My father was saying, “Damn him. After all these years . . . explains everything.” His voice was choked. In it was lodged a burr of anger and a shriek of hyste-ria—and a dangerous calm.
Then I heard these terrifying, hissed words: “I can’t go on prostituting myself, Lois. Working for that man, I might as well go work for the other side. . . .”
“Charlie, don’t be ridiculous.” My mother’s response was instant, harsh and afraid. “You should fight back. He’s a goddamned son of a bitch. You should . . .”
I couldn’t hear any more, except the silence of my father’s stiffening. Then a dark, hard sentence.
“That man’s beneath me, Lois.”
For years my mother had sputtered and raged—and now would continue to sputter and rage—about “that man,” that man, Mr. Smith. It wasn’t until just before my father died that I would learn the story that brought all to light—the episode that had flicked the switch in my father’s eyes from hope to despair, and a pernicious, slow, and fatal yielding.
That day in Tokyo, an officer from Langley, an emissary from Headquarters—I picture a floppy-bereted messenger dressed in Shakespearean tights and bloomers galloping up on a horse and skidding to a stop outside the embassy gates—had flown into Tokyo especially to speak with my father. In an obscure tea shop where he was sure they would have privacy—or perhaps one of the safe houses where my father met his Japanese contacts—the man informed my father of a recent investigation at Headquarters. Due to mounting complaints, there had been an inquiry into the promotion of officers in the Agency; in particular there had been a study of the progress of officers who had worked for Mr. Smith. A pattern had come to light: certain officers with excellent efficiency reports had not been given the promotions their fine records would dictate. The visiting officer, one of the investigators, had traveled across the American continent and across the Pacific Ocean to tell my father in person that his had been one of the records of note. My father ’s efficiency report, comprised of excellent evaluations in post after post, showed that, while he had been given minimal promotions, he had time and again been denied the rightful, steady, and greater advancement his work merited. The investigator had been impressed: the unfairness was blatant. He’d been determined to tell my father in person.
He then went on to open my father’s dossier and show him an evaluation, from his posting in Taipei back when I was seven, wherein my father’s boss had written, in effect, the following damning six words: “This officer should advance no further.” Those black words—doubtless resulting, as my father explained to me, from a disagreement Smith and my father had had about an operation, and about which my father’s predictions had turned out to be right—and Smith’s subsequent, repeated blockages of my father’s promotions, had indelibly altered my father’s career, and, like water subtly eroding stone, or acid attacking skin, eaten away at his spirit. How does a person stay buoyant if all his steady, bright efforts, which he knows are of high quality, are deemed inferior?
My hospitalization had been an existential turning, a jolt into another way of being. Similarly, this news from Washington shunted my father onto a new track. But while my ordeal gave me a bigger world in which to live, his delivered him a more constricted one.
A dimming spread through my father’s eyes that day, and was never cleared. He knew that, even if Smith retired soon (and he would be pink-slipped shortly), the damage had been done and there was no redress. He knew the Agency culture. Nothing would change, the Far East desk was dug in. And—it was too late to leave now. My father was trapped. He had a child entering college, and another right behind. Years of discouragement now furled into a situation where he couldn’t sink or escape; he had to swim.
The name Smith was one source of my father’s conflict. Another was Lee and all he symbolized.
When I wrote to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 to request information regarding Chigasaki, the site of my father’s first assignment, at the time of my birth, in Japan, I received the following response.
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C., 20505
7 March 2005
Reference: F-2005-00833
Dear Ms. Taber:
The office of Information and Privacy Coordinator has received your 25
February 2005 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for:
“information or records on the secret CIA
base at Chigasaki, Japan . . . from 1950-1958.”
We assigned your request the number referenced above. Please use this number when corresponding with us so that we can easily identify it. The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request. Such information—unless it has been officially acknowledged—would be classified for reasons of national security under Executive Order 12958. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of such records would also relate directly to information concerning intelligence sources and methods. The Director of Central Intelligence has the responsibility and authority to protect such information from unauthorized disclosure in accordance with Section 103 (c) (6) of the National Security Act of 1947 and Section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949. Therefore, your request is denied under FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3); an explanation of these exemptions is enclosed. . . .
The letter gave me the creeps. Reading it, I sensed I was experiencing, to a minute degree, the withholding, arbitrary, authoritarian culture of the organization to which my father had devoted his best years.
One long weekend, we went to a hotel near where we used to live when I was a baby, and where my mother and my father had once stayed before I was born. It was a famous ancient, weathered inn on the Tokaido Highway perched above a rushing stream. Our room, a large rectangular tatami room with a view across the brook and into the woods beyond, had the gorgeous hush. My father adored this place more than maybe any other in the world—it recalled a time when he and the world were young and beautiful.
I will imagine the scene taking place here. My father’s story evoked such a searing sense of his pain that where exactly it occurred is a blur in my memory.
We all took an ofuro together in the quiet, spotless, white-walled and wood-trimmed bathing room off our suite. This was the first time we had all been naked together in years. It was as if Andy and I were adults now—and we had all taken on Japanese notions of nudity.
