Entertainment, Books - Air Force Times

Spy novelist Ignatius back in operation with ‘The Increment’

Journalist/novelist David Ignatius says he loves “the tension between fact and fiction,” which explains why he continues to write newspaper columns on foreign affairs and spy novels respected by Hollywood and real-life CIA operatives.

His seventh novel, “The Increment” (Norton, $26.95), begins with an e-mail to the CIA from an Iranian nuclear scientist suggesting that his country has restarted its weapons program, which could provoke a U.S. attack.

Ignatius, 58, a Washington Post columnist who spent two weeks in Iran in 2006, made up the mysterious scientist and CIA agent Harry Pappas, who tries to sort out what’s real and what’s not.

But Ignatius says the agency’s Web site (CIA.gov) actually has a link for “virtual defectors.”

As a journalist, he likes “to get the background details right — what a place looks like and how things work. But the characters are fiction and the story is imagined, from playing with the question, ‘What if?’”

“The Increment” — the title comes from a real-life unit of British intelligence — has been optioned by movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Ignatius says he’d love to see George Clooney play Pappas, a CIA veteran who is disillusioned by the war in Iraq.

The 2008 film of Ignatius’ last novel, “Body of Lies,” about CIA operatives in the Middle East, starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.

It did better among critics than at the box office, but Ignatius says he thought it was a “terrific” although “serious” movie. He says it’s doing better among international audiences and on DVD.

It also won him respect from his daughters — ages 24, 21 and 18 — when he introduced them to DiCaprio, “which did wonders for my status in their eyes.”

He calls Iran “the most fascinating place I been to in 30 years of running around the world.” He expected a “regimented society and Muslim theocracy” but found a “surprisingly open place. It has the look of Los Angeles, with big freeways and newspapers with every shade of opinion.”

He predicts that real-world politics will pose the same dilemma as his new novel: “How much intelligence — and what it means and doesn’t mean — pushes us toward war.”

He assumes Iran is close to having material to build a nuclear bomb but is at least a year away from turning it into a weapon. He also expects a new Iranian leader after June 12 elections and says that “by extending his hand in negotiations, Obama has added to the public pressure in Iran to engage with the U.S.”

The journalist, not the novelist, says that “in a few months, Iran could look a lot different and better.”