CHAPTER 9

Washington State, 2001

As a child I used to sit around the campfire with my father and tell him tall tales about how I could read the galaxies, and about the colour associations I had with certain numbers. Four was green, I’d say. Three was blue. Eight was black, like the sky at night. The stars were zeros, or sometimes ones. I told him I could read the lines between the stars. I saw shapes there, and they had more meaning than humans could understand. He listened patiently and showed the keenest interest in my nonsense. He poked the fire with his stick and encouraged me to roast my marshmallow (‘make sure the chocolate doesn’t melt too much; watch that cracker now, see that it doesn’t break’).

Now, 30 years later, during one of my periodic visits home, he sat behind me on the vinyl seat of our camper and got ready to change his insulin pump. Outside I could hear Tucker prowling around in the bushes, so I went to open the door to let him in, but he just looked up at me quizzically and wagged his tail. The fire glowed and vanished into a gaseous aureole.

I watched my father scrupulously. With great fanfare, he undid his shirt and ripped off the plastic tape that kept the needle in place. ‘Egad!’ he shouted. ‘We open this, still smarting from the agonising pain.’

On the radio, Madame Butterfly had ended and John Coltrane had begun to wail. ‘Well, that little baby’s out of insulin,’ he said. He prepared an alcohol swab and lifted his shirt up to grab a slab of his belly. ‘See that God-awful needle,’ he asked, tipping it into the little bottle of insulin and drawing out a small, clear dose. He tapped the syringe delicately, dispersing the bubbles as he hummed along to the jazz. ‘This one goes in my belly, this one doesn’t.’ He ran the insulin up a long, thin tube, filling an auxiliary bottle. ‘I don’t know what folks who don’t get to do this do. What fun it is!’ He pointed to a tube of clear liquid sitting on the table. ‘A whole vial of this in there.’

Outside, the dog began to bark. My dad’s fingers had turned bloody. He watched the monitor to get the correct amount of insulin into the machine. The table was littered with tiny vials, clear syringes, thin plastic tubes, strips that measured blood sugar, and machines that drew blood. He slid the needle into its holster and then attached the whole pump, which hooked onto his stomach. The ends of his fingers were blistery and hard from poking them again and again.

‘Egad, Scotty!’ he shouted again. His brows arched in mock agony, his face gleaming. ‘Somebody shot me. My dying wish is that you get the rustlers before they get away from here with all the cattle. And that varmint that shot me, go shoot him — well, maybe not shoot him, but don’t ask him to dinner soon, anyway.’

I sat back. The lamp glowed on the windows. He held a syringe in his mouth like a cigarette.

‘Quick,’ he said, ‘maybe you better get some whisky to splash over my wound here.’ He was suddenly viciously happy, momen-tarily relieved of his sadness.

A few days earlier, my father had arrived home in the afternoon. His eyes were red and he hugged me, and I found out that my grandfather had died.

The phone rang all day, and he sat in his den and answered callers and made calls. He played solitaire on the computer while Janet fussed around the kitchen. ‘I fully intended the other day to take that chrysanthemum for my dad,’ he said to someone who had called. ‘Do you still have that? I’d like to pick it up. It’s a perennial, so we can plant it in our backyard here.’

He moved the phone to the other ear and looked down at the floor. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you probably sensed how important my dad was to me.’ His voice sounded choked with emotion, and his fingers grabbed the phone tighter. ‘Yeah, my mother is staying here with us, and of course my son is still here.’

A few days after his father died, my father and I went for a walk together. He led me to the edge of the Little Spokane River, on a grassy bank that overlooked a pool where the waters twisted into curls. He sat down on a rotting stump, talking through his fingers. ‘I can just see myself through the years. You kind of transport yourself — you think about something 50 years ago and you remember vividly what it felt like. I see those memories differently. And when a father dies, it kind of all rolls together so that your emotions get sort of skewed.’ He looked out at the water. ‘All of us tend to control our emotions.’

He was trying not to cry, but every time he started to talk he would lose control. He looked confused and sad. I couldn’t stop watching him. The thought occurred to me that he was acting. Then, as he cried, I berated myself for thinking his emotion was less than genuine.

‘My father, maybe more than others, treated me like a mature person early — he didn’t exert a lot of control over me. I tried to be a mature person early. Where he had expectations, it was easy to know what those expectations were, and it was comfortable living up to them. I inherited from him a love of the land — a love of stewardship of the land — so there was never any question of doing anything that would be irresponsible or destructive to the land.’

