Barry Eisler
============

Barry Eisler is a former CIA officer and novelist, and a guest on Kiriakou's Dead Drop podcast.

Kiriakou's framing is that Eisler is hardly the first former intelligence officer to give up storytelling as a spy in favour of storytelling as a pure storyteller, but that very few have succeeded as he has. Eisler left the government in 2003 to write full time, and has since produced three successful series rather than three successful books, the John Rain novels that established him, then the Ben Treven series, and most recently a series about a Seattle detective named Livia Lone. What Kiriakou identifies as the trick of it is the weaving of a collection of good characters into one compelling story, and his verdict on the prose is that "the writing is sublime".

Kiriakou also uses Eisler to make a general point about why the transition is so common. There is, he argues, "simply a literary quality to espionage. It's all that gray matter navigating all that gray territory", and a spy writes constantly, because writing is part of the job. He says he cannot accurately count the words he typed over the years that were purely him doing his job, so that when the spying stops it seems natural to put the stories and the accumulated skill to some productive and possibly lucrative use.

See also

- Dead Drop (podcast)
- John le Carré
- Joe Weisberg
- Kiriakou's writing process
- The Directorate of Operations
