Clay Stafford Interviews Cindy Dees: “You Can Write Espionage”

Cindy Dees interviewed by Clay Stafford

---

As a fan of Cindy Dees' espionage novels, I've always been drawn to their realism, pace, and relatable characters. So, when the opportunity to discuss her work arose, I eagerly seized it. A former spy, Cindy brings unique and unparalleled authenticity to her espionage novels. Her firsthand experiences in the field make her one of the best in the genre. “Cindy, let’s delve into the art of writing espionage thrillers.”

“Yay, I love those. I love a good spy thriller. Always have.”

“Tell us a little bit about your background.”

“I was a Russian and East European studies major in college. I came to that because I had studied several languages in elementary school, junior high, and high school, and I needed to take a language class at my university. I didn't want to study languages I was already familiar with, so I decided to try a new language. I randomly picked Russian because it doesn't seem to be a language many Americans study. My teacher was a spy who had gotten caught, and he had to leave the business. For lack of anything else to do, he became an instructor of Russian at a university. He could manage to get through grammar for about three-quarters of a class, and then he would get so bored he couldn't stand it anymore because he wasn't a teacher at heart. He would turn a chair around backward, sit it down in front of the class, and tell us war stories about being a spy in the Eastern Bloc. It was a fascinatingly different culture. And I just got interested. And so, hence my degree. Once I left college, I went to pilot training in the Air Force and showed up at my first base of assignment after pilot training. After pilot training, I flew a business jet that flew generals to their business meetings. One of the other pilots in my squadron was a native-born Russian speaker, and he introduced me to a program that the United States had at that time where U.S. pilots escorted, at the time, it was Soviet flights, then later became Russian flights into and out of U.S. airspace. He recruited me for the program, and I was eligible because I was both a pilot and a Russian speaker. We figured out very quickly that the Russian crews I flew with didn't think I was a pilot. I was a, you know, 23-year-old blonde, and they didn't take me terribly seriously. If I acted dumb enough and blonde enough, they would tell me anything I wanted to know. I could walk right up to them and ask them about information that they no-way-no-how should have told me, and they didn't think I would understand it, and not only did they think I didn’t have the Russian language for it, but they didn't think I had the technical understanding. I became a very effective gatherer of information. Most of my intelligence career boiled down to me walking up to Russians and going, ‘Oh! Look at all those dials! I can’t remember what they all do. How can you possibly remember all these dials and switches?’ And then they would go, ‘Oh, well, I remember all of them.’ ‘Really, what does that one do?’ And I could point at something that I knew very well to be something classified, and they would go. ‘Oh, well, it does this,’ and then, ‘What does that do?’ ‘Oh, it does that.’ And they would tell me everything I wanted to know. It was insane. And so, I laugh about how my job was to be the dumbest spy on the planet and then come home and write reports and tell people what I heard.”

“It's incredible how the pretty girl thing will work for you. Philip Marlowe found that often.”

“I don't know how pretty I was. I was just young and blonde, and they were old and grizzled, and it works. But yes.”

“You’ve started writing a nonfiction series on tropes. What are the tropes associated with the espionage thriller?”

“I would have to pull up the whole list to give you all of them.”

“But just in general.”

“The nuclear threat, the spy defects, the piece of information that is fake, like fake intelligence. In a book like Gorky Park, which is an old espionage classic, the low-level spies must save the world from the high-level politicians. The search for the mole. The double agent. I could go on and on. I mean, there will be dozens of traditional espionage-style stories.”

“And for someone such as myself who has never interacted with any Russian dignitary or anything, how would I ever go about researching to write this? Or is it even possible for me to write this realistically?”

“There are any number of terrific books written by former spies, some of which will have terrific war stories. And it depends on the time you want to write about. What's fascinating to me is what's old is new again. Right now, we're in a period of heavy Russian espionage so that you can go back to the espionage of the war stories and the ex-spies like the Seventies, the Eighties, and the early Nineties. And a lot of those stories are going to apply to today. There's then a whole other class of manuals and books that are how-tos of tradecraft, and government agencies put some of them out. Former spies themselves put some of them out. Some are put out by wannabes and aren't all that good. But if you read enough of them, you'll get a relatively good overview of what the actual tradecraft would look like. If you're reading a book by a spy, and it reads as if about 90% of the job is tedium and silent stress while nothing happens, and about 10% of it is running for your life and maybe being interrogated and having to dodge questions and fearing for your life, that's about the right percentage of it. That's probably somebody who did the job because the vast majority of the job is stressing over getting caught, not getting caught, and very tedious, very time-consuming collection of mostly useless information, mostly just trying to get to know sources trying to gain their trust, doing nothing of great value for a very long time punctuated by individual moments of a single critical piece of information coming across your feed, or getting a tidbit of information from somebody that's incredibly important, or then having some unpleasant run-in with a foreign government. So those are the people that when I read a book, and it reads like that, I'm like, ‘Okay, this person is real. I'm going to pay attention to how they described it.’”

