What recruiting spies and developing literary plots have in common - "Intelligence Matters"

In this episode of Intelligence Matters, host Michael Morell speaks with former CIA operations officer Jim Lawler about his years of work on counterproliferation matters and his post-CIA pursuit of writing fictional novels, including "Living Lies: A Novel of the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program." Lawler and Morell discuss the similarities between recruiting spies and developing literary plots, as well as why a keen sense of empathy is necessary in each endeavor. Lawler tells Morell why he believes the most successful operations officers may have a particular neurological capability for convincing spies to steal secrets, which he calls the "metaphysics of recruitment."  

Highlights:  

• Being a cheerleader to recruit spies: "I want to motivate the people that I recruit to not only want to do this, but to want to do it really badly. A lot of my assets, I think, considered me their therapist. They would want to look forward to the next meeting. They would want to find out, 'OK, how can I please Jim? What other secrets can I steal?' And they would go amazing, amazing distances for me. And so my job was really not only to perceive who was vulnerable in this respect and who would do this, but then to keep them highly motivated. One time a colleague of mine said, 'Jim, you're nothing but a cheerleader.' And I said, 'That's fine. If I can cheer you on to greater accomplishment or cheer my assets on to stealing more secrets, then I guess that's my job.'" 
• The transition from spy recruiter to writer: "I found it to be probably the closest thing that someone can have, can be, to being your own God in your own universe - because you create these characters and sometimes they do what you want them to do. And sometimes, just like human beings disobey God, they disobey and they go off on their own and create their own destinies…I used to love to run CIA operations, and this is as close as I can get to doing something simulating an operation. Writing a novel from start to finish is a lot like conducting a clandestine operation and trying to guide it and make sure you've got all the plot holes filled and you know, the train of logic and everything." 
• CIA regaining focus on traditional espionage: "[L]et me tell you, while we were distracted for 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, our adversaries were not…Our adversaries were at the back door, the Russians and the Chinese and others, loading up on our secrets and recruiting sources inside the United States and our Western allies. And we've got to make sure that we switch that focus back on where the real danger lies."

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Intelligence Matters - Jim Lawler - Transcript

Producer: Olivia Gazis 

MICHAEL MORELL: Jim, welcome to Intelligence Matters. It's great to have you on the show.

JIM LAWLER: Thank you very much, Michael.

MICHAEL MORELL: I am really looking forward to our discussion because your book is is really terrific. It's a page-turner I couldn't put it down. Made me think I was back in at CIA occasionally throughout the book. So I'm really looking forward to our discussion.

But I really wanted to start by talking about your career a little bit. You took a bit of a roundabout way to get to CIA, right? Can you talk about that a little bit?

JIM LAWLER: Yes, I did. In fact, I I like to say I backed into it and it was a very fortuitous accident. I was actually in my last year of law school at the University of Texas and like any last-year student, either in graduate school or law school or wherever, there's only one thing you're focused on and that's finding a job. And so I was interviewing with countless law firms.

And lo and behold, CIA came to campus looking to hire attorneys for the Office of General Counsel. A retired case officer named Bill Wood interviewed me and about three or four minutes, maybe five minutes into this interview, he said, 'Jim, have you ever thought about the Clandestine Service?'

Well, this was 1976, and for those of you who don't know, the CIA did not even have a sign out on 123. In fact, it said 'Federal Highway Commission' something or other. And there was just not much written or said about the CIA.
And I answered his question and I said, 'No, I actually don't know what the Clandestine Service is.' And Mr. Wood said, 'Well, Jim,' he said, 'I've got this gut feeling that you'd be really pretty good at this.' Now he was there to hire attorneys for OGC, for Office of General Counsel and not case officers. But it intrigued me when he said that.

Unfortunately, at the time, my wife's mother was deathly ill and there was absolutely no chance that my wife and I were going to move away to Washington, D.C., from Texas and then overseas on an assignment. So I returned the application form to him with regret, but I knew I had to face reality. And instead, I went into, well, I went into a family-owned business, and I like to always ask people how many people have been in a family-owned business, and I'll see a few hands. And then I say, 'I bet you, I know while you're no longer in a family-owned business,' and my focus focuses on the word 'family.'

I love my dad. I love my two brothers. We were in a steel fabrication components business and I was miserable. I was making a lot of money, in fact I made more money than I'll ever make again in my life. But I found out early on that making money is not the secret to happiness. And so I became very discontented. I'd come home, I'd complain, and my wonderful wife, she took about three and a half years of this before she finally said one day, 'Jim, either do something about it or stop your belly-aching.'