After we were all fresh, warm, and moist, wrapped in the hotel yukatas, we sat down at the kotatsu, a low, square, quilt-covered table with a heater beneath it, for tea, brought in by a tabi -footed lady in a beautiful gold-threaded kimono. It was as though, now that his body was clean, my father wanted also to clean his mind.
Around the kotatsu, while we sipped, the Chigasaki story tumbled out.
My father started to tell us a little about his work in the hinterlands of Japan when I was born. “The whole goal of the Chigasaki operation was to train penetration agents to parachute into China.” He explained that, in Chigasaki, he and the other Americans had developed a comprehensive program to teach their pro-American Chinese recruits how to use various firearms, how to carry out demolition actions, how to engineer evasions, how to use radios and send out secret radio signals, and how to parachute into enemy territory. The plan was, once these agents were injected into China, they would set up secure bases, use guerilla tactics to recruit locals, gather military intelligence and transmit reports, and engage in sabotage of the Communist regime. As a requirement of the work, both my father and my mother had had to learn to parachute and to shoot. At some point in the operation, according to the scheme, the young Americans would join the Chinese on the Mainland.
My mother piped up, “Yes, we all had to drop onto the beach.”
For a moment, the cliff toward which this river was rushing was forgotten. Andy and I were amazed: to think of our mother parachuting! It was like a movie of America Saves the Biggest Country in the World, complete with drum rolls and John Wayne.
; “The thing is,” my father said, “the operation was foolish and wrong. We sent man after man into China and never heard from them again. Most probably, they were immediately picked up and done away with. One of these, Lee, was a close friend.” Then my father choked up and his eyes flashed the smoky-black I had witnessed since I was small.
Lee was the first of who knows how many my father had worked with and cared about, and then had to abandon, or worse—and regret forever—in the name of America.
After the visit from the emissary, my father was grimmer. He propped himself on the tenets: I won’t let him take me down. I refuse to lower myself to his level. I will not honor him with my attention. And: living well is the best revenge.
My mother was angrier—rampaging sometimes. Someone had to express the suppressed fury. Her mottoes were: That son of a gun. Charles, I wish you’d take him on. Call a spade a spade.
My father was still and always a gentleman. He cleaved to his belief in man’s essential goodness and treated people accordingly. “To understand is to forgive,” he said; he refused to let anything tamper with that.
I absorbed this maxim of my father’s and it would become a core tenet of my own creed. It dovetailed excellently with the social worker’s perspective I would take on in graduate school: that, if you learn enough about a person’s history, however troubling his behavior, you can forgive him much, or at least soften toward him. It also allowed me to forgive my parents the rice of loss on which they had raised me. Placed in the context of their histories and good intentions, weighing the benefits along with the sacrifices, it allowed me to bring into focus both sides of the Escher print of my childhood.
But my father’s laugh now struggled. The mirth had been choked and a deep weariness took up residence. Maybe the true self cannot be suppressed. Looking back, I see these eighteen years, for both my father and me, as a long war fought by our true identities—for emergence. Emergence from the aliases imposed by my father’s work, the diplomatic corps, and our culture. Perhaps there is within us all a bright-eyed, real self that doggedly elbows for a world in which it can breathe with complete freedom.
After the news, though you might not have been able to detect it easily—he was a pro at looking fine—my father constricted even more. Although my ordeal had been more dramatic, my father was the one who was emotionally squeezed to the breaking point. He was the one truly straitjacketed. Confined to living multiple lies imposed by the organization that had betrayed him and for which he had done things he regretted, he first became cynical—and then, finally, he collapsed.
One day, almost ten years from that day in Japan, just before he retired, I was with him when, recovering from a minor traffic accident, he broke down. The Japanese believe that the deepest, truest self is hidden and sacred, and cannot be spoken; the soul is so true it cannot be put into words. My father sobbed as though he would never stop. He couldn’t keep his private and public selves separate anymore.
What is success? To have towed the company line, brown-nosed the right superiors, cheered or spearheaded arrogant, expensive actions of questionable merit and morality, and thereby risen to the top—would that have been success? Unfair treatment is a bitter elixir that can turn a man into a rampager, and victimhood can be tempting. My father wanted neither. My father loved his country—he insisted that bad always traveled with good, that compromises were inherent to democracy, and that America, even with all its tangled complexity, was the best governmental bet. So, in the end, even though I wanted to reject it for what it had done to him and the world, I couldn’t cleanly and freely hate my country. To the end, my father insisted his had been a satisfying career. As always, he claimed grey.
This was how my father went on.