He began to play with a twig that he picked up off the ground. Right then, it seemed like it was a piece of himself. ‘I remember when I was eight years old and we had just moved to Colville. He was going to be going over to the coast for a few days, and I really didn’t want him to go — I wanted him to stay with me — and I said something childish like, “I hope the train has a wreck so you can’t go,” or something, you know, something that if uttered by an adult would have been hurtful, but all I was trying to say was that I wanted him to stay with me. I think my mother scolded me for wishing ill on him. I didn’t wish ill on him; I just didn’t want him to go.’

I waited for him to continue.

‘He knew that his life, the quality of his life, was disappearing — his friends were gone, his brothers and sisters were all gone, his life was gone. He couldn’t move, he was getting increasingly dependent on pills and doctors, and was in pain — and the dementia had started setting in. He said he wanted to go. He was close to 95, and he always said he didn’t want to live to be a hundred. In the last few weeks it clearly was time for him to go: his body was shutting down, his heart was shutting down, and he had no quality left in his life. It was selfish to want him to stay, and rationally, I wanted him to be relieved, but emotionally … I wanted my dad to stay.’

My father put his face in his hands and cried, then he pulled himself together and continued. ‘And of course I have a lot of regrets. I regret that I didn’t answer the letters he wrote to me when I was in college. He would write a letter every week; I would write one every three months, maybe. When I was travelling in Hawaii or India, or living in Yugoslavia or Spain and all those places, I knew he wanted to hear from me but I, um, didn’t take the time.’

We got up and kept walking along the river. He looked big to me, lumbering and sunburned, with ankles torn up from the brambles, and as he walked along the banks he stumbled and grabbed at reeds for balance. He picked up stones randomly, tossing them down the hill. He looked at the river, and I wondered if the currents made sense for him.

In the distance the green hills were bald, and skeletal armatures had begun to appear. We could hear the sound of four-wheelers on the dirt tracks, throwing up skiffs of powder. When the forests burned around here, the skies turned black and the timber cracked and fell.

We passed the church close to his house. There was always some new saying on the board outside — ‘walk forgiven in the presence of the Lord’ or ‘kneel today and rise tomorrow’. Usually when my father saw them, he scoffed and made up an aphorism of his own. The corny maxims and false sincerity made him wish the fires would creep to the churches and burn them to the ground. But when we went past that day, he stayed quiet.

Over the course of the next several days, talking with my father about his youth evolved into conversations about death. What kind of childhood led a man to the CIA? He told me about incidents in which people he had been close to had died. One was a boy named Roderick, my dad’s best friend, who died when he was 12. Another was a scoutmaster who died of pneumonia when his Christian Scientist wife refused to seek medical help for him. A third was his grandfather, who died on the very same day my father, only six years old, had taken the bold step of initiating the only meaningful conversation they ever had.

‘That just occurred to me now,’ he said very suddenly. ‘That just as I reached out to them, they died. It’s a coincidence that it never occurred to me before ... I don’t attach meaning to it, though.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t bring on the deaths,’ he said.

There was a pause.

‘Years later, I found Roderick’s grave and went to visit him,’ he went on.

‘Did you talk to him?’ I asked.

‘I think so.’

‘Do you remember what you said?’

‘Yeah, I talked to him,’ he said, but didn’t say more, and I let it go.

When we went on those long walks and drives in the days after my grandfather’s death, I often brought a camera or a notebook to record my father. He had withered and recoiled at his father’s death, and I had witnessed it.

Perhaps because he was vulnerable, or in a reflective state of mind, I sought a different sort of confession from him. I asked about his work in the CIA. I wanted to know what it was he did, exactly. I wanted him to confess to me the way confessors used priests to absolve themselves of sin, the way whistleblowers did it. I wanted to be the revealer.

I asked him what kinds of qualities were necessary to be a spy. He thought about it for a while. The conversation was a welcome distraction from his pain. ‘An agent might tell you at length about how he is fighting to preserve the free world,’ he mused, ‘when in fact what he really wants is a case of whisky.’

It was important, in other words, to be able to respond to the real needs of people, as well as their stated needs.

He meandered up an incline, through a stand of birch, and sat at the foot of a limestone boulder that left flakes of chalk on the ground. ‘There’s a lot of myth about the CIA,’ he said, ‘the Agency, espionage, and so forth. It’s not a world of guns and arrests, like most of the books. It’s more about counterespionage — trying to find the spy within.’

The spy within. I thought that it must be such a strange way to pass the hours — always looking for the whisper of deceit among your own kind, a shadow of your self.

