I stayed at the Star Hotel in Accra, the capital, while planning my travel and stays at universities throughout Ghana. Before leaving Accra, I stopped by the American embassy to alert them to my presence in the country. Unknown to me at the time, I’d arrived at the embassy in a lull between the appointments of ambassadors: Franklin Williams, who had been on duty during the ouster of Nkrumah, was on his way out, but Thomas W. McElhiney had not been sworn in. The ranking consul general called me into his office and gave me a dressing down. This fellow told me in no uncertain terms to leave Ghana immediately.
If I did not, he said, “You’ll be declared PNG [persona non grata], and the United States government will assume no responsibility for your health or welfare.”
“I came here to visit the land where my ancestors were stolen as slaves,” I shot back. “And I’ll be damned if I let some White man tell me I have to leave Africa.” I promptly walked out of the embassy.
At the time, all of Ghana had no more than two or three IBM computers; still, the company had opened an office in Accra as early as 1960 to serve Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. Each time I walked by the IBM offices in the capital, I took some comfort that, should I need him, my father remained close by.
I received a Ghanaian name, Kojo Baako, in a traditional naming ceremony in the city of Kumasi. But I liked best visiting small villages and talking to local people. Everywhere I went, I found myself at pains to disavow the term many Ghanaians used to greet me: Oboruni, meaning “foreigner” but also “White man.” After getting past this salutation, even the poorest villagers would gather around, many holding up embossed velvet images of the Kennedys and King. They peppered me with questions about how America could call itself a civilized nation when its greatest leaders faced assassination. In return, I spoke freely and openly about Black Power, Malcolm X, and Kwame Nkrumah.
* * *
While traveling back to Accra from Kumasi, after nearly two months in Ghana, I encountered a young law student named Jimmy Adu, whom I’d met upon my arrival. Jimmy wasted no time laying out what I now faced.
“I would leave immediately,” he said. “The authorities know about your travels. They know what you’ve been talking about. You’ve been marked for arrest and detention by the CID.”
A holdover from British colonial rule, the CID (Criminal Investigations Department) is Ghana’s equivalent of the FBI. They work in plain clothes, surveilling those considered enemies of the state. In the coup d’état that overthrew Nkrumah, the CID worked with the CIA. Some CID leaders came into power with Nkrumah’s ouster. I may not have taken seriously what the consul general said, but I did not doubt a word of what I heard from Jimmy Adu. I remember walking down the red dirt road toward my hut in a village known then as Tetteh-Quarshie, and thinking, Oh, shit! I’m in trouble now. Then I burst into tears. I also remember the tug-of-war inside, mulling over whether I should run and seek refuge in the Ghanaian offices of IBM.
I got myself into this, I finally told myself. I will not seek my father’s help to get out of this situation.
On the road to Tetteh-Quarshie, I wiped away my tears, composed myself, and thought, I see this all the time on television programs like Mission: Impossible and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., where characters extract themselves from the most desperate situations. If they can do it on-screen, I can do it in real life. First, I need intelligence.
At sixteen, I decided to go up against the CID and possibly the CIA. I needed to assess my weakness, so I marched into the downtown office of Pan Am, whose return ticket I held, and simply asked to book the next flight back to the United States. As I entered the Pan Am office, I stopped to look at the IBM sign atop a building on the other side of the street. The Pan Am agent took my ticket, made a few calls, and promptly returned to tell me my ticket had been invalidated and he would be unable to arrange my flight. I snatched the ticket from his hand, racing from his office back to Tetteh-Quarshie.
One thing I’d learned from my time in Ghana was how loving, honest, and trustworthy local Ghanaians were. The other thing I’d learned is that you never let your ticket or your passport leave your side. I took them everywhere with me. I never thought once about leaving my hut door open or my belongings out, but even if I stepped away to walk the short distance to the pit toilet, I always carried my passport and my ticket with me.
When I left the pit toilet, after returning from the Pan Am office, I saw two men dressed in black suits running from my hut. My first thought was how strange to be wearing black suits in the heat and humidity of Africa. My second thought was, Oh no! When I stepped back into my hut, my belongings had been ransacked, and my wallet had been stolen. I was stranded in an African village and marked for apprehension.
Another thing I always carried with me, tucked into a back page of my passport, was the numbers of the American Express Travelers Cheques that I had purchased prior to leaving for Africa. Redeeming those cheques required another trip downtown, but all of my money had been stolen. Fortunately, American clothes were a tradable commodity in Ghana. So I simply paid a taxi driver with a pair of my blue jeans. He dropped me at the American Express office in Accra, farther down the main street from Pan Am and even closer to IBM. Once again, I felt the pull of simply giving in and seeking refuge in IBM. And once again, I couldn’t bring myself to appeal for my father’s help.
I stayed in the American Express office for hours until I finally got my cheques. I knew then that I had little time to execute a plan for my extraction. My intelligence turned up a time, on Saturdays only, when Pan Am’s airport office was open but the main office downtown was closed. I believed my ticket was still valid and that I had been told otherwise only as a ruse to draw me in for arrest by the CID.
