’ novels to advise him on the story’s structure. “He has a lot of empathy for the person in a position of trying to gather information in sometimes dangerous situations because he has been in the same situations as a journalist,” Epps said.
Ignatius has an appropriately cluttered but sunny study at his Washington home, where he often writes his columns. But when the novelist emerges late at night and on weekends, he heads to a dim, empty office in a downtown law firm, courtesy of a longtime friend, lawyer Jonathan Schiller.
“Journalism has fueled his creative writing,” Schiller said. “It allows him to travel to many places and fill his notebook with sights and sounds and people.”
Ignatius, whose father, Paul, came to Washington in 1961 to work in the Kennedy administration and went on to become secretary of the Navy, now lives just a short distance from his boyhood home in a neighborhood where, he joked, “if you threw a rock you’d likely hit a CIA officer’s house.”
While at St. Albans School, he was a reporter for the student newspaper and once rode in a limo to a hotel with one of the Temptations. They entered an “amazing” room filled with “amazing” women. “He looks at me in my St. Albans blazer and he looks at these women and he says, ‘Son, maybe this is the end of the interview.’
“How incredible is that? Talking to the lead singer of the Temptations? Getting out of my skin, getting out of my normal comfort zone and getting into another space. That’s what I love about the news business. And it’s what I love about being a novelist.”
Ignatius’ first reporting job was covering steelworkers in Pittsburgh for The Wall Street Journal. It was an unlikely destination for a man educated at Harvard and Cambridge. But Ignatius was determined to fit in, build relationships and find news. “The first thing I did when I got to Pittsburgh was buy a leisure suit,” he said.
He drove up and down the Monongahela River, visiting union locals and bars where steelworkers hung out. He bought drinks, passed around cards and built lasting relationships — much as a spy might do. A steelworker took one look at Ignatius’ light blue leisure suit with leather-trimmed pockets and told him, “You’re the best-dressed guy I ever met.”
“What an education,” Ignatius said. “I felt after that I could talk to almost anybody. Also, I was just totally, totally hooked.”
As a journalist, Ignatius was at first supportive when President George W. Bush pushed for war in Iraq. “I wish I had some of those columns back,” he says now.
Ignatius gives voice to those regrets in “The Increment,” named after a black-ops British spy team. A midcareer CIA officer named Harry Pappas, haunted by the “catastrophic mistake” of Iraq, now has information that Iran is progressing toward a nuclear weapon.
This time Pappas decides he’s not going to be rushed into providing a rationale for the United States to go to war. Said Ignatius: “I think there are a lot of CIA officers who would say exactly that, that they are struggling to be professional, to understand what that means, to be responsible and not political.”
For now, Ignatius has no thoughts of giving up either his newspaper column or his novels, but like many of the characters he creates, he has his doubts.
“If I have one concern, it’s that by straddling these two kinds of writing, both of which I love, that I’m preventing myself from becoming really, really good at one of them,” he said. “Would I be a much better columnist if that was all I did? Could I be a much better novelist if that was all I did? The answer may be yes … but I just haven’t been able to choose between the two of them. I’m going to keep doing both.”
BIO FILE
BORN: May 26, 1950, in Washington, D.C.
EDUCATION: St. Albans School, Washington, D.C.; Harvard College, 1973 (magna cum laude); King’s College, Cambridge, England
FAMILY: Married to Dr. Eve Thornberg Ignatius; they have three daughters. Their first date: a professional wrestling match in Wheeling, W.Va. Ignatius’ best source inside the steelworkers union worked on weekends as a professional wrestler named “Jumping Johnny De Fazio,” and Ignatius promised to come see him perform. “I can still remember the look on her face.”
JOURNALISM CAREER: Spent 10 years at The Wall Street Journal, the last three as chief diplomatic correspondent. Moved to The Washington Post, where he has served as Outlook section editor (1986-90), foreign editor (1990-92), assistant managing editor overseeing business news (1993-99) and twice-weekly columnist (1999-).
BOOKS: Has written seven novels, all but one a thriller, including “Agents of Innocence” (1987), “The Bank of Fear” (1994), “Body of Lies” (2007) and “The Increment” (2009).
MOVIE DEALS: “Body of Lies,” which grew out of a conversation Ignatius had with former CIA Director George Tenet about how much Jordanian intelligence was aiding the United States in its “war on terror,” was made into a movie in 2008 by director Ridley Scott. His latest book, “The Increment,” recently released by W.W. Norton & Co., has been optioned by Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who is considering making it into a movie with the working title “Persia House.”
