Jason Matthews, CIA officer who after a career in the field wrote realistic spy novels including Red Sparrow – obituary
Matthews #Matthews
Jason Matthews, who has died in California aged 69, wrote the best-selling thriller Red Sparrow (2013) and its sequels, which drew on the author’s previous career of three decades with the CIA.
Red Sparrow, filmed in 2018 with Jennifer Lawrence in the lead role, is the story of a former ballerina, Dominika Egorova, who is trained in the arts of seduction at a school run by the Russian state. When she becomes involved with a CIA officer, she is turned and begins working as a double agent.
While critics praised Matthews’s handling of the traditional elements of the genre – sex and guns and Soviet bloc moles – they were particularly intrigued by his depiction of the day-to-day business of modern espionage, which was rendered with unusual verisimilitude.
In the first scene in the novel, the CIA officer, Nate Nash, spends 12 hours moving about Moscow to ensure he has eluded all surveillance before he meets a covert source late at night. As became clear, Matthews had extensive experience of doing the same, having pounded pavements from Istanbul to Hong Kong after joining the Agency in 1976.
Intending to become a journalist, he had found himself being interviewed – “Grey little office. Grey little man.” – by what proved to be the CIA. It was interested in his Greek descent and ability to speak the language, and he was posted under State Department cover to Athens.
There he met Suzanne Moran, who was also with the CIA. The two were married in 1979 and became one of the Agency’s few “tandem” couples, working in harness together. After scoring a significant coup by recruiting a foreign source, Matthews came to specialise in internal operations, running agents in countries where there was continuous hostile surveillance.
Although he would not affirm that he had been stationed in places such as Belgrade and Budapest, he acknowledged that he was familiar with them. He also worked in Asia and against Cuba.
Matthews and his wife would retrieve messages from dead drops and make brush passes of intelligence, the latter sometimes while pushing her children’s pram. In return, they would on occasion wake up to find overnight someone had left a cigarette stub in the ashtray of their apartment.
Once, Matthews narrowly avoided an ambush at a meet and his name was also found on a terrorist organisation’s hit list. During the Kosovo conflict of 1999 – Western spy agencies monitored the whereabouts of arms accumulated during the civil wars in Yugoslavia – the family had to leave their home in the Balkans hurriedly before it was burned down. It was their daughter’s eight birthday.
Nevertheless, Matthews pointed out that “We’re not choirboys” and had few regrets about the work he had undertaken and the untruths he had told in American interests. He subsequently became head of internal operations before working in counterproliferation, seeking to disrupt the supply of nuclear and biological matériel to states such as Iran. By then, he and his wife had told their two young daughters what they really did at work, following a trip to see the film Spy Kids.
Matthews’s last post before retirement was as head of station in Los Angeles. He had always enjoyed composing the cables describing his meetings with contacts and realised that they were in effect observations of scenes and characters.
“A lot of new thrillers are written by people who have not lived the life,” Matthews observed, “and a lot of them seem to be about a bipolar agency guy, helped by his bipolar girlfriend, trying to chase a bipolar terrorist who has a briefcase nuke and there’s 12 hours left to go.”
Although there is a long tradition – from Somerset Maugham through Ian Fleming to John le Carré – of British thriller writers with experience of espionage, Matthews was unusual in being an American who made the transition. Perhaps the only other well-known instance was Charles McCarry.
Matthews later reflected that it was probably this rarity value which prompted a bidding war between publishers for Red Sparrow. It helped, too, that the text had been passed by the CIA with few changes, Matthews asserting that all the operational techniques described were out-of-date. It won the Edgar Allan Poe award for Best First Novel and he subsequently acted as an adviser when the story was adapted for the cinema.
James Jason Matthews was born at Hartford, Connecticut, on September 17 1951. His father ran a family baking business and invented a method for quickly freezing pies. Jason studied French and Spanish at Washington and Lee University and then journalism at the University of Missouri.
He wrote two sequels to Red Sparrow, Palace of Treason (2015), which dealt with Iran’s nuclear programme – this time the CIA did make him alter a plot strand – and The Kremlin’s Candidate (2018). This featured an assassination planned by the Russian president. “I wake up every morning and I think: ‘Thank heavens for Vladimir Putin,’” quipped Matthews.
Despite technological advances, Matthews believed that there was still a vital role to be played in future by case officers in the field. “The Pentagon’s definition of intelligence is ‘What does the bridge over the next hill look like?’ But if we want to recruit a Syrian defence minister, it takes 10 years. It’s two totally different things.”
Jason Matthews enjoyed cooking – recipes bookend the chapters in Red Sparrow – and he retired to Palm Springs.
His wife and daughters survive him.
Jason Matthews, born September 17 1951, died April 28 2021
Sign up to the Front Page newsletter for free: Your essential guide to the day’s agenda from The Telegraph – direct to your inbox seven days a week.