MICHAEL MORELL: Sounds like my wife.

JIM LAWLER: Yeah. Well, it's pure logic, and you don't have a right to complain if you don't do something about it. So I had kept Mr. Wood's business card. I went in my study. I typed out a letter to him. This was before Al Gore invented the internet, so I had to type out a snail mail letter and said, 'You know, you interviewed me three and a half years ago. I wasn't ready, but I think I'm ready for this now for this opportunity that you mentioned.'

Three days later, I got a phone call from a young woman who never used the words or the letters 'CIA,' all she said was, 'Mr. Wood wrote you a letter, or received your letter. And he would really like to meet you next Thursday at the Holiday Inn on the Gulf Freeway at three o'clock. Can you be in the lobby?'

I said, 'Yes, ma'am.' And I went there. And Mr. Wood and I chatted for about maybe two hours. He said he'd like to fly me to Washington a couple of weeks later. He did. And I had some interviews, came back in about three or four months after that, I went back. I took the polygraph. I took the psych exam. Lord knows how I got through the psych exam, but I did.

And just a very short time thereafter, maybe a few weeks, I got a phone call and they offered me a job as a GS 11 operations officer. Now, I had no idea, I mean, no idea what this entailed or what this meant, why they chose me or what was going to be expected of me. Literally nothing.

It's so bizarre that I was taking a job that I knew nothing about and had no idea if I could even do the job. But at this point, I was so desperate to get out of Houston and away from the company, the family company, I would have taken a job on the planet Neptune if I could have.

MICHAEL MORELL: So Jim, you spent a good chunk of your career working to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And as part of that work, you were the chief of a team that identified and disrupted the A.Q. Khan network. Can you tell us a little bit about why your team was formed, how you ended up leading it and how long it took your team to get to the bottom of the problem you were focused on and who A.Q. Khan ultimately was?

JIM LAWLER: Yes, I can tell you about this. We originally were formed for an entirely different reason. The chief of the counterproliferation division asked me to take on a very daunting task and that was to penetrate and disrupt another country's nuclear program. I won't mention which one, but it's been in the news a lot lately.

And so he said, 'I want you to do that and that's all I want you to do.' And being an operations officer, I just love operations, and he's giving me the luxury of doing something that I consider to be psychologically righteous, and that is to disrupt a nuclear weapons program of an adversary country.

So we created an operation that was based on the - literally based on the same type of operation that Felix Dzerzinski, who founded the Cheka, the Russian intelligence organization, back in 1917, when he went after all of the opposition to the Bolsheviks. And his philosophy was, 'If I want to destroy the counter-revolutionaries, I have to become one myself, or at least pretend to be.'

And so we created an operation where, if we wanted to destroy and disrupt proliferators, we had to become in a sense, proliferators ourself. And in so doing, by creating the field of dreams, then the people did come. Not only did we ultimately have some involvement with the original target, but guess who came knocking on our door? Elements of the A.Q. Khan network.

And I was somewhat familiar with A.Q. Khan. Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan had worked in the West for the Uranium Enrichment Corporation and in the early or in the mid-70s, he had stolen plans for centrifuge enrichment of uranium and gone back to Pakistan and formed what ultimately became Khan Research Laboratory and gave the Pakistanis a nuclear weapons capability.

Well, this new thing that we discovered was he wasn't content with just giving Pakistan a nuclear weapons capability. He was out now freelancing - something that the CIA, I don't believe had ever imagined, that, you know, would be possible. Typically, we would see state- to-state proliferation, but not a private network. And yet he had a private network that was out there offering nuclear weapons capabilities to, well, to whomever would buy it.
And the first target, customer, that he identified was Libya. And this really set me back. I went, 'Whoa, here's an arch enemy of the United States, and they're going to purchase a full turns, a turnkey, full scale nuclear enrichment capability, along with plans for nuclear weapons.'

And so that's how we came into contact- that really took only about a year and a half after we started the operation when we basically came into touch with in touch with elements of the Khan network.

MICHAEL MORELL: OK, Jim: how does a retired CIA case officer become a writer of fiction?

JIM LAWLER: It was something I always wanted to do. In fact, it was funny, when I went through one of my interviews at CIA, one of the interviewers - this was in 1979 - he asked me what I would like to do eventually with my life, and I said, 'You know, I'd love to write a novel.' And he looked disgusted and he said, 'That's all we need is another author.'

