Delicate indeed, truly delicate. There is no place where espionage is not used.
—Sun Tzu
The Blue Ridge Mountains, Maryland, August 21, 1997
• The anxious memories returned to haunt me that summer night, keeping me from sleep once more…
It is past midnight near the time of the monsoon. I wait tensely on the concrete observation deck of the sweltering airport terminal, peering down at the tarmac through a thickening haze. The TWA flight from Bangkok is already two hours late. I have watched Swissair arrive from Riyadh, Lufthansa from Bangkok. An Aeroflot IL-62 arrives from Tashkent and lumbers up to the gate directly below.
My pulse suddenly surges. The appearance of the Aeroflot is an ominous sign. The operations plan called for the subject and his CIA escort to have left on the continuation of the delayed TWA flight at least an hour ago, for a very good reason. We wanted them out of here before the Aeroflot landed, with its inevitable ground retinue of KGB gumshoes.
The subject is a KGB defector who simply walked into our Station ten days earlier. Now, waiting down in the steamy, crowded departure hall, will he panic and run when he hears the Soviet flight announced?
I glance over the mildewed cement barrier. All the gates are full, but there is no American plane. Then, out of the gloom, the TWA Boeing 707 materializes. It lands, taxis down the runway, and finally stops at the far end of the poorly lit parking apron.
The haze thickens—“smit,” the old Asian hands call it, ground-hugging “smoke from shit” from the millions of cow dung cooking fires burning in villages across the subcontinent. I squint, but the TWA plane is hard to distinguish. I wait.
The disembarking TWA passengers grope their way through the murk and stumble into the terminal, where the humidity and stench of clogged W.C.s will certainly overpower the smit.
I cannot leave the platform. My task is to confirm that our subject and his escort officer “Jacob,” my partner in this operation, safely board the continuation of the TWA flight. But in this miasma, how can I see whether they reach the plane? If I don’t catch sight of them coming out of the terminal with the other passengers booked for the same flight, it could mean they have run into trouble at passport control. That is where the alias documents and disguise I’ve helped create will be tested.
Passengers emerge from the terminal, headed for the TWA plane, but I still don’t see the subject and his escort. Is it possible that they have already bolted to the two getaway cars sitting at the dark end of the parking lot with their engines running?
Whatever the outcome of the exfiltration operation, I have to pass a signal from the phone booth at the bottom of the stairway. Tonight, we will use an open code with an ostensible wrong number. Is Suzy there? (They made it.) May I speak to George? (Something went wrong.) The rest of the plan will unfold based on which of these two things happens…
Finally, I sleep, but I have no rest. Even in my dream, my mind cannot let go of the scene at the airport. I find myself descending the stairs with their chipped paint and wedging myself into the oven of the phone booth. I lift the receiver of the clumsy red Bakelite phone, put a brown coin in the slot, strike the cradle bar and release it. No dial tone. No coin drop. Damned colonial phone, a legacy of British rule that probably hasn’t been maintained since the King folded the Union Jack.
Again I jiggle the cradle. The fat copper disk drops into the coin return slot. I jam the coin back in. A hiss, a click, a weak dial tone. Receiver held between ear and shoulder, I dial quickly, scanning the number scrawled on the hotel matchbook in my other hand. Clicks and pops, finally a coherent double whir. The phone is ringing at the other end. I press the receiver tightly against my ear. Four rings…five…Pick it up, Raymond. I slam the phone down after ten rings.
Why doesn’t he answer? I look at my watch: 3:07, an hour past my scheduled call time. I know he’s still at the safe house. They’re expecting me to pass the signal. I suck in a deep breath of humid air and release it slowly to ease the tight band across my shoulders and the drumming in my ears. I have to call. I insert another fat copper coin and dial. A pause. A click…the coin drops through again. The phone is dead.
BLINKING AWAY SLEEP, I open my eyes to the wispy dawn spreading over South Mountain. The August sun brushes the treetops behind our garden teahouse. I blink again. Is that smit swirling among the azaleas? No, only mist.
