The only arena in which he was not open was about his own emotions. These he steadfastly denied having. “No, I’m not worried,” he said about himself, his work, the world. “Everything will be fine.” Was this simply a father’s protectiveness toward his daughter? The self-soothing of a boy raised in a chaotic household? The smothering required to survive at his workplace or by the clandestine nature of his job? Or was it that this sensitive man had to crush himself to fit into a brutal world? In any case, I think he’d lost the ability to know what his feelings were. This is the effect on my father for which I would most blame the Agency: the murder of my father’s access to the full repertoire of emotions due to any human being. So often, I heard fear in my mother’s voice. “Did you hear what happened to Mr. Carson? He hid his depression, had a nervous breakdown, and lost his job.”
Are you being dishonest if you have had your emotions kicked out of you and don’t know they’re there? Believing he ought to run his life according to principles rather than feelings, my father denied any emotion that might come up. To complicate things further, he didn’t denigrate the emotions of others; he honored them. But he would have none himself. In all other realms, my father believed fiercely in seeking and cleaving to the truth. This might seem an odd position for a covert operations officer to hold, but if we accept that, no matter the means, the CIA’s goal is to find the truth, it’s not so hard. If we looked hard enough, he believed, we could find the truth, and then it was our duty to stand by it.
“Why do we need a CIA at all?” I asked my father as my mother spooned mounds of chocolate-chip ice cream into dark blue Taiwanese stoneware bowls.
“Because there are always strongman regimes up to no good in this world. The world is messy and complicated and we need to collect information on these regimes in order to protect ourselves and others,” he said. “Intelligence gathering is essential. A spy agency is necessary: a choice between evils. At its best it has a higher purpose, to stop people like Hitler. It is a kind of morality within amorality, a morality of thieves.”
Also, he said, the spread of democracy was a worthy aim, it just depended on how you went about it. As long as it was supporting good causes, that was fine—but sometimes even that got murky. It was the operational division, the part of the Agency that sought to do away with people and governments, that was of questionable merit. Some of the things the Agency did were excellent; others were beyond redemption.
He told us he believed strongly, though, that a lot of the secrecy was unnecessary and many documents marked “top secret” should be open to the public. And a lot of the brazen spy schemes were ineffective and a colossal waste of money—even though the higher-ups often loved the showy, exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff. Much of the best intelligence could be obtained by listening to people closely at parties and in private meetings.
“If you don’t believe in it all,” I asked, “why do you stay there, Pop?”
“Because it does some good, along with the bad.” Then he went on to give me the standard line I’d heard him give many people about why he stayed in government when he disliked the views of an administration. “I also stay with it because it’s a good life for Mom and you kids, because it has a good pension, and it’s a fascinating life. Learning languages, living abroad, it’s vital.”
Thirty-plus years later, burrowed into my house in Silver Spring, Maryland, with CIA men wrestling with the truth about Iraq, I would think hard about all that the lying entailed. When my father joined the CIA not long after World War II, he no doubt considered the ends justifying the means. He was lying for a good purpose: to discover the truth about untrustworthy foreign governments, to fight fascism around the world. But as the Agency overthrew Allende, blew Vietnam, and upped the arms race, his sense of the value of the enterprise, its tactics, its own honesty, and the trade-offs troubled him, and the lying became increasingly distasteful, and then unbearable.
The toll on my father was tremendous. Through the years, particularly after I left home, the dissembling, and the dark actions of the CIA, grew like a cancer within him. He grew to hate the Agency—to the point that he’d fight for his right to retire “open,” and spend his retirement eaten up by depression. But by then, hiding himself had become a habit he couldn’t break.
We sat at the table for a while after our ice cream dishes were scraped clean and my parents were drinking their instant coffee.
Andy and I said, in unison, “Tell us more, Pop.”