But it turned out that it wasn’t that easy to shed only one part of one’s identity, at least as far as the rest of the world was concerned. A couple of years earlier, my father had tried his best to emerge from the shadows intact. He had run for public office when a Washington State Senate seat came open.

The day before he announced his candidacy, an article appeared in The Seattle Times. ‘A Spy in the Senate?’ the headline asked. The paper wrote: ‘Johnson said his job experience — primarily spying on the Soviet Union — should transfer nicely to Olympia law-making. “The whole time I spent as an intelligence officer I was trying to get important information for our decision-makers. I was working with foreigners, identifying problems, agreeing on solutions. I also developed a heightened sense of patriotism.” Johnson said he didn’t consider challenging [Jim West] until he grew disturbed by the senator’s behavior. “He is known to be angry, mean and a hip-shooter.”’

‘A Senator Spokane Can Be Proud Of,’ my father’s blue-and-white campaign brochure proclaimed. People seemed to want to listen to him. He hired Janet as his campaign manager. They put tickets up in their front yard, and bumper stickers on their car. He embraced his spy persona as much as he dared. ‘Keith Johnson: committed to country and community,’ said his posters. There was a shot of him sitting, listening patiently to prospective voters. His posters told his life story in quick, bite-sized abbreviations:

Keith Johnson was born in Spokane. He became an Eagle Scout, and he graduated from North Central High School. His early years growing up in the Inland Northwest taught Keith important lessons about duty, service, and commitment. For 25 years, Keith Johnson served our country as a foreign intelligence officer. He risked his life to ensure liberty and freedom for others. His efforts helped to tear down the Iron Curtain and spread democracy throughout the world. Now, Keith Johnson is running for the State Senate.

He had vocal support from the Democratic establishment. Yards across town filled up with his campaign posters; bridges and lampposts and the sides of buildings all carried his picture. There were strategy meetings downtown and swanky fundraisers up-town. Phone calls poured in. Money did, too. He started canvassing door-to-door. ‘Hi,’ he’d say, ‘I’m Keith Johnson and I’d like your vote.’

He had launched his campaign on my birthday, which was also the anniversary of his marriage to Janet. It was late in the political season to join the race, but by October polls showed him in a dead heat with his contender. Most forecasts said he was going to win.

Many people liked the idea of my father as a senator. He was handsome, intelligent, and articulate. Knowledgeable about the issues, he had, at times, an indefinable sense of bearing. He could be charismatic. Sometimes he was angry, too, and anger was good when it translated as political passion. He wanted to change things, shake them up. He was quick to choke up and become sentimental, and that too translated well as political theatre.

By the summer, my father had emerged as the favourite of the two Democratic primary contenders — the other was a registered nurse. He began publicly criticising the Republican incumbent, Senator Jim West, for some allegedly threatening comments West had made on the phone to a lobbyist the year before, and for which he was facing a misdemeanour charge. West had apologised, but the telephone threats became good political grist for my father. ‘People are disgusted by bad behavior in public office,’ my father told the local paper, The Spokesman-Review. ‘The best example of bad behavior in public office in Washington State is Jim West.’

In a brief profile of my father, The Spokesman-Review described him as a ‘Spokane native’ who the CIA had recruited in Mexico City in 1969. ‘He tracked Cold War Soviet activity in Yugoslavia, Southeast Asia and Spain,’ the article noted. ‘Fluent in Spanish, he worked on counterterrorism operations prior to the world exposition in Seville and the Barcelona summer Olympics. He said he was also a trade representative for the U.S. State Department and worked undercover, but declines to provide specifics.’

‘I can’t get into operating procedures,’ my father told the reporter.

The paper described some of my father’s campaign positions as ‘populist’, and noted that he had received most of his campaign funding from labour unions and the state Democratic party. ‘The big danger, it seems to me, is when professional politicians want to stay in politics and climb the ladder,’ he told a reporter. ‘When that happens, they start collecting PAC money at a furious pace and the PAC money compromises their beliefs.’ Increasingly convinced that my father could defeat Jim West, the state Democratic Party gave him $8000.

In another article, the paper noted that my father’s criticism of West had taken on a ‘moral tenor’. ‘I went out in the world and came back to Spokane and became increasingly convinced about abuses of power in many places,’ he said. ‘Jim West abuses his power.’ Soon, my father had more than $20,000 in funds pouring in from state supporters and local Democratic Party headquarters. Later, he told another interviewer, quoting the US Constitution, ‘I’ve done my part to provide for the common defense. It’s time to promote the general welfare.’

