[5] He authored seven books, including Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South (2015); Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force – the NYPD (2009), and a memoir, Summer of Deliverance (1998), about his father, the poet/novelist James Dickey.

[4] Dickey's career as a foreign correspondent began when he was named Mexico and Central America Bureau Chief for The Washington Post in 1980 after he had spent six years in various editing and writing positions at the paper.

Over the following three decades for The Washington Post and then for Newsweek, he covered wars in Central America and the Middle East, with occasional forays into Africa and the Balkans.

From his experiences in the field he produced the non-fiction books of reportage, With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua (1986) and Expats: Travels in Arabia from Tripoli to Tehran (1990), as well as two novels, Innocent Blood (1997) and its sequel, The Sleeper (2004).

[citation needed] Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions optioned Securing the City in the fall of 2009, to develop into a television series.