From Japan, during my first year in college, my parents spent a year in Washington and then my father received the inevitable assignment to Vietnam. His job in Saigon was to help manage a radio station, House Seven, which beamed deep-cover “black” propaganda to the North Vietnamese Communists, as well as those in Laos and Cambodia. The work was stimulating—and beaming slanted stories to the enemy didn’t kill anyone—but it was in Vietnam that my father’s cynicism flowered. Everyone at the embassy knew, despite Ambassador Graham Martin’s announcements, that it was just a matter of time before the Viet Cong took the south. Here was an out-in-the-open instance of successful and accurate intelligence gathering that, if heeded, might possibly have changed the course of history, but where the executive branch preferred and promoted an ideologically based false story. Vietnam was such a hoax—the fiction was so blatant, the truth so obvious—that, by this point, my father and his colleagues, drinking beer around the embassy pool, felt they were as much pawns as were the Vietnamese.
But then, at the end of the American odyssey in Vietnam, in April 1975, my father managed to take an action that was the opposite of cynical.
That spring, when it was clear that the Communist takeover was nearing, my father and two colleagues moved the entire House Seven operation—not only the Vietnamese employees but their extended families, which amounted to thirteen hundred people—to Phu Quoc Island off the south coast. From there they were situated to launch an evacuation when the embassy gave up the ghost. As it turned out, Headquarters abandoned my father and his entire group when it fled from the embassy rooftop. My father and his workmates might, in turn, have left the Vietnamese employees to fend for themselves, but they were determined not to abandon the people who had served the CIA for years to a highly uncertain and probably disastrous fate. How many victors look kindly on collaborators? For my father it was a matter of principle. At last he could take an overt, water-surface action for the good. After several attempts, he managed to convince the captain of a passing freighter to take all thirteen hundred people on board, and every last one made it to American shores. Finally my father had been able to take a clean, decisive action for the good.
For the Phu Quoc operation, my father received a medal, a “Certificate of Distinction for Outstanding Performance of Duty,” signed by William Colby, director of Central Intelligence. The medal, about which he was not permitted to speak, read, “Mr. Taber’s flexibility, imagination, determination, and demonstrated courage were in the finest traditions of the service, reflecting credit on him and the Central Intelligence Agency.” This award, however, did not brighten my father’s views of many of the Agency’s endeavors and the Vietnam debacle.
After Saigon, my father was assigned to The Farm, the CIA training center near Williamsburg, Virginia, and was then rewarded with a plum post: Bonn. Though he loved being in Europe again, it was in Bonn that he received a task from Headquarters that drove the final nail in the Agency coffin for him. Of late in Germany, there had been massive protests against U.S. nuclear policy. In response, President Reagan had delivered a showy proclamation that Eastern bloc Communists were behind the demonstrations. The assignment my father received promptly thereafter was to find evidence for Reagan’s contention. Scoffing as he set off, knowing full well that the German protests were homegrown and sincere, he was unable to find a shred of such evidence. It was yet another instance of a president making up his facts. My father was disgusted. He put in for retirement.
Even retirement from the Agency was not to be smooth sailing, however. President Reagan was enamored of secrecy, and under his watch, Agency operatives were expected to retain their cover until death. Once covert, always covert. My father could not abide this. He wanted to cast off his double life at last. He believed in his loyalty oath and would never have dreamed of divulging company secrets; he just wished to no longer have to lie about the nature of his career. The Agency would not have it. But my father wouldn’t have that. His name had been exposed on a Russian list of American operatives and he felt being honest about this one fact would harm no one with whom he’d worked. So he fought—and the Agency again fought back. He was required to see an Agency psychiatrist and attend a kind of tribunal in which the Agency sought to blame my father’
s plea on emotional problems. In the end, he won his case, but my mother said, “It was awful.” He had been stripped.
When my father got out, he was relieved, but his God-given right to self-assertion had been whittled away. He now poured himself into doing for others, into work for the untainted good. The only man in a committee of women, he lobbied Congress to gain retirement and health benefits for divorced spouses of Agency and State Department employees. He volunteered for the Democratic National Committee, at the National Archives, and in Hillary Clinton’s correspondence office. He studied Spanish. He helped my mother carry her physical therapy equipment to and from the car. While he discarded himself, he continued, as always, to nurture others, giving each person the benefit of the doubt, anointing them with goodness.
The one thing my father did for himself, because he needed to, was to write an account of his Phu Quoc odyssey. I had urged him to write a spy story based on one of his espionage missions, such as that in Chigasaki, but he had utterly no interest in that. Phu Quoc was something about which he felt good. As John Dryden wrote in 1666, “To rescue one such friend he took more pride, Than to destroy whole thousands of such foes.”
Through all the years, my father refused—no matter how many times they tried, and the Agency tried many—to let them steal the goodness or the truth. He never stopped believing what he knew to be true, never stopped loving what he loved. And he refused to simplify. He insisted on living within an Escher print, with multiple viewpoints flicking, as really the only way to ken what was real—no matter how challenging it made things.
Late in life, my father sank away. He withdrew into a deep passivity. He sat in his old green chair all day, reading the paper, until someone needed his help. He brightened when I visited and told me I was his joy, but it was dismaying. I felt he had handed me his self, a husk to blow into—something that should never have to belong to someone else. In a way, though, I’d always stood for him—from protesting the Vietnam War to falling in love with Japan. Perhaps as long as I was there, he was whole.
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