R.J. Hillhouse.

• Author: Kounalakis, Markos
• Position: THE Monthly INTERVIEW - Interview

One of the great unheralded casualties of the end of the cold war was the espionage novel. In the 1990s, the genre floundered for lack of reliable villains. The war on terror has supplied a new set of bad guys, but writers have been slow to adapt. John le Carre gamely tried his hand at a terrorism novel, Absolute Friends, in 2003, but the best parts of the book were an extended cold war flashback. Like the generals who can't stop fighting the last war, it seems that novelists can't stop writing it, either.

But popular culture eventually catches up, and this year saw perhaps the first spy thriller about what is certainly a post-September 11 phenomenon: the rise of the private contractor. R. J. Hillhouse's Outsourced inhabits a world where the CIA--le Carre's metier--is on the ropes, and the protagonists instead owe their loyalties to private firms with sinister names like Black Management. The Washington Monthly's Markos Kounalakis and Peter Laufer talked to Hillhouse about the book, and about the real-world dangers of relying on private corporations to spy for us.

WM: What's the basic plot of Outsourced?

RH: The book is about the outsourcing of intelligence and the military, and, at the same time, the turf wars between the Pentagon and the CIA. It's about a guy named Hunter Stone, who is a spy for the Pentagon. He's assigned to penetrate a private military corporation that's suspected of selling seized arms to terrorists. He's set up and targeted in the multibillion-dollar war on terror, and the only person he can trust is his ex-fiancee, Camille Black, who runs a private intelligence company herself, and unfortunately the CIA has hired her to kill him.

WM: The back flap of your book says you've got a PhD, you speak a bunch of languages, and you lecture. But what do you really do?

RH: I'm currently writing the blog "Thespywhobilledme.com," which is about the outsourcing of national security and the outsourcing of intelligence, and I'm also writing novels. In the past I've done a variety of things--including smuggling between Eastern and Western Europe back in the old communist days, money laundering, loan sharking to the Estonian mafia. Run-of-the-mill stuff like that.

WM: What's your expertise? And were these activities you've engaged in nefarious, or were you doing this in a quasilegal manner?

RH: Well, I'm pleased to say I've broken no laws in countries that still exist. My PhD is from the University of Michigan in political science, and...