Why I'm Writing This Substack
For most of my professional life, I lived in two worlds.
By day, I was an Israeli lawyer representing the United States government in Israeli courts in civil litigation for more than three decades. That work was public, formal, and conducted in full view.
Away from the public eye, I was also retained by U.S. federal agencies to gather sensitive intelligence in more than thirty countries, often undercover. That work belonged to another world entirely — one defined by discretion, ambiguity, risk, and the understanding that the most consequential events are often the ones the public never sees.
Over time, those two lives gave me a particular way of seeing the world. They taught me how states behave under pressure, how intelligence and law intersect, how conflicts are shaped not only by what is said openly but by what is hidden, denied, or quietly set in motion behind the scenes.
That is why I am writing this Substack.
I am not here to offer hot takes. There is already far too much noise, too much certainty, and too little memory in the way global events are discussed. What I hope to offer instead is perspective: analysis shaped by decades spent inside legal battles, intelligence work, and the kind of international assignments that leave you waking up in foreign hotel rooms, trying for a moment to remember which country you are in and why.
This Substack will cover global conflicts, intelligence operations, covert influence, terrorism, lawfare, diplomatic maneuvering, and the strategic realities that often lie beneath headlines. I will write about the Middle East, great power competition, espionage, international investigations, and the hidden architecture of geopolitical events. Some posts will be tied to the news. Others will step back and explain the patterns, methods, and habits of mind that drive the world as it actually is.
I also come to this project as a novelist. Years ago, during one long and sleepless night on assignment abroad, I began writing what became my first espionage thriller. More books followed. Readers and reviewers often remarked not simply on the plots, but on the unusual realism behind them. A former chief of the Shin Bet said he knew me personally to be “a master of the tradecraft.” A former operations officer with the CIA’s clandestine operations arm and former CIA chief of station in Tehran said that I had “convinced [him] of [my] intelligence bona fides.” A top Mossad executive’s reaction was simple: “We want [the protagonist] back.” A former deputy defense minister wrote that the stories drew heavily on life experience and were “riveting.” And a former General Counsel for INTERPOL said that, though fiction, they “ring true” and “could have happened.”
Away from fiction, I also authored two legal textbooks on international law, each introduced by a former Deputy Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court. Those books have already been cited 31 times by Israeli courts, including by the Supreme Court.
I mention this not to blur the line between fiction and analysis, but to explain the vantage point from which I write. My novels were fictional. This Substack is not. But both come from the same long exposure to the pressures, contradictions, and moral gray zones of international work. When you have seen enough of how intelligence is gathered, how governments protect themselves, and how fragile order can be, you stop mistaking appearances for reality.
The current geopolitical moment makes this kind of perspective more necessary than ever. We are living through a period in which wars are no longer fought only on battlefields, but through cyber operations, influence campaigns, proxy networks, deniable attacks, economic pressure, terrorism, and disinformation. The distance between overt policy and covert action has narrowed. Intelligence failures, political illusions, and strategic self-deception can now alter the fate of nations in real time.
To understand today’s world, it is no longer enough to read official statements or follow headlines from one news cycle to the next. One must ask harder questions. What are the real interests at play? What is being concealed? Who benefits from confusion? What is the operational logic behind events that are presented as spontaneous, isolated, or inexplicable?
These are the questions I intend to pursue here.
For readers who are new to my work, here is the short version of who I am: I am an Israeli lawyer who represented the United States government in Israeli courts for 31 years, and I was retained by U.S. federal agencies to gather sensitive intelligence in more than 30 countries while operating undercover. I later wrote bestselling espionage thrillers inspired by those experiences.
On this Substack, you can expect insider analysis, historical context, and a more sober reading of the forces shaping our world. I will try to write with clarity, candor, and respect for the reader’s intelligence. I have spent too many years around matters of consequence to pretend that complexity can always be reduced to slogans.
If this interests you, I invite you to subscribe and join me here.
You can also find more about my books at carmonthrillers.com.
Welcome.
— Haggai Carmon