So I toyed around with the idea of writing one, and I didn't do it and I didn't do it, and finally, I was retired and one of my best friends, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen and I were having a conversation in 2016 about the Iranian nuclear negotiations and I said to Rolf, 'What happens if they cheat?' And that gave me the germ of an idea for a novel, "Living Lies," where basically the United States is engaged in negotiations with the Iranians, and it looks like everything's going well. In fact, it's going too well -because the Iranians have decided that they are going to basically stop their centrifuge enrichment program because they already have acquired enough fissile material from Russia for four weapons.

And so they can have the luxury making concessions to the U.S., knowing that they've got an ace in the hole. And the story goes from there.

MICHAEL MORELL: And then what's it like to write a book of fiction for somebody that spent years in the clandestine service?

JIM LAWLER: Well, for one thing, you have to liberate yourself from the agency writing style, and that's hard. After 25 years of writing the way the agency wants you to write, so you have to liberate yourself from that.

But I found it actually, and it sounds blasphemous, but I found it to be probably the closest thing that someone can have, can be, to being your own God in your own universe - because you create these characters and sometimes they do what you want them to do. And sometimes, just like human beings disobey God, they disobey and they go off on their own and and create their own destinies. Sometimes actually much better than I had planned.

And so it was an outlet for creativity. I used to love to run CIA operations, and this is as close as I can get to doing something simulating an operation. Writing a novel from start to finish is a lot like conducting a clandestine operation and trying to guide it and make sure you've got all the plot holes filled and the train of logic and everything.

But I also learned that there's a difference between reality and entertainment. And in real life, CIA operations can sometimes proceed at a snail-like pace. And then they take off like a rocket. And yet most readers wouldn't tolerate a snail-like pace in a book. So you have to accelerate the action and sometimes make a few shortcuts.

But what I tried to do was stay as close to reality as possible. I've read some other spy fiction and - actually a lot of spy fiction by non-operations officers - and it just, you know, I'm thinking to myself, 'This would never happen. This would never happen.' And I tried to not dispense with with reality. I tried to keep it as realistic as possible, even though I accelerated the tempo considerably.

MICHAEL MORELL: So Jim,"Living Lies" is an interesting title. Where did it come from?

JIM LAWLER: Well, it came from - writing this novel was cathartic for me. And in the novel, a couple of the main characters, Lane Andrews and Paula Davenport, they have an ironclad commitment to the clandestine assets that we recruit. And yet they are expected, a couple of times, they were expected to make shortcuts to disappoint the asset.

And both these people, both of these heroes, are very impatient with what I call the careerists, the apparatchik, what the Russians call them, the people who are so focused on their careers and not on the national security.
And yet Lane and and Paula are very much in the opposite camp. They're very devoted to national security. And they could give a damn about their careers. But otherwise, in fact, you're living a lie, and Paula uses that line.

There's a very narcissistic CIA director for whom she works, and he's lecturing her on things. And she said, 'Sir, I'd just be living a lie if I did that. If I've got to do what you're saying, basically to dispense with the commitments we make to our clandestine sources, I can't do that.'

And so living lies, it's - a lot of people live a lie. It's just not tolerable, at least not in my world, not in my universe.

MICHAEL MORELL: Exactly. That's fantastic, Jim.
Throughout the book, your characters provide insights into the intelligence business, and when I read them, they sounded perhaps to me like they were your personal insights to the intelligence business. You don't have to admit that or not. But a lot of them pertain to the recruitment of sources. And what I'd love to do is read a couple of those to you and get you to react to them.

So the first one is your main character you already mentioned. His name is Lane Andrews, he says, and I quote, "Sometimes I can do it, and sometimes not. It requires a force of will and immense concentration. Plus, I have to be motivated properly. He sighed and then said, quote, 'Look, I can explain most of my success rate due to various factors: my patience, my persistence, my ability to read people and their needs.' He shook his head and added, 'Maybe my empathy, perhaps my soft voice modulation. All of these things help a lot. But there's a small portion that's a mystery to me, except for the mental link I envision between myself and the target or subject or whatever you want to call it.'" That's remarkable. Can you talk about that a little bit?

JIM LAWLER: Yes, I can. This is a phenomenon that I call them in novel and I call it among my friends the 'metaphysics of recruitment' because I truly believe, as does Lane, that there is a small percentage that gives certain people, myself and some others, an edge in recruiting.