“It’s a messy business,” my father said. He shifted on his chair and his face turned serious. “In Chigasaki, when you were born, Sara, we were all doing some very secret work meant to undermine the Communist Chinese government. We were training Chinese to . . .”
“But Pop, what’s it like to be a spy?” Andy broke in. “How do you leave secret messages?”
“Yeah, Pop, did you ever deliver secret messages or write in invisible ink?”
“Yes, tell them about that, Charlie,” my mother said, with some sort of signal in her eyes, as if he shouldn’t say too much.
My father’s face flashed weariness. It was as though he was tucking away something he’d badly wanted to say. Then he reluctantly gathered himself up to join our mood.
“Yes, I have delivered lots of secret messages and written messages in invisible lemon juice. . . . What you do is write a note in regular ink and then write your secret message in lemon juice between the lines. When the note is heated with an iron, the lemon juice words turn brown and become legible. . . .” And then he showed us with hand motions how to make a chalk mark on a wall, and then leave a concealed message, or packet of crisp bills, in a designated spot at an airport, train station, or other public crowded places. It was just like on TV.
He was smiling his calm smile toward his children, but he told everything with that same sense of weariness. Like these weren’t the words he wanted to be saying. There was no pride or lightness in them.
My mother was more able to join our spirits. She seemed a little giddy now that the cat was out of the bag. She began telling us about their days in Hong Kong before either of us were born. “Charlie, tell them about the Star Ferry,” she said.
“Yes, well,” he said, leaning forward to put himself in storytelling mode, “when we were in Hong Kong, the Communists found out about something we had done and they threatened to throw acid in the face of the man who’d done it when he next crossed on the Star Ferry.”
“It was awful,” my mother said. “We were scared to death.”
Again my father’s tired look.
“And I used to follow Pop when he was out on a mission, going to meet someone or leave something,” my mother said. “I wasn’t going to let anyone get my husband!” When my mother talked like this, I knew how much she loved my father. Her eyes sparked and her voice lilted.
“One time . . . Remember, Charlie? . . . I was trailing your father about a block away and something went wrong. . . . Pop got up too close to where he was going and saw that something was wrong, and he gave me a signal we’d prearranged. It was the sign to get out of there as fast as I could—and then he raced off in another direction.”
“Those were exciting days—but they were frightening too.”
My father was looking lighter now. The cat was safely curled back in the bag and he had recovered his usual equilibrium. The cat would be released at last a couple of years hence, but my father still had to wait.
My mother could play the game. Later I’d recognize she could do this because she didn’t have to be around the crassness, the casual attitudes about non-American lives, the morally questionable schemes forty-plus hours a week.
When she finished, my mother said, “But you can’t tell anyone any of this.”
My father said, “Yes, I’d like you two to keep this a secret. Just keep telling people what you always have: that I work at the State Department.”
This request may seem a heavy burden to put on a child, but it was exciting to me—and se
cond nature, somehow. It was part of my duty as an American patriot. Here, on this strange night, I was not so much an antiwar protestor as a Foreign Service girl in a uniform, united to my past. I was here to serve my country—and most of all, my father.
My father’s revelation came along at a time when I needed it. It gave me a boost, a secret society to belong to (even though I knew no one else who was in it), and a secret status (that no one else was aware of), within this secret society of America—and this bolstered me.
I was easily bought, perhaps. Spying and secrecy have a unique sheen and glamour. The movieness of it helped me get through the rest of Sidwell. The dusky pearl I slipped onto a chain and over my head, like a pair of dog tags, or my father’s badge for work, restored to me my identity as someone worthy in a place where I often felt adrift. I would keep my father’s secret for another fifteen years, and even then, I would only tell my closest friends. Without knowing it, I too was in the habit of secrets. Born under an assumed name, I cleaved to the disguise.
And as a spy’s daughter, I inherited a distinct legacy: a penchant for complex and oblique truths, and a built-in, sensitive secret detector.
