Washington Post Columnist David Ignatius Coming to Whidbey Island Center for the Arts, 11/15

David Ignatius has spent a longtime as a journalist revealing hard truths about American foreign politics, but his novels allow him to reveal even more.

The bestselling author and Washington Post columnist will be interviewed by political journalist Robert W. Merry at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15 at Whidbey Island Center for the Arts in Langley as part of its Literary Series.

This rare interview will offer a glimpse into Ignatius's gripping new New York Times bestselling novel, "The Director," about how spies don't bother to steal information... they change it, permanently and invisibly.

Ignatius said that fact and fiction converged for him when he covered a story that left its indelible mark.

"That was a front-page story I wrote for the Wall Street in February 1983 revealing that the CIA had recruited Yasser Arafat's chief of intelligence as an American asset, and had run him off and on until he was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad in 1979," Ignatius writes on his website.

He refers to April 18, 1983, when a terrorist truck bomb destroyed the American Embassy in Beirut. By chance, a CIA officer named Robert Ames happened to be visiting the embassy on that fateful day. Ignatius had just left the embassy to go back to his hotel 30 minutes before. Ames was killed.

Ignatius continues: In the aftermath of Ames's death, the Arabs who had been working with him and his colleagues, who had deep bonds of attachment with them, needed to grieve. I was the only American left in town who really knew the story, because I'd been working on it for two years. They knew I knew it. And so they sought me out and began to tell me details about intelligence operations - the wiring diagram details that it would be impossible to publish. That's when I became a novelist. It was obvious that the only way I could share this world of fact was through fiction. Otherwise, the story was impossible to write: It was too raw, and at that time genuinely dangerous. I wrote many drafts, and the novel was eventually published by W. W. Norton in 1987 as "Agents of Innocence."

Ignatius said he had never written a novel before and he wasn't sure how to do it. He knew it couldn't be 120,000 word news story, so he engaged the help of a friend, who was both a novelist and journalist. The rest is history.

In his most recent book, "The Director," Graham Weber has been the director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents' names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads.

Weber turns to a charismatic (and unstable) young man named James Morris, who runs the Internet Operations Center. He's the CIA's in-house geek. Weber launches Morris on a mole hunt unlike anything in spy fiction-one that takes the reader into the hacker underground of Europe and America and ends up in a landscape of paranoia and betrayal.

Don't miss this interview between two of America's crack investigative journalists.

David R. Ignatius has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for more than 25 years. He is an associate editor and prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post. He also co-hosts PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues at Washingtonpost.com, with Fareed Zakaria. In addition to "The Director," other of his bestselling novels include "Body of Lies," "The Increment," and "Agents of Innocence" among others.

Author and political journalist Robert Merry spent 20 years covering Congress, the White House, economic policy, and national political campaigns. He is the author of "Taking on the World," "Sands of Empire," and most recently, "A Country of Vast Designs."

Click Here for Online Purchases. Online tickets are available until noon the day of the show. For tickets by phone, call the Box Office at 800.638.7631 or 360.221.8268. You can also buy tickets in person at the Box Office at 565 Camano Ave in Langley between 1 and 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, or two hours before any show.

Whidbey Island Center for the Arts is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization serving the community of South Whidbey Island and beyond. Founded in 1996 by Island Arts Council, WICA's mission is to inspire, nourish, and enhance the artistic, social, and economic well-being of the community.

Whidbey Island Center for the Arts | 565 Camano Avenue, Langley, WA 98260 | 360.221.8262 | www.wicaonline.org

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