Interview Only w/ Daniel Silva - A Spy Novelist's Threat Assessment of the Real World

Interview Only w/ Daniel Silva - A Spy Novelist's Threat Assessment of the Real World

From The Chuck ToddCast by iHeartPodcasts

July 20, 2026 · 1h 8m

About this episode

Daniel Silva discusses the intersection of spy fiction and real-world threats, focusing on drones and American intelligence.

Bestselling novelist Daniel Silva — creator of the Gabriel Allon series — joins the Chuck Toddcast for a conversation that starts with the craft of spy fiction and quickly becomes something closer to a threat assessment. Silva's newest plot turns on drones, and he's blunt that this isn't speculative: he believes it's a matter of time before a drone carries out an assassination or a mass-casualty attack. He talks about the strange responsibility of writing a fictional event that could plausibly happen next month, why he deliberately withholds visual detail so readers build the scene themselves, and what he learned reporting out how modern kidnappings and ransom negotiations actually work. The darker current running underneath is his read on American intelligence: the FBI is no longer the same place, the U.S. is jettisoning allies and hollowing out its agencies, and Silva poses the question a novelist is uniquely positioned to ask — if you're the GRU right now, where would you most want an asset placed? He notes that the best assets often don't know they're assets, that NATO held a crisis meeting about Trump, and that this is precisely the moment to be putting the…

People in this episode

Host: Chuck Todd

Guest: Daniel Silva

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: FBI, NATO, GRU

Books & works: Gabriel Allon series

Places: Israel, U.S., Ukraine

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