THE PERSIAN

In the latest novel by former CIA analyst McCloskey, a Swedish Jewish dentist of Iranian origins who becomes a Mossad operative in Tehran faces death after his capture by the enemy.

How Kamran Esfahani became part of a covert unit responsible for kidnappings, arms smuggling, and assassinations in Iran is laid out in the confession he is forced to write over and over by his chief torturer, known only as the General. Protective of crucial secrets, the confession takes the form of a novel within the novel, covering Kam’s recruitment by Israeli intelligence officer Arik Glitzman and his training in Albania. “Steady dental or surgical hands, it turns out, are quite useful for picking locks and capturing crystal-clear photographs on a wide range of subminiature cameras,” Kam writes. But other skills are required to recruit an Iranian woman whose husband was killed by Mossad and to elude the Jew-targeting Qods Force. With its snarky tone and its conflicted protagonist’s California dreams, McCloskey’s novel is reminiscent of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015). Musing on Glitzman’s comments about assassination-assigned Israeli forces “killing to save lives,” Kam writes, “Why not fuck for chastity while you’re at it?” But the humor is swept aside by a horrific drone attack on a Mossad couple’s Jerusalem apartment and the severed head of a suicide-bombing Palestinian boy “rocket[ing]” through a salon window. Responding to Glitzman’s claim that the Israelis never put a target’s family in danger, his opposite number, Col. Ghorbani, says, “How about the thousands of Palestinian women and children you’ve bombed or shot or starved?” In probing the deep moral and practical complexities of this shadow war, McCloskey’s novel could not be more timely or unsettling, all humor aside.

A sometimes shocking, sometimes mocking look at the Israeli-Iranian conflict.