Two days before the elections, the residents of Spokane opened their mailboxes and looked down at their doormats and saw, tucked between the webbing on their screened-in porches or scattered willy-nilly across their lawns, an eye-catching flyer filled with provocative imagery. Across the city they sat down at kitchen tables and leaned in their doorways and stood befuddled on their front lawns unfolding this piece of paper. Almost all of these people were registered Democrats, fully intending to vote in the upcoming primary. What they read was disturbing.

‘Who is Keith Johnson?’ the flyer warned ominously in white block letters set against a black background. It gave an answer in red lettering: ‘Johnson is an ex-CIA agent with some secrets he doesn’t want you to know.’ A red question mark loomed over the page, opposite pictures of a firing-range target and a world map in the middle of a radarscope.

‘What is “misinformation”?’ the flyer warned. ‘The CIA calls it misinformation when they spread information that is false or deliberately misleading. They do it to overthrow governments or remove politicians from power. They are forbidden by law from doing it in American political campaigns. When someone does it in America, it’s just plain old political hot air pumped up by the political bosses. Don’t be fooled.’

The flyer went on to criticise my father for not voting in three of the four most recent elections, for getting most of his financing from groups on the other side of the Cascades (outside of the electoral area), and for being unqualified for office. ‘You might not guess it from watching his television commercials and reading the brochures his campaign has put out, but Keith Johnson is a newcomer to Spokane,’ the flyer noted. ‘Don’t be tricked by Johnson.’

My father and Janet went all over town tearing down posters, ripping them off lampposts, and collecting them from people’s front lawns. They called Jim West’s office and complained. They appealed to the media. They counselled each other. Privately, my father raged.

The next day, The Spokesman-Review, although widely viewed as Republican-leaning, ran an editorial titled ‘Republicans Owe Johnson an Apology’:

Plumbing the depths of dirty politics, the Washington State Republican Party committed a drive-by sliming last weekend. It mailed a flier to residents of the 6th Legislative District in Spokane, suggesting with sinister imagery and sneaky rhetoric that a Democratic Senate candidate was a CIA assassin out to overthrow our government. The mailer arrived in voters’ homes on Saturday and Monday, too late for the victim and the media to respond in an effective way. This timing, of course, was intentional. Apparently, it worked. Keith Johnson, targeted because the GOP thought him to be the stronger of incumbent Jim West’s two Democratic challengers, lost in Tuesday’s primary. How sad.

Now, as we sat under the trees on the river, his father dead, his attempt at public life a distant, painful memory, I asked him if he thought he was good at manipulating people. ‘Wouldn’t that quality make you a good case officer?’

‘I don’t think I was an extremely good case officer,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think I had any particular insights.’ But he talked about the history of adventurism in the CIA and of Teddy Roosevelt’s son being a high-ranking officer. He told me about his love of languages and strange places, and his thirst for history, and how he chafed at the chain of command and wanted independence. He said it was important to be on the right side of the law, but also not to betray the promises of fealty and friendship to the people who were deceiving their countries for you.

‘Did I answer your question,’ he asked, ‘or does it seem like I’ve skirted the issue?’

‘Well, doesn’t it take a certain kind of person?’ I persisted. A certain kind of person who could cajole and persuade, and wrench if necessary; who could extract information but convince that extraction doesn’t hurt — and who could go even further, to convince someone to switch ideologies?

A few days later, towards the end of my visit, my father took me to Colville, where he had grown up. On the way, we passed a restaurant with big black-and-white signs that said things like ‘buffalo’ and ‘salmon’ and ‘big screen’. There was a store called Depot, and the train tracks where route 292 crossed, heading north to Colville. We passed old barns, and solid brick warehouses no one seemed to be able to find use for anymore. I asked where he had lived as a boy, and he drove me to 820 N. Elm St, a squat yellow house with blue trim, a tidy front lawn, and an elm tree. He told me how he used to spread a blanket out on the lawn and read comic books. He had lived here when his dad had unexpectedly told him he would be moving to Pakistan to take a job as an agricultural adviser to the Pakistani government.

He parked the car on the empty street and we just sat there for awhile, watching. ‘It was the beginnings of the Cold War,’ he said. ‘They were working up to a fever pitch of Russian Soviet scare, and they enlisted people to go to designated high places and scan the skies for Russian airplanes that might be coming to bomb us — this was slightly before the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb. So my mother dutifully signed up, and there was an American Legion place up on that cliff, up on that bluff, that high point.

‘So they went up there and they had all these charts and pictures and profiles — silhouettes of what these Russian planes looked like — and they’d sit up there looking at the skies, looking around and around, listening for airplanes. If they saw one, they’d quickly identify it.’

