Behind the Scenes with Joel

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to meet presidents and prime ministers, kings and crown princes—people who are either high up in the political stratosphere or closely connected with those who are.

With some of them, I’ve even been able to forge friendships. But all of them have been invaluable in helping me develop the plots to my novels and bring a high level of authenticity to my thrillers as I take readers into the inner circles of political power.

Two decades ago, for example, I was hired to serve as a consultant to Israel’s then-former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He was building a “comeback campaign team” in the fall of 2000, after being defeated for reelection by Ehud Barak in May of 1999, and he asked me to join him. The gig only lasted for a few months. It took Netanyahu nine more years to “come back”—he wasn’t reelected prime minister until March 2009. But even in this short period, I learned a great deal that later became useful to me as a novelist. I got to see the way Netanyahu worked and how he thought. I learned about what worried him and why—particularly about how he viewed the threat of radical Islam.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from working with him and his foreign policy and national security advisors was that he feared that Middle East extremists posed a grave threat not simply to Israel, but to the United States. Netanyahu believed that if U.S. leaders were not focused on that threat and not fully engaged in dealing with it, the murderous disciples of radical Islamism would soon find their way to America’s shores.

After the campaign unraveled in December 2000, and I was once again a free agent, I began thinking maybe it was time for me to get out of the real world of politics and start making things up for a living. I had always wanted to write a spy thriller, ever since I fell in love with James Bond novels and movies as a kid. But if I was really going to succeed, I would need a killer good story—with a plot that would grab hold of the reader and not let them go.

What if I wrote a thriller based on Netanyahu’s warnings? I thought. What if I took what the former prime minister had written and talked about and even testified about before Congress: Mideast terrorism coming to the United States?

From that seed of an idea grew the basis of my first thriller, The Last Jihad—what if radical Islamist terrorists hijacked a jet plane and flew a kamikaze-style attack into an American city? How might the American president respond? How might the American people respond? How far could that lead the U.S. into war in the Middle East—all the way into a war with Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power?

When The Last Jihad spent eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, Netanyahu had emerged as Israel’s foreign minister. He actually invited me to come to Israel for a week in 2003 to meet with him and do research for my next novel—The Last Days—about the last days of Yasser Arafat and what the region might look like after Arafat was gone. That novel, too, became a New York Times bestseller.

I’ve never been personally close to Netanyahu and am certainly not today. But I do keep in close touch with some of his senior staff and advisors and with many other advisors, strategists, and intelligence officials in the U.S., Israel, and throughout the Arab world.

Over time, these have become amazing sources from which I am able to draw insights into many of the threats and dangers facing the U.S., Israel, and the Middle East—and create many great thriller plots. Don’t get me wrong—no one is passing on classified information or state secrets. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo never pulled me aside and said, “Hey, Joel, I’ve got a juicy scenario for your next book, but you can’t let anyone know where you got it or I’ll be in big trouble.” Instead, as we have spent time together and talked about the world, he and others like him have given me precious insights into areas where new difficulties are brewing.

That’s all I’m going to tell you for now about my “sources and methods.” But let’s just say I’m a firm believer in using high-level HUMINT—human sources of intelligence—to help me see and understand the “worst-case scenarios” that will shape the drama in my future novels.

—Joel C. Rosenberg

For more about my novel writing, check out this interview I did with thecrewreviews.com.