The intensity of the dream dissolves slowly. I’m not in South Asia on an operation twenty-seven years in the past, but in the master bedroom of our house in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Still, as the cardinals start to sing, I am gripped by an anxious lethargy, the helplessness of the dream. Unable to return to sleep, I watch the colors in the garden change with the sunrise and quietly reflect on my life.
I’ve considered myself an artist since childhood. For a long time, I also saw myself as a competent spy. Since 1990, when I retired after a twenty-five-year espionage career in the CIA, I have once again been painting full time.
During these seven years of normal life, the recurrent dreams of the world I inhabited for so long have only slowly subsided. But one day, a totally unexpected event occurred that unleashed an avalanche of long-suppressed memories.
I LIVE, WORK, and show my paintings on forty acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Maryland. Our post-and-beam house, and the surrounding studios on this lushly wooded property create a harmonious atmosphere similar to that found on a New England farm. A hundred feet down the grassy slope from the house stands a two-story studio, a red saltbox carriage house, and several sheds. Dominating the studio and stretching back toward the house is a large enclosed pavilion with a third-story tower perched in the center of the roof. The pavilion’s second floor is a main exhibit area above a large office at ground level. My writing studio is now in the tower. This complex of wooden buildings is my personal work in progress, built by the hands of family, friends, and myself over the years since 1974.
Surrounding the studios and house are terraced gardens that my wife, Jonna, claimed as her personal domain when we married in 1991. Maple and oak trees cover most of our rolling property, on the base of a Blue Ridge summit west of South Mountain.
Late on Thursday, August 21, 1997, Jonna and I drove up the winding gravel track with our four-year-old, Jesse, asleep in the backseat of the red Pathfinder. From the garage bay beneath the studio, we passed the door of the office. A white envelope had been slipped into the screen door.
“What’s that?” Jonna asked.
I got out and retrieved the envelope. “FedEx letter,” I replied.
While Jonna tucked Jesse into bed, I examined the contents, a single-page letter on heavy bond stationery bearing an official letterhead:
THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
WASHINGTON D.C. 20505
The letter was addressed to me and signed by George J. Tenet, the newly appointed and just confirmed Director of the CIA. Its purpose was to inform me that I had been selected by my peers as a “CIA Trailblazer.”
The Agency had established the Trailblazer Award as part of its fiftieth anniversary celebration. Fifty Trailblazers or their survivors would receive commemorative medallions during a closed ceremony at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, scheduled for the anniversary date, September 18, 1997. I would be among the “CIA officers who by their actions, example or initiative helped shape the history of the first half century of this Agency.”
Tenet noted that veterans of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Agency’s World War II predecessor, as well as former CIA employees, had nominated three hundred candidates to be honored. A select panel had “worked very hard” to narrow the list down to the present fifty.
I read the letter again slowly, finding it hard to grasp that I was one of those selected.
Jonna poured herself a glass of cold water. “Anything interesting?” She assumed the FedEx was related to our art business.
I handed her Tenet’s letter. “Take a look at this.”
“Amazing,” she whispered, shaking her head. Jonna herself had retired from the CIA in 1993 with twenty-seven years of service, so she recognized the significance of the award. Tens of thousands of people had worked for the CIA in the past fifty years, hundreds of them virtual legends in the intelligence community, but most unknown to the public.
Jonna read aloud from the letter, noting that I had been one of the people chosen out of all those “of any grade, in any field, and at any point in the CIA’s history—who distinguished themselves as leaders, made a real difference in CIA’s pursuit of its mission, and who served as a standard of excellence for others to follow.”
I couldn’t sleep that night, despite the cool breeze and the soothing chirp of crickets from the garden, so I got up and climbed the staircase to my small studio, to reread Tenet’s letter.
