Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  The summer of 1966, the summer between my sixth- and seventh-grade years, the bridge summer between childhood and the whirlwind of adolescence—had seemed the same as any other. I went shopping with Candy in the centrum, trailing behind her. The shops were full of Day-Glo colors: football sweaters with fluorescent stripes on the arms; ribbed, sleeveless turtlenecks in chartreuse and shocking pink; bright-colored bikinis draped with fishnet; and terry-cloth, miniskirted beach dresses. The streets were teeming with Dutch teenagers traipsing in all the latest hip rags, but to me, Candy—in her flippy, American miniskirts from Montgomery Ward—was far cooler than anyone.

  When I was stuck at home not shopping, I ironed my thick hair, trying to make it more flaxen like Candy’s, or—chucking my striving for a while—wandered with Andy and Gracie through the park. When she could break off from her Dutch-to-English translations for the embassy, my mother took us to the beach at Wassenaar to swim in the calmed-down North Sea and fling jellyfish at each other among the Dutch, flung-splayed on beach towels, who were gulping the sun like Arctic dwellers. This was all very normal for me—an average, lazy, 1960s childhood summer.

  And it seemed that way for my father. He went to work as usual, and came home at the regular time, so far as I could tell. Of course, I was too self-absorbed to even notice a scrap of tension in my father—but for him, this was a summer of raging heat and high tension in his small corner of the Cold War. While I was worrying about my tan, the Chinese were feeling humiliated about not being able to protect the North Vietnamese from our bombings, which we were steadily ratcheting up, and my father was playing a perilous, high-stakes game with the Communist Chinese—a game with tragic consequences.

  It was not until 2006, at a Washington Christmas party, that, by chance, while talking to a veteran New York Times reporter, I came across the story—an episode this newsman, Edward Cowan, recorded as a contributor to the 1967 book The Espionage Establishment. Cowan begins the story in this way:

  Prins Mauritslaan is a street of drab row houses in The Hague, about seven minutes by car from the center of town. Number 17 is a three-story yellow brick house on the corner. On the afternoon of July 16, a neighbor observed a man lying on the sidewalk in front of No. 17, moaning in pain. He telephoned the police but by the time they arrived the sidewalk was clear. The injured man, forty-two-year-old Hsu Tzu-tsai, had been carried into the house, which served as the rented residence of the third secretary of Communist China’s diplomatic mission. Hsu was a houseguest, together with eight other Chinese delegates to the Nineteenth Annual Assembly of the International Institute of Welding, which was concluding its meeting that day in nearby Delft.

  At first the occupants of No. 17 refused to let the police enter, but after some discussion one officer and an ambulance attendant were admitted. Hsu was put into the ambulance, and accompanied by two Chinese, was driven to the Red Cross Hospital, a minute or two away. He was examined and x-rayed, the pictures showing a fractured skull, broken ribs and a spinal injury.

  Cowan’s account went on to describe the following unfolding events: While Mr. Hsu was being evaluated, a sedan full of Chinese pulled up at the hospital. During the time two of the Chinese spoke with the attending doctor and a pair of Dutch detectives, to request Hsu’s release—a request they refused, due to the seriousness of the man’s injuries—the other visiting Chinese hoisted Hsu onto a stretcher and absconded with him to the home of the Chinese chargé d’affaires.

  The Dutch Foreign Ministry protested Hsu’s abduction as a violation of law, and insisted that the injured man be returned to the hospital, but the Chinese refused. Finally, on July 18, the charge d’affaires, claiming that the Chinese had wanted evaluation but not treatment from the hospital, informed the ministry that Hsu had died in his office during the afternoon of July 17. Immediately, the chargé was declared persona non grata and asked to leave the country within twenty-four hours.

  The eight other technicians, who had moved along with Hsu, were now placed under guard in the home of the banished chargé d’affaires. In a retaliatory move, Communist China abducted the Dutch chargé d’affaires in Peking and held him hostage, declaring he would not be released until the technicians were set free.

