Influence, blood money, body of lies and most recently, the quantum spy. This is part of our 2018 special fiction addition of indepth. Host David Ignatius, whats the premise of the quantum spy. Guest the us is locked in a new Manhattan Project race to build a piece of technology that is world changing, that is the quantum computer and our principal rival in that race is china. I told you as far as simply the facts, the the quantum spy is a novel that imagines characters who involve intelligencebattles , and other secrets about this world changingtechnology. Principally its the story of my hero orest chang. An officer who is asked to penetrate the Chinese Intelligence Service and in the process learned things about himself, things about the cia, they do not how the world works that shake him to his foundation and we also see in this novel how the Chinese Intelligence Services , not so familiar to readers as five fiction. We all feel weve been in Moscow Center with carla and the russian spy world is familiar to us. The chinese not so much while the pleasure for me takes us into the world, the ministry of state security, a very secretive Chinese Intelligence Agency that is the principal antagonist of this book or the cia. Host how much of it is true . Guest i always say in the preface to my books that they exist in an imagined world, you can sometimes tell people if you take any book i write and think its a recipe for how to make a cake, youre going to end up with a mud pie because you got all sorts of things thrown in. That said, i should try to do research for every one of my novels but the quantum spy is my 10th novel. I researched it for many months. I went to the computer laboratories for Quantum Computers and in one case where one has been built. I traveled to every place mentioned in the book and looked at it and thought about it, i studied the Chinese Intelligence Service in all sorts of different ways though myanswer would be that its a novel , the story is imaginary, the characters dont exist in real life but it is drawn from real life. Its as real as i could make it be and still feel its a work of fiction. One of the conflicts is about science and whether to be open and fair and you write that science has no flags. Guest it shouldnt have flags. The problem in this area i was writing about where you have these superpowerful technologies, the reason Quantum Technology is important is if you want a quantum computer it could shred every system of encryption ever devised. It would render all your adversaries most secret messages, documents, information, your own. So it has that real purpose in the world. Host when it comes to quantum computing, is it . Guest quantum computing is coming out as fast. In my book i describe a technology that is kind of quantum computing. Its actually quantum annealing and i wont bore you with the details of the difference but its not quite quantum computing but it assembles qubits. The standard computer as units that are either zero or one , on or off and the quantum computer is made up of what are called qubits. Zero and one at the same time. They have this ambiguous state and that means that as you assemble these qubits, as you entangle them to use the phrase that technologists use, you begin to build a computer that goes in every direction simultaneously. Its vastly more powerful than any supercomputer ever built. A problem that would take thousands of years even for the most powerful supercomputers could be done in a fewseconds with a quantum computer because of the power of these qubits. So whoever get thats technology is going to have an instrument that is goingto be potentially world changing. It also could change our world and a lot of other ways. Discovering new materials, material science and even if it involves lots of computation, lots of simulation, these computers will be able to do it in an entirely different matter and thats why its so but why somebodys so excited about this. People began to say maybe its 10 years out, the most recent estimate ive heard are that its five years out. And as i mentioned, there is a firm based in vancouver that has built a quantum on the alert that has assembled 2000 cubits to do a powerful calculation in some areas so you talk to people who do technology, they get excited about this but nobody can give you a precise prediction of when its coming. You asked earlier about the classification. A lot of this Computer Research is open. Obviously our it companies, the company that changed the world, google, microsoft have proprietary limits on that there technology. They just move it out as quickly as you could but something that has so many military applications like computing , thats been going on for 20 years, an effort to take some of the most Sensitive Technology involved in both Quantum Computers and do some of that research with classification. The first way i found out a book about this was the disclosure of the nsas black ledger it was called and there was a big chunk of funding for quantum computing. My first thought was wow, theres something here and that was back in 2014. So there is a battle going on between scientists who want the most open world possible where we share information, ideas, where are labs and graduate students from china, russia, where wherever they come from. And others who say this is just too valuable to our country. They wouldnt have brought germans into los altos during the Manhattan Project, it was too dangerous. Thats one of theissues. Host thats one of the themes in the quantum spy about harris chang is that his americanism isnt western. Guest harris chang, our hero grew up in flagstaff arizona. At one point i believe red white and blue, served in the army in iraq and was recruited into the cia. It feels entirely american. He went to west point, it never occurred to him that his ethnic background would be subject to investigation and he finds in the course of the book thatboth for the