On shelves around the desk were mementos of my CIA career. The dim light glinted off the tarnished silver of a Hmong necklace. I glanced at a framed picture of a boxy little Zhiguli sedan, driven along the Moscow embankment by a surveillance team from the KGB’s Seventh Chief Directorate and reflected in the slush-spattered side mirror of an Embassy Ford. But one object stood out from the others. I reached up for a small case and removed the bronze Intelligence Star I’d been awarded for “courageous action” during a highly sensitive mission to Tehran at the height of the hostage crisis. It was a journey made in alias, using false documents—a hazardous and difficult assignment successfully accomplished, but never described in any unclassified publication.
Hefting the cool weight of the medal, I considered the closing comments of Director Tenet’s letter. “Your achievements and those of the other forty-nine CIA Trailblazers probably will never be known in their fullness by the American people.”
As I replaced the Intelligence Star in its velvet-lined case, I pondered the improbable sequence of events that had led me to this time and place. In some ways, I realized, I had been destined from childhood for a career in the shadow world of espionage.
I WAS BORN in 1940 in Eureka, an old mining town snuggled into the Diamond Mountains in central Nevada. As Route 50—“the loneliest road in America”—entered Eureka, it passed through a gap in a black wall of slag, the detritus of the enormous tonnage of silver and lead ore smelted earlier this century.
When the World War II boom hit Nevada, my dad, John G. Mendez, was hired at the nearby Kimberly copper mine. He was only twenty-three when he was crushed between two ore cars deep in a mine shaft. He lingered three days, then died on October 24, 1943, three weeks before my third birthday and the day after Mom’s twenty-fourth. He left behind a young widow, four children, and a token insurance settlement. After the accident, we moved in with Mom’s mother, Ina Bell, in Eureka.
It was in Grandma’s old frame house that I learned of the family’s pioneering history. My great-grandfather, Cristoforo Giuseppe “J.C.” Tognoni, one of the legends of Nevada’s gold bonanza earlier this century, had been born into a big family in the mountain town of Villa di Chiavenna in the northern Italian region of Lombardi. J.C.’s father died in 1872, and the boy struggled to help his family survive before immigrating to America at age fifteen.
Somehow, he reached the United States and traveled west to Nevada to join two of his brothers. J.C. already possessed a skill highly prized in mining towns: In Italy he’d begun learning the secrets of the carbonari, who transformed wood into the high-grade charcoal needed to fire smelters. It was working in the mountains as a young charcoal burner for pennies a day that J.C. gained his intimate knowledge of the land forms and rock formations of Nevada. Still a teenager, J.C. headed off to seek his fortune prospecting in the Comstock Range.
A year later, he married Jesse Myrtle, a twenty-seven-year-old widow who worked as a cook on the mule-train line between Eureka and Tonopah. For the next fifteen years, the couple struggled, with J.C. working a succession of hard-rock mining, ranching, and freight-hauling jobs to stake his next prospecting expedition.
In May 1903, J.C. rode a horseback circuit to the top of a volcanic extrusion called Vindicator Mountain and studied the jumbled landscape below. After twenty-five years in Nevada, he could identify not only promising rock face, but also see from the narrowing of the washes where water might be found to work any claim. In quick succession, J.C. registered claims on a series of sites near a settlement known as Goldfield. These claims were among the richest gold strikes anywhere in the West. Within two years, J.C. became one of the wealthiest men in the state.
In 1916, my grandparents, Joseph R. Tognoni and Ina Bell Cates, eloped in Goldfield when she was just a teenager and moved to the Tognoni family’s ranch. Although the cattle operation was making money, old J.C. was typically restless—“stubborn as hell,” as Grandma always told us.
When he had sold some of his Goldfield claims in 1904, he had turned his prospector’s eye to a likely spot at Black Rock Summit in the Pancake Range. Almost sixty, he pulled a horse trailer behind his Dodge Brothers truck until the dirt track petered out, then rode higher into the mountains. Beneath an eroded volcanic lip, he found a rich vein of reddish “ruby” ore and promptly named the claim Silverton. J.C. was convinced that he could make this remote mine pay because the silver vein appeared to run thick and deep through the volcanic ridge. So he began investing. But Silverton became the opposite of a mother lode: J.C. put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the claim, but did not take out a penny.
