This is CBS Eye on the World with John Bacheler. Here's John Bacheler.

This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Bacheler. I welcome David McCloskey, the author of a work of fiction, a novel, Damascus Station.

It is a story of intrigue, involving state security in the United States, state security in the Middle East, especially Syrian state security.

Mukba Arat. However, this is based upon historical events that in these last years have become more and more tragic.

So we begin with David's presentation of the conditions where he puts his characters in and asks them to solve puzzles that are still unavailable to all of us in the tragedy of the darkness visible of Syria.

Millions have fled. Hundreds of thousands may be dead. Assad remains at the palace in Damascus. This is a story of what was possible early in the turmoil, early in the collapse of Syrian sovereignty.

David, congratulations and a very good evening to you. Your hero, protagonist, Sam Joseph is a CIA officer, covert officer.

He is plunged into the conditions in Syria. He knows this very well. He's a veteran. So let us introduce what Sam knows he's up against when he arrives in Damascus at the CIA operations in Damascus.

Bacheler Assad, what is he as your novel opens and what is his ambition, his contest as your novel opens? Good day to David.

Thank you so much for having me great to great to be here talking with everyone and you about the massastation.

You know, the book starts in page one. It says it's the early years of the Syrian uprising, which is really when I looked at this as an analyst at the CIA.

And it's a work of fiction. There's not a year on there, but this is really looking at the world of Syria, the CIA, the Middle East from about 2011 to 2013, which is when we had the beginnings of a protest movement in Syria.

We had the initial spark of kind of insurgency. We had the beginnings of state crackdown and eventually sort of full on counter insurgency against this opposition.

And the main players that I introduced into this book are on the one hand, the CIA, keen to understand what's going on inside the palace, how Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria is thinking about the unrest, what he plans to do to suppress it.

And on the other hand, really the Syrian regime, which I paint the picture of that palace and its security apparatus through the eyes of several characters in this novel, one of whom is Sam's eventual recruit, Mariam Haddad, who's an ambivalent palace official, who is trying to do her job, but also very frustrated and angry about family being mistreated, not uncommon in Syria at the time.

And also through the eyes of several Syrian security officials, one named Ali Hassan, who is also an ambivalent sort of former police detective focused on cracking down on the protesters, finding spies.

And so I really wanted to paint, I think, in the story of this novel, a scene of a country, the city, Damascus itself, sort of on the verge of the fall, right before it tipped over into full on state collapse.

Yes, it begins in 2011, co-terminus with the Arab Spring, it might be a result of the Arab Spring, but that isn't critical.

What is this to understand? Bashar al-Assad, trained as an ophthalmologist, married to a fashionable woman, and as comfortable in Paris as he is anywhere else in the world, and yet the man you present in the course of the novel, who survives and continues, is as bloody-minded as we can imagine Drugashvili Stalin was once upon a time.

You've presented a genuine force of nature. You've also presented the fact that Bashar al-Assad makes at least one phone call to Vladimir Putin.

What do we need to know about the relationship between Moscow and Damascus?

Yeah, well, I did have a lot of fun putting the real Bashar al-Assad fictional interpretation of him and Vladimir Putin into this book to have a little bit of fun at their expense, which they, you know, so richly deserve.

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