And all of the elements that you read just now from the quote from Lane Andrews, all of those certainly enhance your ability to recruit people. But there was still maybe a small remaining part that's almost metaphysical, where you were so focused on your recruitment pitch of someone that it's like a mental link is going from your brain to their brain.

I had -one of my assets, one of my clandestine sources once remarked, 'Jim. When you're talking to me, my brain feels like it's in a warm water bed.' I have a soft voice and I am empathetic - in fact that's being empathic is a huge part of recruitment. But there's something else, something mystical. And I have a scene in the book where Lane chats with a couple of neuroscientists and they are very disdainful of this concept, and they ask him what tricks he uses.

And he says, 'I don't trick people. I want them to want this. I don't trick people. I'm not doing anything like that.' And they're very disdainful. He actually convinces them that they should do a study on this phenomenon because he says, the field of neuroscience, he says, 'Are you telling me it's complete? That we know everything there is to know about the brain?'

And they said, 'Well, of course not.' And he said, 'Well, that's my point,' that we don't know = if someone back in 1890s had seen an airplane, they'd think it was magic. Now we know it's not magic, there are certain aerodynamic principles that cause a plane to fly. And maybe there's some some kind of neurological capability that a small percentage of people have, that they can convince other people to do things, to want to do things. So I call it the metaphysics of recruitment, for lack of a better term.

MICHAEL MORELL: So, Jim, let me read another one here. "Lane reminded himself that recruitment was a lot like seduction. But then why was he so good at the former and so lousy at the latter? Was it that he refused to use his recruitment skills for his sexual conquests? The very word 'conquest' was distasteful to him in this context. His cardinal rule of recruitment was to cause the target to want the result as much as he did, and possibly even more."
That last sentence, I think, is pretty profound.

JIM LAWLER: And it's exactly the way I feel about it. Sometimes we talk about, when I'm giving courses in recruitment to intelligence officers or FBI special agents, we talk about how our adversaries, like the Russians or the Chinese or other countries will use blackmail. They'll use coercion. And I always like to say that I don't like that, and it's not a moral reason why I don't like using those type of techniques. It's because I don't want to be driving down the street with a rattlesnake in my back seat.

I want to motivate the people that I recruit to not only want to do this, but to want to do it really badly. A lot of my assets, I think, considered me their therapist. They would want, to look forward to the next meeting. They would want to find out, 'OK, how can I please Jim? What what other secrets can I steal?' And they would they would go amazing, amazing distances for me.

And so my job was really not only to perceive who was vulnerable in this respect and who would do this, but them to keep them highly motivated. One time a colleague of mine said, 'Jim, you're nothing but a a cheerleader.' And I said, 'That's fine. If I can cheer you on to greater accomplishment or cheer my assets on to stealing more secrets, then I guess that's my job.'

MICHAEL MORELL: And then here's a really important one. "We may call our sources 'assets,' but they're flesh and blood men and women who have placed their allegiance with us and are risking their very lives by working with us. They are not simply pen and ink entries to be written off of a damned balance sheet when we feel like it. My highest commitment is to the security of our sources."

JIM LAWLER: Yes, that's a quote from Paula Davenport, who's talking to the director. And he is a, in the book, he's a very narcissistic hedge fund guru. And he looks at our assets, you know, our covert sources, as literally pen and ink entries. And she refuses to do that because, like almost all the operations officers I know, the most sacred commitment we have is to the security of these sources. I would be in fact living a lie if I told these sources that we are going to go to hell and back to keep you safe and to rescue you if you get in trouble.

And if I told them thatm that would be a damned lie, and I'm not going to do that and I'm not going to live a lie doing that. And that's what, ultimately, Lane and his team - and it's a joint CIA-FBI team, they have to rescue some of our assets out of Iran, people who put their lives on the line for us.

This is a sacred commitment and it's one that I made and one that you made. And certainly one that George Tenet backed up. Because we had some assets unfortunately arrested and I spoke to George and George is just a remarkable human being. And he said, 'We will do everything possible, including having the president of the United States intervene.' And he did, God bless him.

MICHAEL MORELL: You know, what's interesting to me was, when I was reading the book and I was reading about this operation that is taking place in the novel, and then I was thinking back to your counterproliferation work - much of which took place, or the heart of it took place under the leadership of George Tenet. That George Tenet was just the opposite of the director that you paint in the book. Right? And could you talk about that a little bit why you chose to do it that way?

JIM LAWLER: Well, I told George, I said, 'This is no reflection on you.' You're right, Michael, George Tenet is an honorable man, a man of integrity. Of all the CIA directors I served under, he was by far the best. And he cared about his people. He cared about our assets.

