And that's part of the reason he's been invited speak this week in Raleigh.

But Ignatius also writes spy thrillers, books that are highly regarded for their authenticity by people who work in the real-world intelligence community.

"The journalist part of me tries to get it right, and not make up too much crazy stuff," he said during a recent phone interview.

Ignatius will deliver the keynote address Friday at the annual Raleigh Spy Conference, where authors, journalists and former intelligence agents will gather to talk shop.

Ignatius's fiction journey began when he worked as a correspondent in Beirut in the early 1980s. While there, he stumbled "into the middle of some of the most sensitive operations the U.S. was conducting."

Ignatius spent two years working on a story for The Wall Street Journal that detailed how the CIA. had been secretly working with Yasser Arafat's chief of intelligence. Later, he used that reporting as the basis for his first novel, "Agents of Innocence." Five more books have followed .

As a novelist, Ignatius can do things that are difficult for journalists to do. He can get under the skin of the spy world, and examine what he calls the "broader intrigues" of the Middle East.

The theme of all of his books set in the Middle East is that Americans don't know enough about it to do the things the government wants to do there. Iraq is the leading example, he said.

Ignatius, 57, grew up in Washington, with neighbors who worked for the CIA. He joked that if he threw a rock in any direction, it would've landed in the yard of someone who worked for the agency. "It was this sort of exotic, stylish and pervasive part of Washington that I knew as a kid," he said.

He credits that experience for his early curiosity of espionage. It has served him well over the years.

His most recent novel, "Body of Lies," is being made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.