Jason Matthews, the retired CIA officer and bestselling author of the Red Sparrow trilogy, died on April 28 following a prolonged battle with a rare neurodegenerative disease called corticobasal degeneration. He was 69. Prior to publishing his debut spy thriller, Red Sparrow, in 2013, Matthews spent 33 years in the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations, where he served as an operations officer and senior manager. He specialized in counter-proliferation, denied operations, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, foreign cyber threats and operational training. He received the CIA Intelligence Medal of Merit and the CIA Career Intelligence Medal and retired from the CIA in 2010.
Colin Harrison, Matthews's editor and the v-p and editor-in-chief of Scribner, said it "appeared to be a great mystery" how a quiet CIA operations officer became a "bestselling, critically acclaimed spy novelist," but "when you learned Jason Matthews spoke six languages, had read widely for decades, was an astute observer of human behavior, and was adept at composing long classified narratives, it all made sense. His books were not only sophisticated masterpieces of plot and spy craft, but investigations into human nature, especially desire in all its forms." Matthews followed Red Sparrow up with Palace of Treason in 2015 and The Kremlin's Candidate in 2018. Red Sparrow, which was adapted into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence in 2018, is available in paperback from Scribner ($17).