  The New China News Agency version of Hsu’s death—quoted by Cowan—was that he, along with other Chinese delegates to the Welding Assembly had been hassled at the meeting by American government officials. “Secret U.S. agents, with the connivance of the Dutch government, used every sordid means to induce, illegally and repeatedly, members of the Chinese delegation to desert and betray their own country. . . . Hsu, incited by U.S. agents, jumped down from the building where he was lodged, in an attempt to run away, and injured himself.”

  A neighbor had noticed an open third-floor window at the time Hsu was lying in pain on the sidewalk—and also noticed that it was closed soon thereafter. The Dutch surmised that Hsu might have jumped or fallen in an attempt to defect—it would theoretically have been possible to have climbed onto the roof and from there to have escaped via the roofs of other houses—or been pushed after being accused of wanting to. When, at Dutch police insistence, Hsu’s body was autopsied, the medical examiner determined that Hsu had fallen “from a considerable height.”

  For the next five months, the remaining eight technicians, holed up in the chargé d’affaires’ house, refused to budge from the building or to speak to Dutch authorities. For this period, the Chinese were guarded twenty-four hours a day by a five-person police force, and surrounded by reporters and TV cameras as well as curious tourists and guitar-strumming young people planted along the street.

  Finally, on December 29 a compromise was reached. The Chinese permitted Dutch foreign and justice ministry officials to speak with the technicians for an hour and a half—long enough to permit the Dutch to save face but not long enough to allow intensive questioning of the men. As the technicians left the country, the Chinese diplomatic office reiterated its earlier claim, as Cowan writes, “that Hsu had been approached by American agents. A Yugoslav propaganda broadcast said they were CIA men.”

  During this period, Cowan reported, the Communist Chinese emphasis in its European missions was on counterespionage and prevention of defection. I know, as my father later revealed, that defections were his bailiwick while serving in The Hague. I also know that his portfolio included work as a liaison with the Dutch intelligence. When I asked my mother about the episode, she confirmed that he had been involved.

  My father adored Europe, and he thoroughly enjoyed his work with Meneer Wandersee and his other Dutch contacts, but sometimes he had a turbulent look and a hesitancy. Like a hidden-away part of him felt it was dangerous for him to get near people, like he, himself, was a kind of infection. In later years, once I’d learned of the Chinese defector’s death, it would serve as an explanation for my girlhood half-sensed intuitions.

  In the seventh grade, about the time of the dismaying seventh-grade dance, my father hoisted the globe over to the dining table with one arm and updated us on world events. “The world is in a fever,” he said.

  “Back in August, Mao Tse-tung, China’s leader, announced a new ‘Cultural Revolution,’” my father said. “This is a crusade to wipe out what Mao and his people call ‘the four olds’: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. Specially trained recruits called Red Guards are now capturing good Chinese people, like thinkers and teachers, who Mao thinks have different ideas, or who are rich, and making them work like slaves on farms far away from their families.

  “On the one hand, the Chinese are forcing their people to do things they don’t want to do—and our government wants to take action to stop these dictatorial aspects of Chinese Communism. On the other hand, the Communists are trying to equalize life for all people in their country. This is a noble ideal. . . .

  “The Chinese are trying to revolutionize their country to improve the lot of their citizens,” he said. “This is not such a unique idea. Our Founding Fathers believe
d revolution was permissible in a democracy, when the system needed righting, when we needed to get back on track. The Black Power movement in the States is calling for revolution, for instance. . . . What’s truly great about America is that we can have different opinions and change tacks, and no one kills each other or gets put in jail, like in Red China.”

  When my father told us these things, it was like a cool astringent washed over my face, my fevers cooled, and my world of American boys and girls at The American School of The Hague faded away—while at the same time the outside world suddenly expanded. For a few minutes I could see, in my mind, Chinese and Vietnamese children crying for their mothers and fathers. The raggedy Taiwanese girl flickered into my mind and I turned, for a moment, into my bold Columbus self.

  After work one day, my father looked upset. “What do you have to do to get a promotion in that place?”