My father bought a special Sony Short Wave radio before leaving for Kuching—an expensive, compact radio unlike any I’d ever seen before, which I must tell no one about. Even though my father didn’t say this directly, I figured out it was for listening in on Communist Chinese radio broadcasts.
When my father flew away to Borneo my stomach felt empty and raw.
After my father left, my mother tried her best, but she was at sea. My father wasn’t there as a buffer between us.
On April 20, Nixon announced the withdrawal of 150,000 more troops by the end of the year. He said in a speech to the nation, “peace is in sight.”
“Look,” I said to Mom. I was the antiwar protestor again. “We caused Nixon to pull out more troops.”
My mother sputtered. “You think you caused Nixon to pull out? You kids!?.“ She laughed—not knowing she was thrusting her knife into the crystal teardrop of me. To her, World War II was so much more important. She’d spent her teenage years collecting aluminum for the tanks that would save the world. Her heart thumped when she thought of her war, while mine ached for the Vietnamese and for the despair our soldiers were wreaking. Her war was drums booming; mine was a piccolo.
Then, on May 4, the students at Kent State, who were protesting the bombing in Cambodia, attacked the reserve officers’ training building on campus. The Republican governor vowed to “eradicate” them and sent in the National Guard. Four students were shot dead.
At school we were staggered. At Meeting for Worship no one spoke.
Toward the end of school, taking a break, Sara and I spent our last few times together working on our tans at the pool at the hotel on Van Ness near her house. I was beginning to feel wispy, like I was half gone. Foreign Service kids have a “quick release,” and worn out from the war, I lay in the sun, trying—but failing—to capture in my darkening skin what these two years in America had meant.
In an essential sense, this Washington stay had been a moratorium for me, an in-between time—save for my engagement in the actual antiwar moratoria. Out of this bleak and stirring time, though, I was departing sturdier than I’d arrived. Pain had conferred some wisdom: I’d metamorphosed from a short-sighted teeny-bopper to a thinking teenager. I’d learned the value of quiet reflection, a legacy of my Quaker school that would stand me in good stead for years to come. And I’d learned, through trial by fire, to stand alone.
But socially, Washington had remained a way station for me, a movie set. Even though I spoke English, living in Washington had been like loving someone you could never understand, someone who could never love you back. Washington had never felt as real and alive a place as my other homes across the world. Because of my upbringing, a life that quickened the blood required living in another culture with an undecipherable language. This was an addiction I might never outgrow.
When I’d arrived from The Hague, I’d set foot into a benign place, a big PX, the best country on the planet. I was leaving a frightening, violent country, an evil menace to the world. America is just a country full of hawks, I thought, forgetting that I and all the other people at the marches were Americans too.
At school, I was devil-may-care. I’m sick of this place, I thought. There are too many snobs. I walked around quietly smug, like I had a chocolate cake all to myself: I can leave all of you. I can just turn my back and fly across an ocean. This intolerance is the luxury of the itinerant on the verge of departure. And it is easier to leave a place if you can find a way to hate it.
I loved the sight of the packed boxes. Movement was in my blood. More than Sidwell ever had, they felt like home—and signaled adventure. The thought of a new culture stirred me: Asia! I was ready to kick this bucket over.
Book 5
ORCHIDS
Kuching, East Malaysia,
1970
19
colonial
Sarawak was the smell of heat, curry, incense, and gasoline: the perfect salve.
The thrall began the moment the door of the plane swung open and I stepped out onto the hot, bright rectangle of the tarmac. It was as if the tentacles of the jungle and its scarlet-persimmon ornaments reached out and pulled me in. I was translated. America was gone.
My father had walked to the plane to meet us, and stood with open arms at the bottom of the gangplank. Tall, in a white, open-necked shirt, he squeezed all of us tight.