“I don't think I'm doing a Barbara Walters or Geraldo Rivera reveal like I'm outing you here. Is there any danger in the fact that you go around saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I was a former spy’?”

“No. So there’s kind of a code, a gentleman's code in the community that people who are out of the business, they and their families are left to their old age and their retirement and, you know, whatever guilt they have for whatever bad things they might have done during their life. It's not unusual for people who are retired from the business to mention that they were in the business at some point. And yes, there are some things that I was involved with that I don't feel at liberty to talk about: individual situations or individual pieces of information I might have brought back. There might still be people in the business that might be put in danger, so sure, I stay away from that stuff. But in general, it was known that their guys would try to collect information because they had pilots on our diplomatic flights. It was a known thing that we would try to get information from them. So, it's not anybody's big secret. What would be secretive is some of the information I managed to get that I'm a bit stingy about talking about. But the fact that I was running around with Russian air crews, the Russian government knew that. That was not secret to them. In fact, and again, I won't tell you a lengthy war story, but I did have a flight where the Russians did not think the Americans had time to get pilots to the airplane. It was a very last-minute flight that was ginned up. We had about an hour's notice. It just so happened that I lived close to the airport that plane came into, and you know, my people were able to call me and say, ‘Hey, are you home today? Can you get to that airport fast and jump on that plane?’ And so, when we landed in Moscow, the Russians didn't expect there to be an American on the plane, and the KGB detained me. I was hauled over to KGB headquarters, and it was very pleasant. They generally knew about the pilots; they didn't realize I was there, and I didn't have a visa to come to Moscow because there hadn't been time to generate one. They let me call the American Embassy, and the American Embassy was going to drive somebody over to pick me up, and it was all pretty pleasant. But while we sat there—because it was rush hour—for the hour plus waiting for somebody to come pick me up, the officer minding me got bored. He'd already given me a cup of tea, and he asked me if I'd like to see my KGB file. I, of course, said yes, so I got to see my KGB file, and there was a lot of wrong information in it. There was some information in it that led to somebody inside the U.S. having some problems with the U.S. government because there was some information in the file that could have only come from one source, and that source got tracked down. It turned out to be very interesting. But, you know, they were casual about me, and again, within the business, it's understood. I think that code may be changing some. I believe that is something that has happened in the last decade. I think gentlemanly understanding is becoming less the case and becoming more violent and dangerous to be human intelligence. They call it HUMINT, which is human intelligence, human gathered intelligence. That's becoming much more dangerous, and because of that, the intelligence services rely a lot more heavily on technology now—spy satellites and listening devices and hacking computers—to get information than they would from people. The problem is people are incredibly valuable sources of intelligence. It's becoming more and more challenging to do human intelligence, but that is where you get just that ineffable: somebody has a Spidey sense that something isn't right, or somebody has a Spidey sense that something might be about to happen, or that you know, for example, right now, if there were human intelligence, if I were in the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, I would be very interested in which high-level generals inside the Russian military are acting nervous. Because just about a week ago now, the number two guy in the Russian army was abruptly arrested and charged with an $11,000 bribe. In terms of corruption in Russia, that's pennies on the dollar of what they do on a day-in and day-out basis in corruption. It was a warning shot across the bow by somebody to people inside the Russian military to stop doing something. If I were in Russia right now, I would want to know what my human sources are saying about the high-level people inside the Russian military, their thinking and feelings, and how nervous they are. And have they gone into a bunker? Have they quit talking to anybody? Who are they talking to in private? That would all be incredibly important, and the only way to gather it would be with human intelligence.”

“So, if you're sitting there drinking tea and see these inaccuracies in your dossier, do you correct them?”