The banks eventually gave him an ultimatum: He could choose between foreclosure on the ranch or on the mine. J.C. chose to save the mine. He died at sixty-seven on August 9, 1932. No one ever did figure out how to make Silverton pay off. The old man was buried beneath that stark desert ridge, in a private cemetery where many of his descendants also now lie.
Eventually, my grandfather, J.R., took his family north to live in the old home in Eureka, but the stress of their financial collapse was too much for his heart, already weakened by childhood rheumatic fever. He died in February 1936, leaving Grandma with four children.
There wasn’t much welfare in those days, and county assistance was especially slim in Nevada mining towns. So she and her kids learned to live by their wits and hard work in order to survive. Grandma had never driven her husband’s ’28 Dodge stakebody truck when he was alive, but that tough old vehicle soon became the family’s principal source of money. Grandma bid on a “Lone Star” route, delivering mail to outlying mines and ranches, over washboard roads that switchbacked up stony mountainsides and crossed wide alkali flats. Her route led through some of the loneliest terrain in the state, and she drove through some of the most severe weather in North America. I grew up with eyewitness accounts of Ina Bell burrowing under her truck stuck in a snowdrift and cinching on her wheel chains before a sheepherder or passing busload of miners could stop and lend a hand.
My mother relied on Grandma’s example to help her through the shock, grief, and fear that followed my father’s sudden death. Mom went to work as the editor of the county newspaper, the Eureka Sentinel. She and Grandma pooled their money so that Mom could save enough for a down payment on our own small house. Then she met Arch Richey, who was twenty-seven years older than she was. They married in 1945.
Richey had worked in mines all over the West and lived by a simple rule: Give the boss an honest day’s work and have a good time at night. His idea of a good time was drinking boilermakers, swapping yarns, and gambling.
Then the war ended, and the bottom fell out of copper and zinc. We left Eureka in 1947, the entire family jammed into the family car, a 1930 Model A Ford pickup piled high with bedding and suitcases. My half-sister, Maureen, was a baby, and Mom was expecting her second daughter, and final child, with Arch. The only work Richey could find was cutting rock at a quarry outside of Sparks, a suburb of Reno. He planned to build a house on the side of a desert mountain and had made a fair start on the foundation. But we were forced to spend several months in a sun-faded old Army surplus pyramid tent, sleeping on canvas cots, before moving into the shell of the house. We had no toilet and used a boulder slide down from the building site as the latrine. Our only running water was the cold Truckee River, where we washed our clothes and took baths, and where I learned to swim in the fast currents.
Twenty-some years later, these tough conditions helped me adjust to even more austere living when I’d visit the CIA’s Lima Site strongholds on sheer limestone monoliths above the rain forest north of Vientiane and on the Bolovens Plateau in southern Laos. Night and day, heavily armed Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army troops moved in the nearby lowlands along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hidden beneath the forest canopy. The sites could be supplied only by helicopter or rugged little short takeoff and landing planes, so amenities like water were precious. Still, taking a sponge bath from a five-gallon Jerry can that had warmed all day in the tropical sun was a lot better than bathing in the Truckee River in the winter.
It was in the half-finished house in Sparks that I started to draw. Using a brown paper bag and a carpenter’s pencil, I created a primitive cartoon strip of my family’s trek from Eureka and the progress of the new home.
One Saturday after payday, Mom came back from town with small presents for the kids. “This is for you, Tony,” she said, handing over a sketch pad and box of watercolors. “You have the qualities of an artist.”
AFTER LIVING ON that mountainside in Sparks, the drafty house above the tracks in Caliente did not seem like much of a hardship when we moved there in 1948. But there were plenty of nights between paydays when the single pot of beans Mom always kept on the stove and a few slices of Wonder bread had to stretch to feed us all.