chinese who tried to manipulate him using his ancestry and for some americans , in the Intelligence Community, it ends up being central to his experience, deeply upsetting for him and thats really the arc of his story is coming to realize that people see him in a way he doesnt see himself and by the end of the book, ill let readers describe becomes the quantum spy. Host has that been through in the Intelligence Community since before these or whenever, that somebodys nationality or their heritage can affect how they are viewed . Guest i think our Intelligence Community has always been anchored to use the richnessof our national fabric. The people who speak languages, who have Cultural Skills or the soviet files have russia and the ukraine, east european backgrounds. Often middle east people who speak arabic have a native fluency to their family for their experiences would go into that part of the agency of operation so its always been a cross. The danger is when people feel they are being seen in stereo typical ways as arab american and this set of things but not that. I think this is more of a problem with gender. Women, although they were given responsible roles, they were encouraged to go out and recruit spies in the cia. They felt limited, thats another theme that weaves through this novel. A woman who felt she was in a sense robbed at of an experience she might have as an Intelligence Officer and ends up having a deep rage about that. Host with a novel like this, do you start with the conclusion and work backwards . You really start i think with the idea, the theme that you want to play with. Ive always been interested in quantum theory and then looking for something to do, i love to go out and report and find information so i got interested in quantum computing and i saw the chinese were our principal rivals and that interested me. It wasnt until i could see the character, until i could see harris chang at a hotel room. I started writing this book after a trip to tampa, coming back on the plane and suddenly i understood where the ball would start rolling in a hotel room in singapore so for the writer, its the process of taking the themes, making those themes alive and the charactersunderstanding, the places those characters are going. And then to be honest, the essential thing in writing this book and every book is rewriting. The first draft in which you have done your first kind of rough sketch and then you need to go in ruthlessly and see what works and what doesnt, the passes that are wide, the characters that are fully developed and the ones that dont work. You need people who will be honest with you and say david, youve got to go back and do it again. And principally the person for me, my recent books thats been my wife eve who is the hardest person in the world to see your husband slaving away so proud hes got the first draft of and he she takes me like a puppy and i would say ive been slaving and she would think carefully and say i just dont think its there yet. I dont think the characters are believable so you go back and rewrite it and hopefully you get another honest evaluation. We, even the best writers are capable of rewriting the first draft if its not real and we need people who will tell us the things we may love in our book to do it again. So ive learned over time the value of people who will say thatto me directly. Host harris chang, tom bendel, denise ford, mike flanagan, some of the characters in the quantum spy. What are those names projecting . Those names are projecting a diverse agency, the cia is one in terms of every variable. All the women who work at the agency, i think one thing that really has changed about the cia is its not an ivy league playground. They thought basically yale was the Feeder School for the cia. Its more diverse in that way. People from every educational background, looking for the unconventional interests and backgrounds. I think there is a bluecollar side of the cia and the whitecollar side. I think the head of support in my book, an important part of the cia is not often recognized at the safehouses and on the airplanes and they send out shooters to guard the case officers, they dont do all the glamorous stuff you got to get done if youre going to conduct an intelligence operation. There the bluecollar workers and they carry themselves that way. Theyve got a chip on their shoulder, interested in people and one of the works ive done is try to explore those people. Host with those characters, they think ahead unlimited safehouses, unlimited money, unlimited resources. Is that based on real life . I think the cia doesnt suffer for resources. Comes sometimes from ideas. It suffers from us as a country in operating truly clandestinely so that people, americans are graded. There is a natural straightforwardness to the american character, i think. The cia is when American Power was strongest, had the wind at its back. Everybody around the world wanted to be americas friend. An enormously powerful economy as the engine of global prosperity. I once joked that in beirut it was hard to find a person who either wasnt a cia contact or didnt want to be seen as one because that was the crown of the realm. Today, we are much more reluctant to be seen as friends and it can get you killed today rather than a public fortune. Where we had the wind at ourback , going into a pretty strong head wind, its harder to find people who want to take those risks. When the us does find them they are not always as good as they should be out protecting them. Or sharing with the Us Government so i think that ive been writing with my tent novel, the first one was published 30 years ago. Over that time that ive seen the agency i think has lost its way a little bit. It really struggles most of all with the way the world has changed. We arent superpowerful for a while and everybody wanted to be our friend. Today, we are not superpowerful, we have stronger rivals and everybody