In 1985 William Buckley, CIA Chief of Station in Beirut, was kidnapped and assassinated. Twenty-three years later, Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh was killed in a car bombing in Damascus. That bombing was eventually revealed to have been a CIA/Israeli Mossad operation, presumed revenge for Buckley’s death.
In Ilium, I tried to say something about war’s essential subjectivity, how a hero to one side is an assassin to another. I tried to bring the reader inside the minds of the players on all sides of a brutal, violent, very high stakes game. And, especially, inside the mind of one woman who becomes involved not for love of her country but, simply, for love.
I have thought often about the small circle of people involved in any highly classified operation and eventually developed the idea of a story about a pair of interlocked killings, not unlike those of Buckley and Mughniyeh, operations separated by several years, or even a generation. Revenge, in a forever war, can take its time.