On summer mornings, my brother John and I often headed up the canyons, lugging a black cast-iron frying pan, a potato, and an onion, sometimes an end of bacon if we were lucky. I knew where the rabbits watered, so we usually shot one and had it sizzling in the frying pan by noon. Then we’d doze under the scrub cedars through the hot afternoon before climbing the steep pink rhyolite cliffs to chisel out a gunnysack of rock-hard bat guano—which, strangely, was always laced with cactus needles—from caves I’d found my second summer in Caliente. High-quality bat droppings made excellent fertilizer, and we could usually peddle a gunny sack for a dollar to the better-off Mormon ladies across the tracks.
Word got out that we knew of secret caves, and some of the kids tried to tail us. I learned my first lessons in surveillance evasion by leading them into dead-end box canyons well away from our precious bat caves, then climbing out unseen through hidden, narrow chimneys.
John and I shared a Las Vegas Sun paper route and always asked our manager for extra copies when we filled our sacks each morning. Every afternoon we’d peddle these papers in bars along Main Street. We turned over our regular pay to Mom; anything we made selling the extras was movie money for all the kids in the family. Watching the Bob Steele and Superman serials at the Rex, I felt an early fascination with the magic of deception: The kids around me in the splintered old movie-house seats actually believed the characters were real. I knew they were actors, and I wanted desperately to discover what makeup techniques, props, and camera work had transformed them into celluloid heroes and villains.
Sometimes when we had extra papers, we’d hike out to Cherry Hill and sell them to the girls, who often had curlers in their hair and were just finishing their late-afternoon breakfast before a long night’s work. I don’t think John knew what a whorehouse was, but I was fascinated by the tangible sense of the clandestine that we would encounter by stalking over the ridges and surprising the married ranchers and store owners. Startled, they would jump back in their trucks and get away, terrified of being recognized by two scrawny little kids from town.
Their embarrassed expressions stayed with me for decades. I saw this again in Vientiane on the faces of government officials and diplomats leaving the White Rose or stumbling down the steps of Lulu’s Rendezvous des Amis on the Mekong embankment. I would also encounter this caught-in-the-act resignation among Soviet bloc diplomats in Bangkok. When I was a kid, the knowledge that a “proper” merchant indulged in occasional pleasure with the girls on Cherry Hill was merely amusing. In Southeast Asia, spotting the second secretary of a Soviet embassy or an Indian military attaché at a whorehouse was potentially valuable information, so CIA stations organized regular “pole patrols” to conduct this unsavory but necessary form of surveillance.
The paper route provided another crucial skill that served me well in my later profession: the ability to deceive with plausible denial. When John and I were stuck with unsold papers from the previous day, we met the Union Pacific streamliner from Salt Lake to Las Vegas that stopped in Caliente for just nine minutes each morning. John would take the Pullmans, and I’d hit the restaurant car, calling out “Papers…get your morning paper!” The passengers were usually so sleepy that they handed over their dime without checking the paper’s date. The fact that they’d just paid for yesterday’s news wouldn’t hit them until the train was well south of town. And it was unlikely we’d ever see them again.
But before beginning this little operation, we worked out a contingency plan. Growing up in remote mining towns without television, I’d spent hours studying magic tricks in my uncles’ battered old copy of The Boy Mechanic, a book published in 1905 that taught everything from building gliders to making bicycle-powered washing machines and had several chapters devoted to sleight-of-hand and parlor-game illusions. I realized that tucking a couple of the correct morning’s papers behind the stacks under our arms was just a variant of the old transfer-the-sugar-cube trick.
One day I sold a paper to a stocky professional gambler in a herringbone suit who was too busy chomping down ham and eggs to even look up as I took his dime. But as I turned away, he reached out and grabbed my shirt.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded, waving the Sun in my face.