So I concocted a plan: I would forge a letter from the State Department saying that, due to the dire security situation in the neighboring country of Nigeria (the Biafran War was underway), I needed to return at once to the United States. The only problem was finding both the stationery and a typewriter. The stationery proved easy. I decided on one of the Mailgrams, which I used to send letters back home. The typewriter was not. I had made friends with a professor at a nearby university, so I asked him if I could use his typewriter while he went to lunch. He agreed, and I forged and signed a letter from the US State Department to me.
Then I waited until Saturday and took the letter and my ticket to the Pan Am office at the airport, hoping that they had no record of my ticket’s invalidation. I timed my arrival for the half-hour period when my intel showed they could not call the main office downtown for corroboration. I also practiced being a panicked, young American who needed to get back home, a role I found it easy to get into. I wound up nearly overplaying my hand. The agent at the airport office told me to calm down, that he’d get me out on a flight leaving that afternoon. He made the arrangements, issued me a boarding pass, and told me to be back a few hours before the flight left.
I worked hard to contain my excitement as I rushed from his office back to Tetteh-Quarshie to grab the belongings that had not been stolen, and then back to the airport for my flight home. I remember sitting at an outside table, drinking a beer with another Black American who’d been traveling in the country, while we watched our Pan Am flight scream overhead and then land. I remember also checking out of customs in Ghana and being told to stay within a cordoned-off area reserved for those booked on the flight about to leave. Elation filled me. I’d made it, and it was not even that hard.
Several buses pulled up to take passengers to the plane waiting on the tarmac. As we waited in line to board the buses, I met a Black professor named Anthony Kennedy, who’d been in Ghana doing research. Still nervous, I began recounting for him what I’d gone through in the last few days. But I’d barely finished when the Pan Am agent from downtown walked into the airport. I saw him before he saw me. I pointed at the man and said to Kennedy, “That’s him.”
“Go!” Kennedy said. “And don’t stop until you’re on that plane. I
’ll run interference.” He pushed me in the direction of the tarmac, and I ran. The Pan Am agent saw me and took off in my direction. I looked back to see Kennedy step into this man’s path as though by accident. The two collided, and Kennedy held on to him for a moment, buying me some time. I hopped on a bus already rolling toward the plane and pushed my way toward the front. The agent hopped on the back and fought his way toward me. I leaped off the bus before it came to a stop and raced up a forward staircase onto the plane.
At the top of the stairs, a flight attendant smiled at me and said pleasantly, “Is everything okay?”
My body shook. My voice trembled. “I just need to get to my seat.”
She took my ticket and pointed toward the rear of the plane.
Meanwhile, the Pan Am agent watched from the tarmac as passengers came aboard. I fully expected that he’d try to drag me off the plane, but he never once walked up the steps. While I shook in my seat, Aretha sang, “You make me feel like a natural woman,” over the plane’s speakers. Through the small window, I saw the Pan Am agent standing on the tarmac, waving his clenched fist at me.
The Pan Am flight was headed to JFK, and by all rights I should have simply stayed on board. But it made a stop in Liberia, and I said to myself, I don’t know when I’ll be back to Africa, so I got off. I spent a few days relaxing in Monrovia and then went to a Pan Am office to book my flight to JFK.
“Anything wrong with this ticket?” I asked.
The agent studied it and typed a few keystrokes into his computer. He studied the ticket some more. “Nothing at all, sir.”
Over the years, I’ve heard various explanations of why that Pan Am agent would not board the plane to drag me off. Some have said Professor Kennedy was right to tell me not to stop until I was on the plane, which under international law was American, not Ghanaian, property; others have said my youth, inexperience, lack of training, and simple luck helped me outwit professional intelligence agencies. I have not told many people about what happened that summer in Ghana, out of fear they simply would not believe me. I think it took me a decade before I told my father. But that summer in Ghana became a personal touchstone. Whenever facing a difficult or trying situation, I have only to ask myself, Is it as bad as Ghana? It’s never been. In which case I say to myself, You were sixteen and you made it then. You can certainly make it now. I discovered that I could accomplish what seemed impossible, and I could do it without the help of my father.
* * *
My father and I also clashed over which college I should attend. Since my grandfather spoke at Dartmouth, my father wanted me to go there. Instead, I chose Wesleyan University in Connecticut, with its well-earned reputation for politically active students. I entered Wesleyan a few weeks after returning from Ghana, and I led a double life there: I was a Black history major before there was such a thing as Black history, to my father’s consternation, and a mathematics and computing minor, to his great pleasure; studious undergrad at times, which also pleased my father, Black radical at others, which caused him angst.
Just weeks after I started at Wesleyan, Black students organized into a group called Ujamaa (Swahili for “family”), issued a set of demands to the university, and prepared to occupy a building—all pretty standard actions for 1968, which, thanks in large part to affirmative action, saw the first large crop of Black students at the nation’s colleges and universities. In those days, I went by my African name of Kojo Baako, and as co-chair of Ujamaa, with a fellow student who went by Kwame Lumumba, found myself in the thick of the action.
