Interview with The Times about working with spies

So in a previous life — even before I started working with spies — I was a crime reporter for a local newspaper. I loved print journalism. I still love print journalism. It’s taken a battering over the past decade, but it remains, in my opinion, the best place to get your news, and I will always be a journalist at hear, sniffing out the best story. Which is why I am so OVERWHELMED that today, I have a DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD in The Times. The actual Times. THE TIMES OF FREAKIN’ LONDON, you guys. I wish I could go back to my young, eager, slightly dishevelled crime reporter self and tell her that this would happen one day, because she would lose her MIND.

Anyway, in it I talk about my other previous life, the one that inspired my new paperback, THE CHASE: working in counterterrorism communications at MI5 and MI6. It was an incredible time of my life and while there are tons of great stories I’ll never be able to tell (that darn official secrets act!), I did let The Times in on a few little secrets in this article. Like the girl from “the legal section” who turned out to be a spy doing my background check. Or the suspicious powder spilling out from a package that ended up being something significantly more prosaic.

If that’s got your attention, you can read the full article in today’s Times, or on their website. Do let me know what you think. I promise it won’t get back to anyone; after all, I’m not working with spies any more.

…Or am I?