I looked into his hard eyes, then noticed the ruptured duck pin in his lapel. He was a veteran, probably a former officer from the look of him, a guy who’d seen every yardbird swindle and heard every stockade lawyer’s alibi in the army. I knew he’d have a sharp eye for sleight-of-hand if he’d spent much time at the gaming tables of Las Vegas and Reno.
“Oh, sorry, sir,” I said, blinking at the paper’s date. “They must have been upside down in my bag. I have to take the old ones back to the station.” I turned over the stack, slipped him that morning’s edition and retrieved the offending copy.
Even though there were several potential customers seated at tables down the line, I opted for a tactical withdrawal.
Chalk up another lesson that later served me well: Keep your options open; always have a fallback when you’re working in hostile territory.
WE MOVED TO Denver in 1954, the year I finished eighth grade. At Englewood High School, I fell in with a group of boys who shared my interest in art. This “greaser” crowd liked to draw, but we were also fascinated with anything mechanical. We worshiped Marlon Brando and his gang in The Wild One and, of course, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. We drank beer, organized illegal drag races, harassed the local cops and our high school teachers, and had the occasional rumble with kids from outside neighborhoods.
While doing all right academically, I couldn’t accept the smug conventions of Englewood High’s reigning clique, the “sosh.” During my junior year, 1957, the student government arbitrarily decided the Christmas dance would be couples only. This meant that guys like my buddy Doug and myself, who liked to go to dances to meet girls, would be excluded.
“Looks like we’re out of luck,” Doug said, applying a coat of wax to his 1932 V-8 Ford deuce streetrod in the old garage behind his mother’s place.
“The hell we are,” I said. Ever since the announcement that morning in home room, a plan had been forming. “We can go as a couple and tear the place up.”
Doug grinned, but then looked worried. “Who’s going to be the girl?”
I tossed a coin…and lost. I had two weeks to become “Denise,” Doug’s date from out of town.
I suppose the Christmas dance caper was my first covert operation, because it involved analyzing hostile security, planning an elaborate “cover legend,” inventing a persona, and developing a disguise that would pass the closest scrutiny. Once Doug registered Denise as his official date from another school, we got down to the details of building a foolproof disguise. It had been announced that the regular school teacher chaperons would be supported that year by city police under strict instructions to maintain order and admit only couples with tickets. Their vigilance would discourage the leather jacket crowd from crashing the party.
I approached with dead seriousness the challenge of becoming a convincing teenage girl. Enlisting Mom’s support was not hard; she relished the idea of putting something over on the “popular” kids. Mom borrowed a dress from a friend who was about my size, constructed a padded bra, and even plucked my eyebrows the afternoon of the dance. Doug and I had already picked out a long brunette wig from a costume shop in Denver. That evening, I shaved my legs and practiced my backward dance step, wearing the borrowed pumps for the first time and coached by my four giggling sisters.
As we moved down the line of couples toward the door of the school cafeteria, I could feel Doug’s arm tighten inside his powder-blue sportscoat. There was a big, serious-looking police sergeant standing beside the ticket taker. It was not too late to back out, but I struck out my chest and strutted ahead.
“This is going to be so much fun,” I murmured in falsetto.
“Shut up!” Doug moved ahead.
Out on the crowded dance floor, my anxiety dissolved and I began to enjoy the power of our deception. This was fun. Dancing nearby was one of the worst of the stuffed shirts, a senior named Dave, who’d been voted the school’s “most studious.” With me maneuvering backward, we slid in beside Dave and his date and I began to wink at him. Dave was so flustered that he stepped on his girl’s white pumps. After two more dances, Doug and I pulled up alongside Dave again and unleashed the surprise we had been saving up for him.
“Bastard!” I shrieked, startling the entire dance floor.
“Bitch!” Doug snarled back. He threw a solid punch into my ample right breast. Girls around us screamed. I snatched off the brunette wig and threw it at Doug’s face. He ducked and a girl behind him was hit by the flying tresses. For a couple of minutes we traded movie punches and wrestled, my crinoline skirts whirling. The desired effect was achieved. The dance’s Goody Two-shoes snobbery had splintered into chaos.
