OLD TOWN, ALEXANDRIA
Denise Ford worked in the unfashionable 15th arrondissement, just downriver from the Eiffel Tower. At lunchtime, she liked to get a baguette sandwich from a boulangerie on the Avenue du Suffren and find a place on the grass in the Champs de Mars where she could eat her lunch and read a book. It was a short walk from the International Energy Agency. She loved the commotion of tourists along the Quai Branly, the slow chug of the barges moving upstream, and the view of the old Beaux Arts buildings that framed the park. She was in her early thirties; her divorce had been an emancipation; her colleagues envied the Paris assignment and teased her about how soon she would become a station chief.
She met Jean-Christophe Arras the first time at one of those déjeuners sur l’herbe. She saw him sitting on the Champs, eating his own baguette, and she said hello and sat down nearby. After an awkward minute, they began talking. They worked together, it turned out, on different floors. Fancy that!
It wasn’t as accidental as it looked. Ford had targeted the French scientist from the moment she arrived at the IEA. He was one of the French technical representatives on the IEA secretariat, with a doctorate in nuclear physics. The station ran his traces; he had served in the military with the Force de Frappe. At that time, the CIA didn’t run many operations against French government targets. But in the case of Monsieur Arras, Denise Ford requested that this rule be suspended.
The station chief didn’t like the operation. He was a heavyset, hard-drinking dinosaur who wasn’t convinced that women case officers were useful for anything other than spotting potential recruits. Honey traps, he understood. Recruiting prostitutes, he understood. Women case officers who recruited foreign scientists to spy for the CIA, he didn’t understand. But he approved Arras as a “developmental.” Soon, after more lunches with her French colleague, Ford began filing intelligence reports. Her developmental got a cryptonym. The EUR division chief sent her a cable commending her and urging her to take the case to the next level.
She had planned that night carefully: She wore a black dress she had bought at Dolce and Gabbana. That was a mistake, probably. She chose a restaurant on the Avenue Rapp and asked him to meet her there. It was a small, intimate place, a neighborhood secret for people who lived in the 7th arrondissement. Another mistake. He was waiting when she arrived; he seemed startled by how elegant she looked. When she sat down, she knew that he thought she was coming onto him. Men are vain; when a pretty woman suggests dinner, they think they understand what’s going on.
How do we remember the moments when our lives begin to go off track? A series of little misjudgments, small moments that have big consequences. After dinner, she asked if he wanted to come back to her apartment, which was nearby on Rue de l’Université. She was thinking that she could draw him out on French nuclear consultations with Moscow. In her mind, she was an intelligence officer doing her job.
But that wasn’t what Jean-Christophe Arras thought, or even considered, until she shoved him away when he pushed her down on the couch in her apartment. She was strong; she had been trained in hand-to-hand combat at the Farm. When he tried to come at her again, she hurt him. He limped away from her apartment. And then things began to come apart.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” said the operations chief at the embassy. When people say that, they usually mean the opposite. He told her to put the recruitment on hold. The French FBI, known as the DST, put surveillance on her, and it wasn’t hard, really, for the French to assemble a dossier.
The ambassador was summoned by the interior minister, who complained bitterly about a covert American attempt to recruit a French scientist and demanded the departure of the undeclared CIA officer working at the IEA. The ambassador screamed at the station chief; the station chief told Denise Ford to pack her bags. She was gone twenty-four hours later.
“I knew this wouldn’t work,” said the station chief as he drove her to the airport. He congratulated himself later for managing to keep the story out of the French newspapers.
When Denise Ford came home from Paris, her father met her at the airport. That was meant kindly, but it deepened her sense of failure. He had served in the government, too. He knew what she did for a living, and he understood what not to ask. He took her for dinner to a restaurant on K Street that had dim lighting and black-leather banquettes with a maître d’hotel who sang Puccini and Verdi arias in a liquid baritone voice. She didn’t mean to, but she started to cry.
Before returning to work and the reassembly of her career, she traveled to New Haven to see a faculty mentor. It wasn’t to visit the history professor who had pitched her to apply to the agency, but to see his wife, Marie-Laure Trichet, a lecturer in French literature. Ford had always wondered if it was this woman who had really spotted her as a potential intelligence officer, rather than her notoriously well-connected husband.
Ford brought a gift for her French teacher. It was a first edition of Aden, Arabie, a memoir published in 1931 by the philosopher Paul Nizan, chronicling his youthful dreams and despair in what is now Yemen. She had found it in an antiquarian bookstore in the 5th arrondissement, beyond the Luxembourg Gardens. She treasured the opening line of the book, which she had quoted in one of her undergraduate essays. “J’avais vingt ans. Je ne laisserai personne dire que c’est le plus bel âge de la vie.” I was twenty. I will let no one say it’s the best time of life. Ford was fourteen years older, but she felt Nizan’s premature exhaustion.
“You look very sad,” said Madame Trichet, after she had received the visitor in her study and accepted the book. “What has gone wrong?”
Ford explained what she could, starting with the rupture of her marriage before Paris. She had dated George Ford at Yale, where he was regarded by most of her friends and family as an ideal match. He was part of the upward path that she was meant to ascend in her personal life and at work. But the threads had come undone so quickly, they obviously hadn’t been stitched very well from the beginning. The silences got longer. Ford always felt that she was making little mistakes, putting the shirts and socks in the wrong drawers. She was relieved when she discovered that he was cheating on her.
“I never thought he suited you really,” said Madame Trichet. “He was not supple. His head was flat. But what about your work? We have had such high hopes.”
“You know, then?” asked Ford.
“Of course, I do. I was the one who recommended you. Ewing thought women were wasted on the agency, and vice versa. I said you were different.”
“I had some bad luck in Paris,” said Ford. “It wasn’t my fault, but things happened. It will be hard for me to go overseas again, probably. I can’t really go into the details.”
“Of course, you can’t,” said Madame Trichet. She looked at the handsome, gifted woman sitting across the table, her shoulders bowed slightly. “May I give you some advice?”
“Please. That’s why I came, I think.”
“Never settle for the lesser ambition. The job, the title, the conventional loyalties and rewards. Stay focused on the larger ambition, which is making a difference in the world.”
“Should I keep working for the government?”
“Probably. But only if you think you are doing good things. That’s what you must promise your teacher. That you will have the big ambition, and forget the rest. It’s too easy in this world to say yes to mediocre people and ideas. Remember what Voltaire wrote. I taught it to you in this study: ‘L’homme est libre au moment qu’il veut l’être.’ ”
“Man is free at the instant he wants to be,” said Denise Ford, translating her professor’s words. How far she was from freedom.
Denise Ford roused herself from her chair in the living room in Old Town, and from her reverie. She had another opportunity to be useful in an intelligence operation. But really, she had never stopped trying; it had just been hard to get her colleagues to give her the chance.
When she was ready for bed, she turned on the bedside light and opened the memoir of Simone de Beauvoir. It was easier to read, now. Every word was incendiary. “I was choking with fury. Not only had I been condemned to exile, but I was not even allowed the freedom to fight against my barren lot; my actions, my gestures, my words, were all rigidly controlled.”
She fell asleep with the book open, but when she awoke the next morning, she felt oddly refreshed.