“Oh, oh, no, I'm the world's best dumb blonde, like, ‘Oh, look at that! That's so cool!’ You know, give them a little giggle, and you move on. I've had a couple of situations more recently in my life since I left the military, where I had an opportunity not to do any intelligence work, but I was in a situation where I was around some security people, and I needed not to acknowledge their presence. After the situation ended, the only debrief I got was they could not believe how good I was at looking one of them right in the eye, acting as if I had no recognition of them whatsoever and had no idea they were there, and just went on, you know, with my dingbat life. I was like welcome to the dumb blonde act. I refined it over many decades.”

“For the readers, do you think someone can write a plausible espionage if they do the research?”

“Absolutely. You know I was not—well, I was chased a few times—but it was not the norm in my career to be running around making deaddrops and assassinating people because I've never killed anybody. I’ve never dropped sarin poison in somebody's coffee. I didn't do any of that, but I can certainly write about it just as a function of the widely available research materials. And yes, I have the advantage of there being a few people I could maybe pick up the phone and ask for a little bit further information, but I try not to bother those contacts with stuff that I can find out by doing my own research.”

“And there does seem to be a good bit of material going on right now in our present-day society from which you can pull things.”

“Yes, I'm a little cautious of Reddit feeds and the internet, just in general. Try to go to a primary source. I want to get a book published by somebody or an interview where I know the interviewer and who was interviewed. Occasionally, somebody will be on YouTube, someone I know is a reputable source. But honestly, the vast majority of it you can get in print. I will look for other primary sources if I find something interesting online. I may look for footnotes or citations and look those up to verify something. I try to be cautious in verifying if I hear something that doesn't sound logical or reasonable.”

“And between your experience and research methods, that’s why your espionage tales ring so true. You’ve inspired me. I might even give it a try. Do you think there is hope?”

She laughs. “I think there is hope.”

---

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

NYT and USA Today bestselling author Cindy Dees is the author of 100+ novels. A former U. S. Air Force pilot and part-time spy, she writes thrillers, military romance, and bestselling non-fiction, writing how-to series using tropes. www.cindydees.com

“Bruce Robert Coffin: Using Your Life to Write a Police Procedural”

Bruce Robert Coffin interviewed by Clay Stafford

---

Bruce Robert Coffin has been coming to Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference every year since its early days, so it’s only fitting that we feature this incredibly talented writer as our cover story. To give a little backstory, Bruce wanted to be a writer, but after going to college and not necessarily receiving the encouragement or success he had hoped for, he chose a career in law enforcement. Little did he realize he was laying the foundation for the outstanding writing career that was to follow. I had a chance to speak with Bruce from his home in Maine. “Bruce, when you were a police officer, a detective, did you even think about writing again, or did you miss writing as you went through your regular job?”

“There’s nothing fun about writing in police work or detective work. Everything is bare bones. There’s not much room for adjectives or that type of stuff. It’s just the facts, ma’am. That’s what they expect out of you. So, everything is boilerplate. It’s very boring. You’re taking statements all the time. You’re writing. If there was one similar thing, and it certainly didn’t occur to me that there would ever be a time that I would write fiction again, but it did teach me to write cohesively. Everything that we did had to make sense. You know, you do one thing before you do the next. Building timelines for putting a case together, doing interviews with witnesses, and then figuring out how they all fit together, and making a cohesive story or narrative out of that to explain to a judge, a jury, or a prosecutor. As far as story building was concerned, I think that might have been something I was learning at that point because that’s exactly how a real case gets made. I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of writing later, but I think it’s something that helped me because I think my brain works that way now. I know how cases will work, I know how cases are solved, and I know why cases stall out. I think all those things really allow me to better describe what real police work is like in my fictional novels.”

“When you retired from detective work and started writing again, how much of the police work transferred over, and how much was fiction from your head?”

“I made a deal with myself when I started that I wouldn’t write anything based on a real case. I had had enough of true crime. I had seen what the real-life cases had done to people: the survivors, the victims, the families, and I didn’t want to do anything that would cause people pain by fictionalizing something that had been part of their lives. I made a deal with myself that I would write as realistically as possible, but I would never base any books on an actual case I had worked on. And I’ve so far, knock on wood, been able to stand by that. I think the only exception would be if it were something that had a reason. Maybe the family came to me and asked me to do that or something like that. There had to be a reason for it, though. And so, when I started writing, I could draw from a well of a million experiences, things that we tamp down deep inside, and you don’t think about how that affects who I am and how I see the world. And I think in my mind, I imagined I would be making up stuff, and that would be it. There’s nothing but my imagination. There would be nothing personal about what I was writing, and it would just be fun. And like everything you delve into that you don’t actually know, I had no idea I would be diving into the real stuff, like dipping the ladle into that emotional well and pulling out chunks of things from my past. There were scenes that I wrote that emotionally moved me as I was writing them. And it’s because what I’m writing is based on something that happened in real life. And I’m crafting it to fit into the narrative of the story I’m writing. But the goal of me doing that is really to evoke emotion from the reader, which I think is the most important thing any of us can do. You want the reader to feel something. You want them to be lost in your story. And I really didn’t think that was going to happen. But it’s amazing what I dredged up and continued to dredge up as I write these fictional police procedural stories.”