As the cops and chaperons shouldered their way onto the dance floor, I snatched up the wig, and Doug and I sprinted for the emergency exit.
Although we expected to be called into the principal’s office, we actually escaped punishment. Everybody in authority, including the cops, had found our little act outrageously funny. For me, the most amazing aspect of the episode was that a good cover story, supported by a clever disguise, actually could transform one person into another. But, as I would later teach hundreds of CIA case officers, disguise was more than a matter of putting on a dress and renting a wig. You had to live the deception. Every aspect of the altered persona—the walk, the voice, the posture, and the mannerisms—was essential. They all combined to make a convincing whole.
AFTER A PLEASANT year at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I spent the summer working fifty-four hours a week as a plumber’s helper, digging ditches and chopping through concrete with a jackhammer.
There was a building boom under way in Denver. The Cold War was heating up again after the cease-fire in Korea. Martin Marietta’s aerospace division had just landed air force contracts to build Titan I and II intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Engineers and skilled craftsmen were pouring into Denver from around the country.
One night in June at a swimming pool, I met a pretty girl with auburn hair named Karen Smith. A junior at Englewood High, she was about to turn sixteen. We dated all summer, and when I went back to Boulder that fall, I was sure I’d met my future wife.
But college wasn’t the same. Even though I’d earned $1.85 an hour with plenty of overtime all summer, Mom had borrowed most of my savings because Arch was unemployed and still running up hefty bar tabs. The news from home that winter got worse. Money was so tight that there were times the utilities were shut off and the kids had to stay in bed, bundled under blankets, instead of going to school. I decided to take a semester off to help them out.
This time I wasn’t as willing to overlook Arch Richey’s problems as I had once been. We had some serious fights, and I was soon living in my own apartment and working again as a plumber. This gave me more time alone with Karen. We planned to get married when she graduated from high school. But, hormones and emotions being what they are at that age, a year’s wait seemed impossibly long. In 1960, unmarried couples didn’t just move in together, so we did the only thing we could: We eloped that May, on Friday the thirteenth.
FIVE YEARS LATER, Karen and I had three children, Amanda, Toby, and Ian. I’d gone from plumber’s helper to a partnership in an art and design fabrication business, then landed a job on the night shift at Martin Marietta as an artist/illustrator in the proposal department.
The work at the Martin Marietta plant was neither exciting nor challenging. An engineering team would cobble together a proposal on a subcomponent for a military satellite, missile, or perhaps even a NASA spacecraft, and we’d have to transform their drawings into finished schematics and charts and provide an eye-catching brochure cover, often working all night.
Defense work was a roller coaster. I got advance word of my layoff a month before the hammer fell in 1963. Still on the Martin payroll, I qualified for a mortgage. Karen and I bought a house in the suburb of Littleton that had enough room for a studio, shop, and gallery. I planned to make my way in the world as a painter and run the art and design business as sole owner.
But I soon found out that trying to live on a fifty-dollar-a-week unemployment check while hoping to sell landscapes to other unemployed aerospace workers was not a winning proposition. We had a couple of rough years during which I hustled for any kind of fabrication or store-decoration job, and even worked as a process-server for my lawyer uncle, Robert Tognoni. For a while, it looked as if my own kids were destined to live through the financial instability that had plagued my own childhood.
Then I got called back to Martin, this time as a tool designer working with electronic engineers on the huge new Titan IIIC booster. We were designing the missile’s electronic control modules, which had to withstand the stress of launch and the hostile environment of space. My job took me into vast sheds where prototypes of the missile lay in cradles wider and longer than the huge Ute dump trucks in the Nevada mines or the gondola cars that used to rattle through Caliente. I had to crawl around the “bird,” making exact measurements for my life-size drawings of the wiring harnesses and junction boxes.
