Chapter One
Mexico 1998
Mom calls. Dad’s in the hospital, on oxygen. It’s his heart. I fly down.
They live in Mexico in a big adobe house with cool tile floors and high
ceilings. Servants move quietly through the rooms. Mom greets me at the
door, telling me through tears that she found him last night flopped
across the bed with his legs hanging off the edge. He lay there for an
hour before he started calling her, then he apologized for bothering her.
We both smile because it’s just so Dad – he’s always so polite, so
maddeningly self-denying. Sometimes Mom cries out: “Don’t ask me what I
want! Just tell me what you want!”
I go into his room. With his dentures out and his head laid back on the
pillow, he’s like a cartoon of an old codger, lips sucked over his gums
and grizzled chin jutting out. When he sees me, his face brightens.
In his pajama pocket he wears a handkerchief, neatly folded.
A few minutes later he gets up to go to the bathroom. I’m used to seeing
him hobble around the house. He’s been juggling congestive heart failure,
osteoporosis, cirrhosis, and about half a dozen other major illnesses for
almost a decade. But now the nurse takes one elbow and I take the other
and he leans over so far he’s actually hanging by his arms, bent in half
with his chest nearly parallel to the floor. He goes three steps and
pauses, rests against the bureau, then takes five more steps and rests
again. Glancing sideways I see gray in his cheeks, a whitish gray, like
dirty marble.
He makes us wait outside the bathroom. He won’t be helped in there. So we
stand in the hall and when the toilet flushes I open the door and see him
shuffle to the sink. He leans down with his elbows against the yellow
tiles and washes his hands. On his way out, he stops to put the toilet
seat down.
My father was a spy, a high-ranking member of the CIA, one of those
idealistic men who came out of World War II determined to save the world
from tyranny. After hunting saboteurs and Nazis during World War II, after
sending hundreds of men to death or prison camps during six years behind
Soviet lines in occupied Vienna, after manipulating the governments of
Greece and the Philippines, and the two terrible years when he helped
depose the leader of Vietnam and stored up the raw material for a lifetime
of regrets, he retired to Mexico and moved behind these ten-foot-high
walls. His bitterness was the mystery of my childhood. Eventually I became
a reporter and started trying to put his story together, but whenever I
pulled out my tape recorder for a formal interview my father would begin
by reminding me that he had taken an oath of silence. That was always the
first thing he said: “You know, son, I took an oath of silence.”
Later I started interviewing his old friends and colleagues, traveling to
Washington and writing to Europe and New Zealand. Some were helpful and
pleasant, painting pictures of a tough-minded, piano-playing spy who drank
martinis till dawn and carried a gun through the ruined cities of post-war
Europe – a man I could hardly imagine. But many of his friends resisted
me. One refused even to have a cup of coffee. “I don’t approve of what
you’re doing,” he said.
“What am I doing?”
“You’re trying to find out about your father.” Another time, I drove to
Maryland for a meeting with a group of retired spies. But after the coffee
and small talk, they started trying to discourage me. One said that my
father would be angry if he knew I was asking questions. Another broke off
in the middle of a harmless anecdote and refused to continue. The wife who
refilled my cup told me that her kids never asked a single question. “I’ve
had people ask me, ‘What was it like being married to a spy?’ I would say,
‘Oh, was I married to a spy?'”
Tonight I set up my futon on the floor of the study, close enough to hear
him if he needs help. Later he starts wheezing so hard I think he’s about
to die right now. The nurse pounds on his back until he recovers and a
minute later he starts worrying again, this time about my mother and
whether she’s adequately covered by insurance and his pension, things
we’ve gone over a million times before. He gives me advice on dealing with
the house after he dies and tips on getting his estate through the Mexican
system. I tell him not to worry, kissing his scabby forehead.
Back in the study, I crawl into my bed and take comfort in the familiar
setting. This same furniture has gone with us from the hilltop mansion in
Athens to the former secret police headquarters in Saigon: the red leather
chairs my mother bought at a garage sale in Virginia, the capiz-shell
lampshade from the Philippines, the drop-front desk and round cherry table
Mom picked up in Vienna after the war, when gorgeous old furniture was
selling for a lieder, the autographed pictures of the king and queen of
Greece waving from red leather frames embossed with raised gold crowns,
mementos of the glory years when Dad fished with the queen and squabbled
with the foreign minister and ran spies into Bulgaria and Albania.
And the books – the books most of all. Bound in red leather with his
initials pressed in gold leaf into the spine, complete sets of Aristotle
and Plato and Cicero, the essays of Montaigne and the Anatomy of
Melancholy and The Confessions of St. Augustine. There’s plenty of George
Orwell and Winston Churchill and volume after volume on communism, from
Conversations with Stalin to the collected works of Lenin to more
specialized titles like …
(Continues…)
HarperCollins
ISBN: 0-06-051035-8
Excerpted from My Father the Spy
by John H. Richardson Excerpted by permission.
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