Keith Thomson: 7 Grams of Lead

Today I welcome author Keith Thomson. Keith played semi-pro baseball in France and drew editorial cartoons for New York Newsday before becoming a writer. His novels include the New York Times Best-Selling Once a Spy and 7 Grams of Lead.

KEITH THOMSON:
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED TO ME AT THE CIA

I think I can finally talk about it. On December 13, 2008, I went to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and interviewed General Michael Hayden for The Huffington Post. One of the things Hayden told me, repeatedly, was that in his experience, journalists too often lacked discretion and were a liability. Of note, in his previous gig, director of the NSA, he ran the controversial warrantless surveillance program.

A few days later, I was walking out of a movie theater when it felt like lightning struck my left arm. Nearly floored me. In the fleshy gulley beneath the pisiform bone, the knob on the outside of the wrist, I discovered a small lump. I figured it was a sebaceous cyst, a pea-size accumulation of keratin beneath the skin; I’d had two or three before. They’re harmless. Go away in a couple of months. This one was unusually smooth, though. Oddly symmetrical too, like a Tic Tac.

I wondered: Could the lump be an eavesdropping device? For several years, I knew, CIA drones had been dropping undetectable “smart dust” particles that adhered to intelligence targets, enabling an officer halfway around the world to track them. Given ultra-miniaturization trends, was a particle that also transmitted audio all that far-fetched? And if you’re going to implant someone with such a particle—say, while he’s asleep in his DC hotel room following a interview at the CIA—the gulley beneath the pisiform bone would be a great place because people hardly ever have reason to poke around that area, much less look at it.
          
I knew an electrophysicist with experience in subminiature eavesdropping devices, but if I called him, Hayden’s people would have known I was onto their secret, and you know what that would have meant. I ended up going to an orthopedic surgeon. A few months earlier, I’d made the mistake of trying to push a squash court wall out of the way while running full speed after a ball and tore the cartilage in my left wrist. The lump in my left wrist now, the surgeon said, was an absorbable suture from the operation that hadn’t dissolved properly. Which fit the facts. Or the CIA had gotten to the surgeon.
          
The experience gave me the idea for a story: A national security reporter discovers that a subminiature electronic device is implanted in his head. He investigates, propelling him into a life-or-death struggle with the spy who’d bugged him. That idea became my new book, 7 Grams of Lead. I worked with my intelligence community sources and the electrophysicist to make everything as realistic as possible. Still 7 Grams of Lead is only fiction. I hope.