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Just go to therestispolities.com. That's therestispolitics.com.

Welcome to a special edition of The Restis Politics, me Rory Stewart.

And me, Aleister Campbell.

And the reason it's special is because we've got a guest who is a special guest because he's doing a new Rest is podcast called The Rest is Classified, which is going to tell amazing stories from the world of espionage.

And it's a very good thing because unlike Rory Stewart, this guy is actually an ex-spook.

Exactly.

Welcome, David McCloskey.

Thanks for having me on, guys.

I'm really excited to have you.

David, one of the reasons why excited to have you. David,

one of the reasons why people will have heard of you is that you wrote this extraordinary novel, Damascus Station. But I'm not sure that everybody's aware that that draws directly on

your own experience in the CIA working actually in Damascus, right? Yeah, that's right.

I spent pretty much my entire CIA career as an analyst working on Syria and had the opportunity

to actually live and work in Damascus just prior to the start of the uprising in 2011.

And David, you picked up, I think, very clearly there, because it's right there in the

beginning of the book, just how brutal and unpleasant the Bashar al-Assad regime was.

I mean, given that Syria's back in the news at the moment, give us a bit of a reminder of

what that regime was like, what it was capable of, what it's done over the last few years.

Yeah, you know, the astounding thing just in looking at what's happened. was like, what it was capable of, what it's done over the last few years.

Yeah, you know, the astounding thing just in looking at what's happened over the past few days in Syria is to think that we're now, I mean, 15 years into this conflict.

...