We walked through the moist heat toward a whitewashed building the size of an American gas station: the Kuching Airport. The heat was strong, but it was clean and lightly, florally fragrant. Just as we neared the double doors of the small terminal, five figures trailed out through the doors. Three caramel-skinned women, petite in beautiful sarongs, wisped out to Andy, Mom, and me and placed baskets of orchids in our hands. “Welcome to Kuching,” they said in bright, British-accented English.
My father had given us a rundown on Sarawak’s history before he’d left America. The British had first arrived on the island of Borneo in the early sixteenth century. In 1839, Sarawak, the northern icing on the cake of Borneo, a river-rich land of swamps and mangrove forest populated by tribes such as Ibans, Land Dyaks, and Kayans, was acquired by James Brooke, the White Rajah. Brooke suppressed the prevalent headhunting and set up a social system of small holdings rather than the more typical European-held estates established in other British-ruled territories. In addition to its tribal peoples, Sarawak’s population was made up of Malays and overseas Indians and Chinese. The Japanese occupied Sarawak for four years during World War II. Directly afterward, in 1946, it was ceded to the crown, and made a colony. Ten years later, in 1956, at the end of British rule, the Federation of Malaysia was formed. Sarawak was one of three Malaysian provinces on the island of Borneo.
In the little VIP lounge, a sweet-eyed Malay official in a crisp yellow cotton shirt shook our hands. We also met other people, including cola-haired, handsome Mr. Taylor, the American consul. A man in a sarong and white coat served, from a silver tray, glasses of orange squash and triangular curry puffs—delicious melt-in-your-mouth pastries with spicy potatoes tucked inside. As these kind people from Kuching asked me about my flight, without effort I returned to my formal, diplomatic self. It felt delicious; I could be polite again! I felt set free.
We became part of an entourage of five small cars, jammed with ourselves and our luggage, and a driver whisked us for fifteen minutes down a white-asphalted avenue cut new, wide as a jetway, through the jungle, and then into the narrower, but still spacious streets of the tiny capital of Sarawak with a population of about ten thousand people. Trees lining the streets dripped with flowers beside half-hidden British-style bungalows and cottages. I thought I might have seen a monkey in a tree. I did see chickens dashing across the road, and men and women in straw hats moseying along on bicycles, and women on foot carrying baskets of vegetables. Alon
g the way, my eyes struggled to adjust to the brightness.
Soon the cars ahead of us turned right into a drive that pushed up a green hill. The cars, including ours, stopped at the crest of the hill in front of a low, broad-roofed bungalow with a front veranda. This place reminded me of houses in which British people lived out on the plains of Kenya among lions and wildebeest, but here, instead of endless plain, there was an expanse of lawn dotted with blossoming trees and shrubs. Three slender people, a man in a checked sarong wearing a Muslim fez on his head, and two shy-looking pretty women with curly hair and flower-spattered sarongs, stood, hands clasped in front of them, lined up to greet us. They were our new cook—the man, and maids—his wife and sister, who lived at the back of the house. They beckoned us up one step into high-ceilinged, white rooms hung with broad-bladed, ivory ceiling fans. Bamboo furniture with batik-covered cushions was spaced apart in two large, airy living rooms that led, one following the other, to a formal dining room at the rear of the house, which, in turn, looked out onto a deep garden with a round, concrete fish pond. A small, rectangular building formed an “L” out one side of the back of the house. This was where the servants lived. Wings to the left and right off the second living room, the servants showed us, led to the spacious bedrooms and bathrooms.
My room was exotic, airy, and lovely—and spotless. It was beautifully decorated with objects from the surroundings. My mother had designed the room when she’d come out for a short visit in the spring. Her artistic side had emerged again—as it seemed to each time she was abroad, had household help, and was less rushed with work. Everything in the room was rattan: the tan, red, and black of Bornean basketry. A basket of orchids on the dresser, a round fan on the wall, a rattan-based lamp. She had placed a woven rattan mat over the bedspread on my high bed—to provide a cool place for napping at midday. The space had a restful purity different from the grabby mess of America.
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