Charles McCarry (June 14, 1930 – February 26, 2019)[1] was an American writer, primarily of spy fiction, and a former undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency.
[1] McCarry believed that "the best novels are about ordinary things: love, betrayal, death, trust, loneliness, marriage, fatherhood.
And, as might be expected, when I have been weak enough to use something that really happened as an episode in a novel, it is that piece of scrap, buried in a landfill of the imaginary, readers invariably refuse to believe.
[3] Ten of McCarry's novels involve the life story of a fictional character named Paul Christopher, who grew up in pre-Nazi Germany, and later served in the Marines and became an operative for a U.S. government entity known as "the Outfit", meant to represent the Central Intelligence Agency.
[14] The New Republic magazine called him "poet laureate of the CIA";[15] and Otto Penzler described him as "the greatest espionage writer that America has ever produced.