In fact, I've told George on several occasions that if I were to write his biography, the title would be, 'The Spy Who Loved Us." Because he truly loved us. He's a very charismatic individual, a very warm, perceptive, empathic individual. He would have made a hell of a case officer.

And so, no, he's nothing like the fictional director that I have in my novel there. So don't don't let anybody make that mistake. He's not.

Now there are some other people based on people I really know - some of the good guys I acknowledge in my acknowledgments, who I patterned them after, and some of the bad guys. I'm not going to reveal that; that's top secret.

MICHAEL MORELL: Excellent.
Jim, I want to do a couple of additional quotes here. These aren't about recruitment, but they're about some other things that I think are important.

So the first one is: "Traditional espionage became yet one more casualty of the global war on terror, which Paula thought of as the global war on tradecraft. Young officers, bright and courageous all, received a totally erroneous impression of what spying was really about: dealing with human beings over a sustained period and finding their motivations and stress points so that they could be recruited as intelligence sources."

For 20 years, we've been fighting this counterterrorism, counterinsurgency war. I think you're talking about that a little bit here.

JIM LAWLER: Absolutely. All of the operations officers in the generation after my own, and a lot of my own generation, were out there per force, trying to keep America safe, fighting the war on terror. But at the same time we were doing this, it was a totally different technique than what classic espionage is about.

In fact, I consider the global war on terror was basically espionage, in a sense, at the point of a gun. And it has no real relation to traditional espionage tradecraft against sophisticated adversaries like the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians or any other traditional target.

And so a lot of the young officers, as brave as they are and as much as we needed them to do that, they would get basically amped up on this battlefield adrenaline. And it had nothing to do with the way we traditionally recruit sources - or very little to do with it.

And I think that we've taken a hit. I believe that the current director is basically refocusing us. I forget the term they use; I think it's the peer adversaries that we're going back against because, let me tell you, while we were distracted for 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, our adversaries were not.

Our adversaries were at the back door, the Russians and the Chinese and others, loading up on our secrets and recruiting sources inside the United States and our Western allies. And we got to make sure that we switch that focus back on where the real danger lies.

MICHAEL MORELL: All right. Here's another one that's a bit surprising in this world of technology we live in. One of your characters says, "Big data typically equals big bullshit. How come I've seen so few tangible results in intelligence operations from this so-called wonderful breakthrough?"
Can you talk about that?

JIM LAWLER: Yeah, OK. It's a little opinionated, but Americans have this unfortunate tendency to rely a lot on technology and to spend big a lot of money on very glittery toys and things like that when, in essence - And of course, I'm a human intelligence operations officer. So my focus has always been on the human factor. And that big data, yeah, it could help. I'm sure it does help in analysis and things like that. But a lot of times there's a lot of hype to big data as opposed to having a real source, say, on the Chinese Politburo or some key source in the Kremlin.

Big data is not going to get you that; human intelligence operations are what gives you that. And trying to penetrate, say, the Iranian nuclear program or what's going on in Vienna right now with the negotiations - big data is not going to really help us with that. We need spies.

MICHAEL MORELL: Absolutely.

So, Jim, I want to do one more quote here. I'm going to quote about something that no CIA officer likes to do, which is take a polygraph.

So the quote is: "Polygraphs were not lie-detectors, but stress-detectors, and their validity, if validity it was, were only good at a static point in time. It wasn't like an inoculation against betrayal, nor a flu shot against treason."
Can you talk about that?

JIM LAWLER: Yes, I think very little scientific evidence that polygraph tests are in fact measures of veracity or deception. They're stress detectors. And if you are a low reactor like I am, when I'm taking a polygraph test, they barely can tell that I'm even alive. They'd have to put a mirror under my nose.

I mean, I honestly, if they said, 'Mr. Lawler, is your name Johnny Appleseed?' I could say, 'Yes,' and the thing wouldn't blip. And it really is a stress detector. I don't get stressed very much. People can fool polygraphs. Other people can register stress when in fact they're, you know, in their mind, they're guilty of something minor.

Sure, if somebody makes an admission on a polygraph test, yeah, I guess that's interesting. But the best polygraph operators are, in fact, extremely keen observers of human nature and are basically psychologists. And I don't want to diss polygraph operators because they're doing their job as best they can. But even if even if the polygraph worked or were more accurate than it is, I'd say that, again, that's not an inoculation against treason, because the very next day - you could have been telling the truth and the very next day you could approach - I had something like that happen on my first tour, where I pitched a target, he turned me down. And then a week later, he brought it up and he said, 'Jim, since the last time we talked, my wife wants a divorce and I've got to accept your offer.'
So suddenly - things change in a heartbeat and things can change in a heartbeat for intelligence officers, too.

