Author Ava Glass: 'Working alongside spies in counter-terrorism communication was a job I had to take'

A former colleague from the publishing world had recently taken a job working for the UK government. “She was looking for somebody who could write about terrorism and not get scared, and she thought about me,” says Glass. “I felt like it was such a good pitch, I had to take it.”

Glass signed the Official Secrets Act and there, working in counter-terrorism communications for more than half a decade, was introduced to the world of British intelligence. Week one, she was befriended by a young woman “about 25, absolutely ordinary, said it was her first week as well”. The pair got chatting, ate lunch together, had a couple of coffee dates. “Then after a couple of weeks, she disappeared. Her email evaporated, her phone no longer worked.” It was months down the line before Glass discovered that the woman was actually the final part of her extensive security clearance, vetting her life and background. “I hadn’t actually made a friend at all, she was a spy…I felt like an idiot. How did I not see it?”

Glass’ time alongside spies feeds into her work as a bestselling author today. When she writes about secret agents and covert operations, she’s drawing from authentic insight into a world few can comprehend. The people she met back then continue to inspire her books, including her latest novel The Hiding Season, the first of her tales so far not to be written from the perspective of a spy. “With this book, I’m taking a look at spying from the outside, how it looks to normal people,” notes the 55-year-old, who is on a book tour in Yorkshire this week. “It takes one normal citizen’s life, one woman’s life, and looks at what happens when she gets tangled up with spies entirely by mistake.”

Glass – that’s a pseudonym by the way – says she took on her role with the government in the aftermath of the London bombings of 2005. Her remit included developing direct communications with the public including about counter-terrorism projects worked on by security and intelligence services. Though she’d meet regularly with those involved, she never knew their real names or for which agency they worked. “I feel like I spent five years negotiating with spies,” she reflects now. “(Talking to the public) was the opposite of what they wanted to do. They operate in secrecy, that’s their currency.”

“It was fascinating,” she continues. “They’d explain that if we tell the people, we are telling the terrorists. I particularly wanted to write about a counter-terrorism project underway at the time. It was huge and was about finding all the targets, any major place where we gather, and making them unattractive to terrorists. It was about making it difficult, if not impossible, to commit an act of mass murder - simple things, better security, more police, bollards and closing streets…It’s now used all over the world.”

These days, Glass’ writing explores the world of espionage, putting women at the core. The main character of her previous books was inspired by the ‘friend’ from her early days with the government. “I was fascinated by what would bring somebody to that world, how you would get the skills to work like that,” says Surrey-based Glass. “I wanted to write that life I imagined.”

Writing is all that she has ever really known, having begun her working life as a crime reporter in the US. The newspaper in Georgia that first took Glass on was one of 40 to which she speculatively applied as she left university – and she joined aged 22 with little knowledge of what to expect. On her first day, she was sent to cover an incident of a body being dragged from a local river and had to make her way down a steep muddy banking in high-heeled shoes, dodging the odd snake. “I never wore heels again – that was my first lesson,” she laughs. “That day was also when I realised I was going to have to deal with death without reacting to death.”

Her job was to cover stabbings, shootings, armed robberies and suspected homicides. “I had a scanner which monitored police radio communications – perfectly legal there,” she explains. “My job was to get to incidents as quickly as possible so I could be on the scene before the crime tape went up. That way I could see the victim and talk to witnesses before the police threw us out. It was a very intense work situation.”

Those frequent encounters with death and criminality were most likely what led to Glass being contacted about the job in counter-terrorism communications. She’d moved to London some years earlier as a writer and editor and these days is also an experienced broadcaster, a go-to expert when something is going on in the world of spies.

“We are taught through film and television that spies are particularly special, particularly beautiful, particularly suave, but I want to get away from that because that’s not the reality,” Glass says. “They are ordinary looking people, they are just like us, they are us. You have probably in your lifetime at some point met a spy...There are thousands of them. But you would never know. They would blend in perfectly…They have to, that’s the whole point.”

“The work that they do is so unbelievably important,” she adds. “It’s always knowing in advance when something bad is going to happen, figuring out a way that the bad thing doesn’t happen then moving on to the next bad thing. That's what they do all day long. It’s the hardest job I can think of. I have great admiration for them.”

- The Hiding Season by Ava Glass, published by Penguin Cornerstone, is out now. Glass will be at Our Big Picture in Grimsby this evening, The Pickering Book Tree tomorrow and the Wave of Nostalgia in Haworth on April 1. To book, visit avaglass.uk/events