doesnt want to be our friend. Host what ive noticed in your books is theres never necessarily a clearcut good guy, bad guy in it. Guest i think spy novels always are painted in shades of gray and moral ambiguities. Thats what intelligence work is all about. Our basic ambience of the spy novel. In mybooks , the operators who in a sense are most ruthless and effective, john vandal who is the chief of operations in my new book, the quantum spy just in terms of being a rough character at the end of the book, asked the state department to do it. Morally complicated and right people, operators like john bendel, i hope the reader will see as competent professionals. There are questions that you ask about corners, questions about harris chang, the hero of this book asks more and more deeply about this colleague. Just the wonders if they are ruthless to the point of shattering the reason that he got into the cia in the first place. Your first book, 1987 it came out, agents of innocence. Takes place in beirut and about that book you wrote, it was obvious the only way i could share this fact was through fiction, what were you referring to . Guest i had written for the wall street journal a story that was published in february 1983. More than two years, and that frontpage story said that the cia, the United States had recruited the chief of intelligence of yossi or arafat and plo, at that time the leading terrorist adversary as a cia asset. You was enormously helpful to save thousands of american lives and was fascinated in 1979 by israel. Which recruited him with good reason. As a terrorist. It had taken israel he lives so were not talking about the gray zone of intelligence, just this space that we had. A few months after i published that article on the front page, the caa officer would run this operation and had been corroborated, a direct director of the subject of a superb Nonfiction Book published two years ago called the good spy came to beirut, came to visit this guysstation. It happened that i had a meeting with the military at cachet and they let the embassy just after 1 00. On that day in april 1983. The biggest car bomb that anybody ever seen was loaded at the door of the embassy and i was in my hotel when i heard this earth shattering roar. And saw the embassy just shatter. I described it as the fleshof the building just being ripped away. Robert ames, this hero within the cia was leaving and had been killed along with every member of the cia station in beirut that they. They were all at lunch and happened to be where they dropped the bomb off and in the aftermath of that tragedy, the arabs who had been working with the us on the long lion case remembered this. Our chief of intelligence had been in Constant Contact with the cia. People whod been involved in that and knew about it needed to talk about it, needed to believe the loss of this man robert ames and because ive been working on the story for two years, i was the only american alive, a journalist in beirut who felt they could talk to people who kept coming to me and telling me things that a journalist just doesnt here, shouldnt here. And i began to accumulate this richness of information about a story whose basic outlines id already written on the front page but i thought, what on earth are you going to do with this . And the answer to me then was youre going to write a novel. I had no idea. I was a journalist at that time. For 80 years, so i sat down, wrote a first draft and the second draft, send it off to the publisher who turned down by everyone. Finally, the publisher is still my publisher, ww norton said okay, we will publish age of innocence. On the condition that you give us a Nonfiction Book. They didnt really want a novel that much either the Nonfiction Book that they thought ignatius a journalist should write, they were willing to buy the novel so thats how ages of innocence published in 1987 was although i didnt say it at the time potentially a true story from page 1 to the end. And the people who were most involved, the plo in the cia and Intelligence Agency, all over the middle east knew immediately when the book came out that it was all real. So the book began to get a sort of cachet with readers who knew and then it began to be particularly read. A piece that people would say give it out to recruits and explain this is what the business is about. Ive had over the last 30 years a dozen cia officers in various places walk up to me and say i cant tell you who i am but i want to say if you want to tell my mom and dad what i did, i say read your book. Its got the basics of what an Intelligence Officer does. Both through the story of one of the great cases that i ever read. Brilliantly executed but by a real professional in the most ambiguous terrain morally. The plo and i really was in it. That got me started and i just never stops. I taught myself how to write a novel. All those rejection slips that i got, i began to learn the craft of writing fiction and its played off of my journalism ever since, over 30 years the things that interest me and i learned about have such so much more than id like to say as a spy novelist, to really unpack the ideas, the places, the issues. I say at the end of this book i started 30 years ago when age of innocence was published. But i had to choose whether to be a journalist and im glad that i didnt. And i mean that, im glad i didnt. Can we draw any Straight Lines from your Washington PostNational Security column to your novel . You can certainly draw a Straight Line in terms of the subject matter. My column, ive written a lot about iran in my column. In iran in 2006, 2018. After the 2006 visit, i was fascinated by the uranian room thats becoming an issue of intent. And i thought this is the perfect setting for a novelist and i wrote a novel called the increments which kept in real life. But an imaginary Iranian Nuclear scientist and every one of the cia calls a virtual walking. On its website, the