This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batsle with David McCloskey. His work of fiction,

a novel, is a thriller. CIA thriller, you could say, but it's a thriller of modern Syria,

unfinished business. Damascus Station, praised by David Petrez, praised by Leon Panetta.

But then again, they were in office during this period where there was nothing to be done

with the scale of tragedy. There is horror in your book, David, and you mean it to be there,

because what I know of reporting about Syria these many years, the Syrian regime, the Mukba Harat,

or whatever drives them are monsters. And the abuse of human beings is infamous. And you make it

very clear that there are no limits. Again and again, you come up against villains,

worrying about losing their soul or I've lost my soul. The despair is here. So your lessons

learned, David, having pulled the America, the virtue of American gambler through all of this.

Does it touch a character to spend so much of his energy going up against monsters? Did you

think about Sam in his relationship towards Syria? It made me feel now and again reading the book

soiled as if, why am I here? What am I doing? This is deviltry and I'm in Hades.

Well, I think the book was really born out of some emotional processing that I was doing when

I left the agency about what I had seen and experienced working on Syria at that time. And I wanted

that raw feeling to be there. I wanted it to be told not just through the eyes of a CIA officer,

although we certainly have that, but to be told and really experienced by the reader through the

eyes of multiple Syrians who were experiencing this war differently and who do things that are

as happened in the war and continues to happen, the war do very despicable things to other people

onto each other. I really wanted to capture, I think, the bravery and heroism that I saw in the

conflict and also to bring out the inhumanity and the tragedy that I saw there. And

that Iky feeling at times was one that I felt like was important because it's

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