  “You know what everyone says,” my mother said. “Out of sight, out of mind. You’ve got to be in Washington, talking to all the right people, like Terry does.”

  “You’re right about ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ But I refuse to flatter people I have no respect for.”

  “Well, you and I both know that’s how you get ahead.” Then my mother went and got a cigarette—she’d been smoking a lot lately.

  My father believed other people would honor honesty. My mother saw things differently. She ranted over and over again to my father, “Charlie Taber, you’re too good for this world. You’re just not realistic; you’re too trusting and too honest. There are a lot of son of a guns on this planet. You’ve got to be careful.”

  My mother said, “It is necessary to tell a little white lie sometimes, for your own good.” “Always put your best foot forward,” she said. “Don’t air your dirty laundry in public,” and “Guard your backside.” As I looked at it, I had two mothers. The mother on the telephone who seemed cheery and told people “Things are grand,” and the one who stood sentry at our door, like a fierce Chinese temple dog.

  In the end, my father’s scrupulous honesty would hurt him—my mother would be right—but to me, at twelve years old, his beliefs about honesty sounded clean, noble, correct. I didn’t know, at this point, about my father’s multiple selves. It was strange and puzzling: my mother believed in secrets. My father, on the other hand— the one who had real secrets to keep because of his “diplomatic” work—didn’t believe in secrets. The truth was, he was becoming increasingly repelled by them.

  It was merely a requirement that duty officers wear guns, but all the same, there were tensions in the air. The Dutch were increasingly vehement in their protests against American actions in Vietnam and the embassy was a target. And at home, my father was tense. Work had been stressful of late—he had been meeting a lot with Meneer Wandersee about the Chinese—and now there was the question of his next assignment.

  We were due to return to Washington at the end of the next school year. Just as Washington thought my father needed to get out of the Far East division to sample another part of the world, now—after close to five years—he needed to leave Holland to prevent the danger of “going native,” of identifying too much with the country he was in. (This would puzzle me all through my childhood: My father was supposed to deeply understand every country he was sent to—but not to the point that he absorbed it, or sympathized with its concerns. To be American, this directive seemed to say, was to only care for the needs of people in one’s own country.)

  My parents would have loved to stay on in Holland, but my father had to mind his career, and play his cards in such a way that he could put off the inevitable assignment to Vietnam until his children were in college. This meant a return to Washington now. So my father was headed back to the China Desk at Headquarters.

  “I don’t know if I can stand being in Smith’s shop again,” he was telling my mother, standing in the kitchen, holding his last-minute cup of black coffee in his hand.

  “That self-serving clique,” my mother said this early morning, smoking, frowsy in her frayed yukata. “Just mind your Ps and Qs, Charles. I’ll have Cherry over for coffee.” Cherry was Mrs. Smith. “We can handle it. You can do anything for a year.”

  But my father’s face didn’t alter. His forehead was still ridged and his eyes still squinting with whatever was troubling him.

  My mother said to me, when my father wasn’t there, “Your father would be a lot better off at his work if he were less trusting.” As she said it, her voice seemed to be smothering frustration. She seemed to be smoldering—about Mr. Smith and about Pop’s situation, but also about Pop’s job, and Pop.

  Only years from now would I contemplate the toll that my father’s work must have taken on my mother. We were all sympathetic to my father’s fatigue and the unceasing demands of his job, while we took my mother’s strength for granted. The tensions for CIA wives were enormous—and completely unacknowledged.

  We were in Heidelberg, a place of the darkest rain yet. It was January and the sky was black all day—now it was night and the sky was exactly the same. Today we’d visited the Heidelberg castle, a gloomy stone fortress on a high hill, in rain that descended in pencil lead sheets—and it was still pouring outside the window.

