Novel imagines CIA director branding MI6 ‘freeloaders’ and ‘pickpockets’
David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst turned spy novelist and podcast host, says the US-Britain “special relationship” is “under a tremendous amount of strain,” and his new novel imagines how things could get darker still. The Guardian, which published the interview Sunday, described the relationship as the time-honored bond between the US and Britain and reported that the ties of history, culture, and language are fraying “as perhaps never before” under President Trump’s “America first” agenda.
In “London Station,” McCloskey depicts a calamitous collapse in cooperation between the CIA and MI6, the British intelligence agency, as the CIA comes under the guidance of a new Trump-like director who scorns MI6 as “freeloaders” and “pickpockets.”
McCloskey said his fictional scenario has been reinforced by the serendipity of real events. Over the past month, Trump openly considered abandoning Washington’s de facto support for Britain in its dispute with Argentina over the Falklands Islands and vocally welcomed the idea of a united Ireland, according to The Guardian. Last weekend, the Trump administration hurriedly withdrew 12 B-1 bombers from RAF Fairford, a British airbase, following intelligence reports that the aircraft could be targeted in an Iranian drone attack.
The Guardian reported that the move, preceded by jeering attacks on Britain from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters, reinforced a growing sense of the US pulling back from a strategic partnership that, at times, has been intimate. The two allies have drifted apart on a number of fronts, including Russia’s war with Ukraine and Trump’s decision to attack Iran — a geopolitical trend McCloskey called “fairly alarming.”
“I do think we’re at a period in the special relationship where there’s a lot more divergence between [Britain and the US],” McCloskey said by phone from a London cab. He said the cultural affinity the two nations have felt for each other since the second world war is “thinning out a little bit,” and that it “created a lot of opportunities to think about how this relationship, as shown in the novel, could get even worse.”
McCloskey said the “ton of research” he carried out while writing uncovered serious fears for the relationship’s future on both sides, but especially in Britain. He said there is “a lot of concern here in London” about what to do with a “really hard-elbowed US foreign policy under Trump” that seems to minimize the contribution of allies and pull traditional enemies closer.
One source of British concern, McCloskey said, is Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin, which has left British spies leery of sharing information for fear that the US president could pass it on, or betray the source. “If I was deep inside Vauxhall Cross [the London headquarters of MI6] working on Russia, and I had a very sensitive piece of intelligence from a sensitive source, would I have more qualms about sharing that with the Americans right now? Probably,” he said, recalling the occasion when Trump reportedly passed on Israeli intelligence to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, during his first presidency.
McCloskey said British intelligence officers he has consulted had posited such a scenario “as a reasonable hypothetical,” and he quickly added that he could not confirm whether any intelligence had actually been withheld.
What he said he could verify was tension: resentment on the British side at being the junior partner, and mutual feelings of intimidation, with US agents deferential to the UK side’s native abilities. “One of the very common themes of my conversations with UK intelligence officers was this feeling of real tension with the US and fear because there wasn’t anything the UK, as the junior partner, could really do about it,” said McCloskey, who co-hosts The Rest Is Classified podcast with former BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera. When an MI6 officer and a CIA officer pursue the same target in a third country, he said, “it was almost always the case that the US would win out because it just has more heft and more resources.” Many of the MI6 insiders he interviewed, McCloskey said, “frankly, resented the [CIA] and didn’t care for it” — and yet, he said, there was this sense of “What can I do? We’re very reliant on this partner.”
CIA officers had their own complaints. “I found any number of CIA officers who could recount instances where they had personality conflicts with their British counterparts,” he said, describing a sense among US agents of intimidation from the Brits “stemming from education, how articulate they were, their sense of refinement.”
None of this means the relationship is doomed, McCloskey said. “Almost every CIA officer I spoke to really felt like the Brits brought a great deal to the table.” The Five Eyes cooperation agreement — providing signals intelligence-sharing between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — remains intact, he said, and is likely to survive for the foreseeable future.
The US-UK relationship still has “depth and flexibility,” in McCloskey’s view, giving it the potential to evolve and survive regardless of future leadership in either country. But he conceded that things have permanently changed, and he said tensions between the intelligence services will likely escalate — though perhaps not to the extent depicted in the novel — as foreign policy interests of the US and UK go their separate ways. “A lot of the structural changes we’re seeing in the special relationship are not specific to Trump, and will outlast him,” he said. “Unlike the cold war, we don’t have an overarching geopolitical enemy to unify us, and so we’re seeing more divergence.”
McCloskey said there are areas where he could imagine the two intelligence services “slightly downshifting their level of exchange.” The end result, he said, is a relationship that may remain friendly, at times close — but perhaps less than special. “Framing it as a special relationship makes it seem like the two countries should agree on almost everything at all times, everywhere – and that is too much pressure to put on a bilateral relationship between two independent nations,” he concluded. “It’s a cliche, but true, that nations don’t have permanent relationships – just interests.”