MICHAEL MORELL: And I always saw the value as what you said a couple of minutes ago; I saw the value as the admissions people make, right, and it's good polygraphers who draw that out of people.

JIM LAWLER: Absolutely. They're like a priest. I, in fact, I refer to them in another novel as like a priest and they want a confession.

MICHAEL MORELL: OK, Jim, last question on "Living Lies." A couple of weeks ago, you posted on your Facebook page the following: "I was thinking that perhaps I should send copies of my espionage novel 'Living Lies' to our negotiating team at the Iranian nuclear talks. It might even be instructional."
Was this primarily marketing for your book? Or do you think the negotiators really do have something to learn from the book? And if so, what?

JIM LAWLER: It was a bit tongue in cheek, but I honestly think that, since my book involves the nuclear negotiations, it certainly points out the value of having sources on the other side and the fact that, President Reagan's old mantra of 'Trust but verify' - you need to have some way, and it's not just the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, that's going to give us that because, if they cheated, if they decided to have a small, very small covert program somewhere and yet make concessions to us as if they were being straightforward -- I just.
You know, I was a supporter, by the way, of the JCPOA, the agreement that we ultimately left in the Trump administration. I was a grudging supporter for it because I believe firmly in Churchill's dictum that 'It's better to jaw jaw than war war.'

But I am very concerned. What if they cheat? And I think we've got to have clandestine sources who can report and whether they're carrying out covert activities that are undetectable by the IAEA.

Now at the same time, I don't think we should push the Iranians into a corner, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, when they see no alternative to a weapons program.

So the nightmare scenario would be if they hit a program or purchased fissile material on the black market and then we relieve sanctions thinking they're in compliance. But you know, the Iranians are not idiots. These people were inventing entire fields of mathematics when a lot of our ancestors were still painting our faces blue and living in caves. So these people are very sophisticated.

They're very sophisticated negotiators. I mean, they're excellent at this. And if there is a way that we could reach a meeting of minds, giving them the incentives to not have a program, then I think that would be commendable. But you have to admit, if we were Iranians, you'd have to say, 'Gosh, we live in a tough neighborhood.'

MICHAEL MORELL: Yeah, I understand. I understand their interest in a weapon. I, from their security perspective, I get it.

Jim, let me ask you one more question. You have a second book and a third book. Tell us about those and tell us where you are in the publication process.

JIM LAWLER: Well, the next book is called, "In the Twinkling of an Eye." It will be published in January in e-book form and in hard copy, probably in March. And it involves a Ukrainian boy. His father is a fireman killed at Chernobyl, being very courageous, and the young man loses one of his eyes due to cataracts, which are caused by the radiation from the Chernobyl and then an infection.

Here he is a teenager and he's got a glass eye. Well, we all remember how how self=conscious we were about our looks when we were teenagers. And so that's a very devastating thing for him. His dad was a hero, and here he's a child of a hero. And he has also inherited a certain genetic problem, which he's passed on to his daughter, who's now got leukemia. And he gets seduced into joining a Russian genetics institute, a brand new, highly funded institute, and he finds out, gradually, that it's actually run by the Russian intelligence service, which is developing an advanced genetic bioweapon for assassinations and terror.

And then running parallel to this is a North Korean girl who escapes to South Korea via a tunnel under the Demilitarized Zone. Her father had been a military officer, and she ultimately is brought to the United States, gains her citizenship and becomes a an FBI special agent especially devoted to battling weapons of mass destruction. She's actually based on a female friend of mine, Dalray Summers (PH), who is a ethnic female Korean special agent, one of the most effective special agents I've ever met.

And so anyways, she recruits the young Russian scientist to serve as a source on this very covert bioweapons program, and they basically remove his false glass eye and they put in a glass eye which has artificial intelligence in it, where everything he looks at is basically recorded. And then he can transmit that back to the United States. So it's the perfect spy device; you don't need a camera. He just looks at things and records both audio and visual.

MICHAEL MORELL: That's fantastic. The book is, "Living Lies: A novel of the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program." The author is Jim Lawler. Jim, thank you so much for joining us today.

JIM LAWLER: Thank you, Michael.