  We were staying in a U.S. Army billet. There were American hotels all over Germany, left over from post-World War II operations, to provide R&R to American soldiers and embassy people. They had snack bars and mess halls where you could get scalloped potatoes, ham, biscuits, and ice cream sundaes. We had cheeseburgers and strawberry milkshakes in the mess with the military families, and then went up to the little room with khaki green blankets on the beds. It was the first warm place we’d been in all day. My mother immediately took a hot bath. My father said he wanted to see a film at the officers’ club. My mother wanted to stay in—“It’s too dreary,” she said. “You go ahead.”

  We all laid around on the beds with the curtains closed against the rain, watching the droning German TV. After lazing around bored for what felt like ages, Andy and I were in bed and about to turn out the light when the door blew open.

  My father was suddenly standing there, his coat sopping, water dripping off his tweed cap, his glasses fogged, with an enchanted look on his face. It was as if he were lit by warm, Italian sunshine.

  He said to my mother, “The film was excellent. Very good—true to life!” He looked calm—like he had had a deep, confirming pleasure. “The film I saw,” he explained to us kids, “is called The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. It’s about a spy who sneaks into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie and does a very brave thing.” He said this like it was a wondrous secret, and also like it was something deeply familiar to him.

  Somehow the room seemed pregnant. It was like the movie, and my father’s mood after it—the summer sunshine and the sense of moment that filled the little hotel room with the rain charging down outside in the black night—was a clue. But I didn’t even know there was a mystery to be solved.

  The night was black. The castle out there, cold stone in the rain on slippery, leafy hills—standing in the gloom and mystery.

  My mother patted my father’s shoulder in the front hall, and he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in an hour.” He was going to meet a man somewhere. Just before he stepped out the door, he reached his hand down into his satchel and then tucked what looked like a packet of cigarettes into the inside pocket of his raincoat—but my father didn’t smoke. As soon as he took one stride from the door, he disappeared into mist. (Later, I would picture my father and a Chinese man huddled over a Formica table in a fogged-up Scheveningen koffiehuis, with the smell of the sea whirling and the wind slamming through the panes, or on the soggy bank of a canal, exchanging cigarette packets, and my father patting the slender Chinese man on the back reassuringly as he turned to leave.)

  Another clue: insinuation in the voices of some of my parents’ embassy and business friends.

  A man from Shell said to my father at cocktails one evening when I was gree
ting the guests, “Sure you don’t work for some other outfit?” and my father chuckled breezily and said, “Oh sure, Dave.”

  And Mrs. Grant, the wife of another Foreign Service officer, always said, “Oh how’s Charlie, the political attaché?” with a knowing look and a little sneer, when she greeted my mother, and my mother always laughed and pretended she didn’t hear it, and then said afterward, “That idiot Mary,” and my father laughed.

  “It doesn’t matter, Lois. She doesn’t really know, or she wouldn’t act like that,” he said. And I could hear, in my father’s voice, a little enjoyment of Mrs. Grant’s uncertainty. (Years hence, I’d learn that this questioning of certain embassy officers by Foreign Service people, this sort of edgy, knowing-but-not-knowing questioning and denial, is a well-scripted act that takes place in every embassy in the world.)

  Early winter, we were at a meeting about the eighth-grade class trip. Mr. Leonard, the San Francisco bohemian, was at the head of the room. He had proposed that our class go to Prague, in Czechoslovakia, a Communist country. He was so excited about the idea, he was bobbing up and down from his toes. He said he thought it would be fascinating and good for us American children to cross the Iron Curtain. There was buzzing in the room as the parents all discussed the trip.

  At the end of the meeting, Mr. Leonard came up to say hello, and asked what we thought of going to Prague. My father said, “I’ll have to check on whether Sara can go. The embassy may not permit an embassy child to go to Prague.”

  “But an embassy girl went to the Eastern Bloc last year,” Mr. Leonard said.

  My father said, “Yes, I know, but things may have changed.”

  Mr. Leonard said, “Hmm.” A look almost like annoyance flashed across Mr. Leonard’s face then—a look like he doubted what my father was saying and also knew more than my father thought he did. My father was nice, and he had an important job. I didn’t know why Mr. Leonard acted this way around him.