“Some of the writers I talk with view writing as therapy. Did you find it cathartic coming from your previous life?”

“I did. I think that was another shock. I didn’t think any catharsis was involved in what I was doing. But like I say, when you start delving back into things that you thought you had either forgotten about or thought were long past, it really allowed me to deal with things. It allowed me to deal with things I wasn’t happy about when I left the job. The things that I wish I could unsee or un-experience. As a writer, I was able to pull from those. I think you and I have talked about this in the past. I honestly think the best writing comes from adversity. Anything difficult that the writers have gone through in life translates well to the page. And I think that’s one of those things where, if you can insert those moments into your characters’ lives, your reader can’t help but identify with them. So, I just had the luxury of having the life we all have, the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the death and the love, and all those things we have to experience. But added to that, I had thirty years of a crazy front-row seat to the world as a law enforcement officer. So, using all of that, I think, has made my stories much more realistic and maybe more entertaining because it gives the reader a glimpse inside what that world is really like.”

“So, you have this front-row seat. And then we readers read that, and we want to write that. But we haven’t had that experience. Is it even possible for us to get to that point that we could write something like that?”

“It is. And I tell people that all the time. I say you have to channel your experiences differently, I think. Like I said, we all have experiences, things that are heart-wrenching, or things that are horrifying, or whatever it is in our lives. They just don’t happen with as great a frequency as they would happen for a police officer. And we all know what it’s like to be frustrated working for a business, being part of a dysfunctional family, or whatever it is. Everybody has something. And so, I tell people to use that. Use that in your stories and try to imagine. You know, you can learn the procedure. You might not have those real-world experiences, but you can learn the procedure, especially from reading other writers who do it well. But use your own experiences. Insert that in there. You know, one of the things that I think is the easiest for people to think about is how hard it is to try and hold down a job. Like, you go to work, and you may see the most horrific murder happen, and you’re dealing with the angst that the family or witness is suffering, and you’re carrying that with you. Then you come home and try to deal with a real-world where other people don’t see that stuff. Like your spouse is worried that the dishwasher is leaking water under the kitchen floor, and that’s the worst thing that’s happened all day, right? That the house is stressed out because of that. And it’s hard to come home. It’s almost like you have to lead a split personality. It’s hard to come home and show the empathy that your spouse needs for that particular tragedy when you’re carrying all those other tragedies from the day. And you won’t share those with them because you don’t want that darkness in your house. I tell people to try to envision what that would be like and then pull from their own life the adversity they’ve experienced or seen and use that to make the story and the characters real. You can steal the procedure from good books. Get to know your local law enforcement officer, somebody who’s actually squared away and will share that information with you. Don’t get it from television necessarily. Some of TV writing is laziness. Some of it’s because they have a very short time constraint to try and get the story told. So, they take huge liberties with reality. But if you can take that stuff and try to put yourself in the shoes of the detective and use your own experiences, you can bring a detective to life.”

“You think anybody can do it?”

“I do. I do think that you have to pull from the right parts of your life. And again, as I say, if you spend enough time with somebody who’s done the job and get them to tell you, it’s not just what we do. It’s how we feel. And the feeling, I think, is what’s missing from those stories many times. If you want to tell a real gritty police detective story, you have to have feeling in that. That’s the one thing we all pretend we don’t have. You know, we keep the stone face. We go to work, do our thing, and pretend to be the counselor or the person doing the interrogation. But at the end of the day, we’re still just human beings. And we’re absorbing all these things like everybody else does. So yeah, you have to see that. Get to hear that from somebody for real, and you’ll know what will make your detective tick.”

---

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Bruce Robert Coffin is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. A retired detective sergeant, Bruce is the author of the Detective Byron Mysteries, co-author of the Turner and Mosley Files with LynDee Walker, and author of the forthcoming Detective Justice Mysteries. His short fiction has appeared in a dozen anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories, 2016. http://www.brucerobertcoffin.com/