The first time I actually touched the smooth titanium skin of the massive rocket, I felt a twinge of excitement mixed with dread. This missile might actually be fired in wartime, and I knew the possibility was not so remote.
The Cold War was no longer a nagging geopolitical dispute; it was a smoldering potential holocaust that could easily destroy human civilization, not simply individual nations. The wars in Korea and French Indochina had ended in bloody stalemates; Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain. None of us would ever forget the tense October days of the 1962 Cuban missile standoff. Now an arms race of unprecedented magnitude had begun.
In the years since I’d witnessed my first atomic bomb tests in Nevada, both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed hydrogen bombs. Here in the plant, the blunt gray nose cones were mock-ups, but we all realized the Titan IIIC was meant to deliver halfway around the world a thermonuclear warhead yielding the equivalent of millions of tons of TNT. Just as the atomic bomb had made World War II blockbusters seem like firecrackers, the H-bomb, driven by the fusion process that fueled the sun, had turned fission weapons into toys.
IN FEBRUARY 1965, George Adams, a friend from my first job at Martin, dropped by my studio. He was still out of work and had answered a want ad in the Denver Post asking for “Artists to Work Overseas—U.S. Navy Civilians.” George’s résumé had been rejected.
“I had some juvenile police trouble,” he explained.
I studied the ad. Working for the Navy “overseas” would probably be more exciting than drawing plans for wiring harnesses on the Titan missile. I sent in my résumé to the Salt Lake postal box listed in the ad. Ten days later, a man called and asked that I appear for an interview at a motel on West Colfax Avenue in Lakewood. “Funny,” I told Karen, “I wonder why somebody from the Navy didn’t want to meet downtown at the federal building.”
Richard Ryman offered me a chair at the faux-wood-laminated motel table. A shaded bulb hung low above us, illuminating my chair, while Ryman remained in the shadows. The scene reminded me of a Sam Spade movie. Ryman was in his forties, tall and rangy with blond hair going to gray. He wore a snap-brim hat and no suit coat. His dark tie was loosened to expose a prominent Adam’s apple at his unbuttoned shirt collar.
Ryman placed an open bottle of Jim Beam and two motel glasses on the table. “Care for a drink?” His tone was casual.
This was unusual behavior for someone recruiting a civilian Navy artist. But I tried to be friendly. “Sure,” I said, holding out a glass.
As we sipped our bourbon straight, he slid a thick black ring binder into the light. “What kind of art work do you do?”
“I’ve got some samples with me.” I bent to open my two old leather portfolios. For the next twenty minutes, Ryman sat silently, nursing nips of bourbon as I rattled on, showing prints of portraits, landscapes, specialty design projects, draftsman and architectural drawings, and the covers of Martin proposal brochures. Finally, I ran out of samples and sat down.
Ryman knocked back the last of his drink and opened the ring binder to a page he had marked. “I really don’t know what kind of artist they’re looking for,” he said, gazing at me reflectively from beneath the brim of his hat. “I sent in several applications, but none of them seemed to be right. Here, you read this.”
He swiveled the binder across the table. The bold red typeface leaped out at me from the top and bottom of the page: TOP SECRET—NO FORN DISSEM. The only classified documents I’d ever seen had been at Martin, and I knew they weren’t supposed to leave a secure facility.
Then my eye moved down the page. I was staring at a recruitment guide prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, Technical Services Division.
Half an hour later, I left the meeting with Ryman, a sixteen-page application form tucked inside my portfolio. At the door, Ryman touched my arm. “If you do apply, you will be polygraphed and subjected to a thorough background check to make certain you’re trustworthy and not an agent of a hostile organization.” His tone softened slightly. “But remember, Tony, we’re not looking for paragons. We don’t give a shit if you patted someone on the ass once or twice. You just have to level with us.”
Loading my portfolios into the car, I looked back at the motel room. The curtain was firmly closed, betraying no hint of the person inside.