What I discovered is I don't like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.

For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.

I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

Like many of his fellow skyjackers, 49-year-old Arthur Gates Barkley was motivated by a complicated grievance against the federal government. In 1963, the World War II veteran had been fired as a truck driver for a bakery, after one of his supervisors accused him of harassment.

I believe we all want the same thing - it doesn't matter who you are or where you're living. We all want to be healthy, happy, to live in peace and prosper. That's what I connect to.

I wore the cloth of the nation for over 31 years in peace and war, from the Vietnam and Cold War eras, to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the emergence of China.

We have a sufficient political class, and the military doesn't have to get involved in high national office. The days of doing that, post-Civil War and post-World War II, are gone.