Author: Katie Kilkenny / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
When 20th Century Fox optioned Red Sparrow in 2013, it purchased the rights to a story that deliberately avoided spy-movie tropes: Jason Matthews’ debut novel features long scenes of spies walking around cities to throw off tails, gaining new sources’ trusts and trying to turn agents into double agents in the place of fancy gadgets, car chases or fight scenes on precarious ledges.
Nevertheless, the story is arriving in theaters this year as a major $69 million-budgeted movie featuring marquee names including Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Charlotte Rampling and Jeremy Irons. Part of the story’s appeal, no doubt, is that its heroine, Dominika, is a “Sparrow,” a Russian agent trained in seducing civilians and foreign agents to elicit information (a real program that the USSR operated in the ’60s and ’70s). Another draw is that its author was once a CIA clandestine services officer himself: Matthews spent 33 years working for the CIA and was posted in the southern Mediterranean, Asia and the Caribbean. He has adapted some of those experiences into the Red Sparrow trilogy, whose last installment, The Kremlin’s Candidate, was released Feb. 12.
The resulting film is a cross between an erotic thriller and slow-burn spy procedural, showing both the daily grind of office work and only slightly more glamorous fieldwork. Matthews, who has been a critic of spy movies previously, consulted on the authenticity of the movie. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with him before its release to learn what he thought of the end product.
First of all, give us a little bit of background on yourself — how long were you in the CIA’s operations directorate?
I retired about seven years ago, after 33 years at the agency. My wife and I both were in the clandestine service, which is the part of the CIA that sends officers overseas to foreign capitals under State Department diplomatic covers to live in the country of interest. What we do, basically, I use the metaphor of we’re clandestine journalists: We look for sources of information, humans, and we develop the relationship, we convince them to give us the stories or the secrets, as it were, and we write our stories up and then we protect our sources. The CIA protects its sources by operating mostly at night, after sunset, and we use tradecraft.
“Tradecraft” is the fancy word for skulking around. In certain countries, you cannot be seen, an American diplomat cannot be seen in the company of his or her clandestine source, so we use what they call “impersonal communications,” which is you leave a letter for me in a hiding spot and I pick it up later, that’s called a “dead drop.” And there are a lot of tricks of the trade that protect the identity of the source as a CIA source.
Were you ever posted in Russia?
No, we never lived in Russia. Mostly they were European countries, so southern Mediterranean countries. We had one tour in Asia and one tour of the Caribbean. It was 10 separate tours of duty over the 33 years, and we raised two daughters overseas, and Suzanne and I worked together, we were known as a tandem couple. Many evenings I would lead surveillance, the people who were following us in one direction, and Suzanne pushing the baby carriage would go pick up the dead drop or meet the agent.
Tell me a little bit about how this book began for you and how you drew from your experience in the CIA.
After I retired, the career was so experiential and so intense, 24/7, that when you retire it’s a big life change. A favorite Hollywood trope is that a retired CIA guy gets called back into service; in real life, that rarely happens, when it’s over it’s sort of over. So I started writing the book as a fictionalized account of some of the people we knew, some of the places we lived in, some of the things we did, and it was basically almost sort of therapy, reliving our past careers. The agency demands that they check and read every manuscript that you write for publication, so all three books were passed by the publication review board at the CIA. They want to make sure you don’t inadvertently reveal sources and methods.
Anything get redacted from yours?
A line here, a word there. But I sort of had an intrinsic sense of what was really classified and what wasn’t. Many of the tradecraft techniques are so old, they were used in biblical times. We were talking about “dead drops”? The Judeans were putting down dead drops so the Romans wouldn’t find their secret messages.
When was your book first optioned and did contemporary events have anything to do with that optioning?
That first book, my debut novel, Red Sparrow, was optioned by 20th Century Fox actually even before it was published by Scribner. My literary agent in New York shopped the manuscript around and like all good agents he started a bidding war, and 20th Century Fox picked up the rights to the book.
There…
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