My Father the Spy
Paul Dillon
Paul Dillon was a Central Intelligence Agency case officer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1927. He and his wife, Anne, had seven children, Maria, Clare, Eva, Julia, Leo, Paul, and Jacob. While working for the CIA at the height of the Cold War, Dillon was stationed in Germany, Mexico, Italy, and India. In 1975, after his cover was blown by a disgruntled former CIA case officer, the family returned to the United States. He died in 1980 at age fifty-three.
i was born in west berlin in 1957, the third of seven children. My father was posted there to deal with the threat of the Soviets surrounding this little enclave of the Allies. His cover was as US Army, but what he was actually doing was gathering information for the CIA from Soviets on the eastern side of the city. We lived in Berlin for about six years, and I have a vivid memory of my father taking me and my two older sisters to see the Berlin Wall. It had started going up a few weeks earlier, and he knew we would be hearing about it from other adults and at school, so he wanted to show it to us himself. I remember holding my father’s hand and feeling frightened by the barbed wire and the scary-looking guards with guns and German shepherds. My father said, “Don’t worry. Nothing will harm you. This is just a wall.”
The qualities that made my dad a really good father were the same qualities that made him a good case officer. The most important thing between both a child and their parent and an asset and their handler is trust. My father engendered trust in everyone he knew because he saw the dignity in all people. Everyone, including us children, felt that from him. He was a devout Catholic and had attended a Jesuit high school and Jesuit-run Boston College. He was heavily influenced by the Jesuit vow of poverty, which can be interpreted as a vow to yourself that you are not better than anyone else. At work, when he was out of earshot, his colleagues affectionately referred to him as Father Paul.
He and my mother gave my siblings and me a lot of freedom growing up, and instilled in us a confidence that has stayed with us into adulthood. For instance, when we moved to India, all of us children were in our teens. My parents encouraged us to go see New Delhi on our own. We took rickshaws, exploring new and interesting neighborhoods. We would come home for dinner, and Dad would ask us, “Okay, what did you experience today?” He trusted us, and we did not want to betray his trust. We honored the faith and confidence he put in us by not getting into trouble.
He was also a lot of fun. With seven children, my mother needed a break sometimes. In Mexico, he took us to the Teotihuacán pyramids and to the bullfights. In Rome, we visited the catacombs, the Roman Forum, and the Pantheon. We were amazed that the rain fell right through the roof onto those beautiful marble floors. At the Bocca della Verità (the Mouth of Truth), a first-century Roman sculpture of a god’s face, Dad explained that if you put your hand in the sculpture’s mouth, it would bite it off if you told a lie.
My father was certainly under a lot of stress in those early Cold War years. While doing research for my book, Spies in the Family, I discovered interviews with my father’s colleagues and documents that show the pressure he was under. For instance, in his first posting outside of Munich before I was born, he was responsible for training suitable refugees streaming into West Berlin from Eastern Europe in the face of Soviet occupation to parachute back into their own countries as spies for the Americans. But the operation was sabotaged from the start, and his recruits were being shot as soon as they landed. Though Dad didn’t know it at the time, the infamous British spy Kim Philby—who had been working for the Russians for fifteen years while acting as the official intelligence liaison between the British and American intelligence services—was telegraphing the landing coordinates of my father’s trained spies to Moscow. In a self-evaluation I later obtained, my father admitted that he was under considerable strain. As children, we had no idea.
Despite the pressure of my father’s job, or perhaps because of it, my siblings and I were adept at entertaining him. For example, during the 1970s, the agency was weighted down with infighting, leaks, and suspicions driven by chief of Counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton, who believed that the CIA was seriously compromised by Soviet moles. My father was not one of Angleton’s disciples, and he would come home drained from the pervasive sense of paranoia at the agency. At the time, my brothers had fallen in love with Monty Python. When Dad got home, they would re-create scenes from Life of Brian wherein the various Judean fronts spent their energy fighting among themselves instead of against the common enemy, the Romans. My father would roar with laughter at these skits. In a way that my father understood, and my brothers did not, this was what was going on at the CIA.
Eva and Paul in West Berlin, 1957
In 1973, we moved to Delhi, India, so that my father could clandestinely handle one of the CIA’s most valuable and highest-ranking assets, General Dmitri Polyakov. My father developed a close and strategically fruitful relationship with him. In the summer of 1975, when I was seventeen, a newspaper article in the Times of India identified my father as a CIA officer. This was how we kids found out he worked for the agency, and it was, naturally, a shock. (My mother knew what he did—in fact, he had once recruited her to deliver a package to a dead drop in a Berlin park. She was so nervous, she refused to do any more drops after that.) The book from which the Times of India article was drawn, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was written by Philip Agee, a disgruntled former CIA officer who revealed the identities of 250 covert officers, including my father. It was, in a sense, the WikiLeaks exposé scandal of the 1970s.
But even after my dad’s cover was publicly revealed, we still did not confront or ask him about it. We just knew he wouldn’t want or be able to tell us what he was really doing at work every day. We respected and loved him too much to put him in an uncomfortable position by asking him.
It wasn’t dangerous for my father in India after his cover was blown, since he had diplomatic immunity, but his career as a foreign operative was over. Soon he was posted back in the United States to work at Camp Peary, the CIA training complex in Virginia known as “The Farm.” Shortly after our arrival in the States, Dad told us we needed to attend a meeting at the Camp Peary administrative base. When we arrived, we were all escorted into a conference room. There’s a policy that the family of CIA officers living at Camp Peary are told that their parent is in the Agency, since the site’s existence as a CIA training facility is an open secret. A camp administrator got straight to the point: “Does anyone here know what your father does for a living?” We were a little embarrassed because Dad had never said anything to us about his role directly, even after his cover was publicly blown in India, but we all admitted that we did. The moment was awkward. We were being forced to confront a lifetime of unspoken, brokered deception, of never revealing the truth on my father’s part, of willful ignorance on ours. Our warm and loving father, who would deal honestly with us regarding any personal issue we wanted to discuss or problems we faced, was embarrassed, I believe, to have an official inform us that he worked for the CIA rather than do it himself. Yet the situation was telling: it was an example of my father’s need to compartmentalize and yet stay true to the two institutions, the CIA and his family, to which he’d faithfully committed himself.
Another thing my father and mother shielded us from was the fact that he was dying. While we were in India, he had developed primary pulmonary hypertension, a narrowing and atrophying of the lungs’ veins and capillaries. In the late ’70s, the disease was fatal. (Today, it is treated with Viagra.) My siblings and I knew that Dad was sick but not how serious it was. Eventually, though, we realized that he was dying, even if we didn’t face, or often discuss, how soon we would lose him.
Once again, we respected his cues and honored what we knew he wanted by not fully letting on that we were aware of his condition. If he didn’t want to tell us he was dying, who were we to insist? After all, we loved our father, and we didn’t want to blow his cover.