Afraid that a mole within Ujamaa would report our plans back to the university, a group of us publicly stated we’d be taking over Fisk Hall one day at four in the morning, while privately leaving for Fisk a half hour earlier. When we arrived at Fisk, a member of our group shattered the glass door by kicking it in. Then I turned to see Wesleyan’s lone Black dean running down High Street, waving a set of keys, crying out in angst, “But I had the keys! I had the keys!”
Straddling the line between student and activist became a tenuous, high-wire balancing act. Black students there solely for an education felt threatened by my activism. Black students given over to being activists saw me as not doing enough.
One concerned economics major, whom I knew from high school, had his sights set on Wall Street. “If you do anything to interfere with my graduation,” he told me, “I’ll kill you!”
The campus also had a little-known student chapter of the infamous New Haven branch of the Black Panther Party, headed by the jazz trumpeter, trombonist, and part-time lecturer Clifford Thornton. On Fridays, the campus chapter of the party would issue weekly “revolutionary ratings” of Black students through hand-drawn icons, with brief titles, affixed to dormitory room doors. Three icons served to rank and classify Black students based on the party’s all-Black, revolutionary agenda: a watermelon, a pork chop, and a pair of White girl’s panties. The more of these icons you received, the further away you were from being a “politically correct” Black revolutionary.
While I had my share of watermelons and pork chops, though never a pair of White girl’s panties, the on-campus chapter also had a fourth icon created in my honor: a book, symbolizing a revolutionary library and intellect, thus counterbalancing my several pork chop and watermelon demerits.
Despite all the seeming craziness, I still learned that activism, correctly timed and focused, was a powerful force for change. Ujamaa abandoned Fisk Hall after the university agreed to most of our demands, one of which was the funding of the Institute of the Black World, the first established arm of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta. In the spring of 1969, along with five other Black students from Wesleyan, I handed Coretta Scott King, Martin’s widow, a check for several hundred thousand dollars to establish IBW. That fall I spent a semester as one of the first students at the institute, which brought together the leading Black scholars, writers, poets, and musicians of the day.
I returned to Connecticut from Atlanta determined to graduate in three years, instead of four, with a major in Black history and a minor in mathematics and computing. At the time, Wesleyan, then an all-male institution, had a rule that if a student wanted a class that was not offered, he could prepare a set of educational goals and a reading list, find a willing professor, and receive full credit if the academic goals achieved met the professor’s standard. I used this rule to great effect and laid out a rigorous course in Black history, with professors in the History Department serving as my proctors. My senior thesis, titled “A System of Governance and Dominance in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” examined the steps Virginia took to transition from a system of indentured servitude to a system of slavery. I authored this paper under my Ghanaian name, Kojo Baako.
But Wesleyan also had an IBM 1130 computer for the Physics and Mathematics Departments. My father possessed extensive knowledge of that machine. I needed to learn and use the 1130 and FORTRAN to get my minor in mathematics, so my father plied me with IBM 1130 operations manuals and FORTRAN educational manuals, and he also paved the way for me to speak with fellows at IBM’s famed Systems Research Institute (SRI) in New York City. A final paper in numerical analysis required mathematical operations with very small and very large numbers, well beyond the 1130’s computational limits. With my father’s introduction, I brought the problem to a Black mathematician at SRI, who leaped at the chance to help a young student. Through a FORTRAN program, we concocted a way around the 1130’s limitations, allowing me to write a paper titled “Investigating the Relationships between the Normal, Binomial, and Poisson Distributions,” which I authored under the name Clyde W. Ford.
Home for a weekend, I showed my mathematics paper to my father.
“You wrote this?” he asked.
“I did.”
“Using the school’s 1130?”
“Yep.”
“In FORTRAN no less?”
“Yes.”
“Guy at SRI help you?”
“He did.�
��
“You know, I don’t understand most of it.” He waved the paper at me, smiling. “But that’s pretty damned cool!”
13
Clandestine Service
During the years my father refused to be seen in public with me, his role at IBM became even more clandestine: not just the covert operation he ran from the bottom drawer of his dresser, but even the work he performed for the company.
Periodically, he would inform us that he’d been assigned to work at the large IBM facility in Endicott, New York; at a research laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts; or at a company location near San Francisco. When asked what his assignment entailed, he smiled knowingly, stiffened slightly, and said he’d been sworn to secrecy. These assignments, all highly classified and some lasting six months or longer, seemed more like military deployments.
After I entered IBM, I managed to piece together one of my father’s major clandestine assignments. Code-named CP-67, it was part of the first government-funded technology projects underwritten by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). While IBM stood to benefit financially through commercializing the results of Project CP-67, DARPA’s real goal had far-greater implications. DARPA wanted technology that would become the foundation of the modern-day internet.
By the early 1960s, it had become clear that IBM computers, and therefore computers in general, faced three significant and interrelated challenges: intergenerational incompatibility, multiple-user environments, and the high cost of memory.
Think Black Page 18