He watched the skies in imitation. A smile came to his lips. ‘Not a single Russian plane.’

I asked if she got paid. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘This was done as a volunteer, for patriotic duty. She did that for a while.’

On another of my last days, we went down to the beach of the Columbia River. He sat down beside me on a big piece of driftwood. He was wearing a pale-blue shirt and jeans, with his insulin injector attached to his belt like a cell phone.

A couple of years earlier, on a drive back to our house, he had told me that he was ‘sad’ most of the time. He was cutting an apple with the pocketknife he always carried around, and he had looked at me skeptically, wondering, perhaps, what other answer I had been after.

Now, I asked if he was happy.

He shot me a hard look and shifted his position. He had begun to whittle on a stick with the knife. He was silent, and his mood seemed to shift between anger and amusement — he seemed to me to stifle a grin, but his face twitched with what looked like fury.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I will try to answer that question with a caveat. I know from past sessions that these questions really weren’t a conversation, an exchange. Nor were they just interview questions. They became an interrogation, and I don’t want to be interrogated.’

But because neither he nor I could get around the conventions, we couldn’t figure out what rules to obey. He wanted to answer me truthfully when I asked questions. I could see him struggling with it as he sat there. He worked on the stick as a distraction, a way to keep from looking at me. I sat behind camera I carried, hidden and secure. We were at an impasse: he refused to answer me in the way I wanted him to, and I refused to accept his answers passively. All the journalism I had done, or thought I had done, and I was failing dismally at the story I most wanted to understand.

I watched Tucker walking along the beach, as if giving us space to figure this out. I had never been afraid of looking at my father, the way I had been with other people. I had never shied away from his face or his gaze, his love or his anger. I felt an endless capacity to soak it up, to take from it what I could.

‘What interests me,’ I commented to him later that day, ‘is that you’re lacking all religious affiliation and any traditional notion of faith, and yet you had total faith in the ideology behind that process of bringing people to your side.’

He didn’t understand. ‘According to traditional religion, you mean,’ he said, ‘am I an amoral person?’

I went with it. ‘Well, do you think you are?’

‘An amoral person?’ he said, hurt. ‘No.’ He had stopped smiling. ‘The Soviet Union was a formidable enemy. It had a declared purpose to defeat us, to undermine us, and I did not have any sort of moral repugnance at trying to counter that.’

I asked him, ‘Don’t you think to be a spy you have to be able to justify your actions, to view things from an appropriate angle, to be morally flexible?’

‘Not any more morally flexible than the average priest who speaks out against sin, but deals with, listens to, helps, and treats the sinner,’ he said. ‘I think there are very few professions where one can live by some stern creed of righteousness. The world is a flexible place. I mean, do you run to report every violation of law that you see? No. We live with it. I was not going to hold out for some absolute, politically correct version of the government before I would let myself go to work for them.’

He looked at me for a while, and then broke out into a grin.

I asked him if he got a thrill out of the idea of secrecy — if he was attracted to it, if he liked having the ability to lie with impunity and institutional backing.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the point is, sure, there were elements of that. I found those things exciting. But it goes back to psychology — not lying or cheating or stealing. I was not betraying the things I had pledged to uphold.’

I thought of the many things that he had upheld without pledging to — his love for his family, his devotion to me, his commitment to the land — and those that had required a pledge seemed pointless.

‘It has to do with nationalism,’ he said.

I told him that some people, those with a more objective view than us, might just see it as lying and cheating and stealing.

‘I hesitate to call it an objective standpoint,’ he said. ‘The Soviet Union knew full well who I was and they didn’t like what I was doing, or trying to do. I mean, I was on their list as somebody to thwart, which they tried to do very hard. And it comes down to this: when there are two sides, are you going to choose one or the other, or are you going to stand aloof and apart and say, a pox on both your houses, I’m above this, I don’t deign to live in that world, I’m pure? Or, I’m a priest, I just listen to everybody and try to help them as individuals? I was trying to help my country.’

I probed further. It was almost against my will, but I was dragging myself there. Something was taking the conversation there. ‘So you were willing to get your hands dirty and let your conscience be sullied for a greater cause?’

‘Give me an example,’ he shot back. ‘Not generalities. Where should I have had qualms of conscience?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Do you?’

He was silent for a while.

‘Was there a border?’ I asked, and hesitated before continuing. ‘Between your work life and your private life, I mean?’

He sighed and stood up, and I joined him. As he walked away, he began telling me a story about India. A long time ago, an Indian man had come to my father with an offer of help. The Indian had been spying on my dad for the Soviets. He had broken into our house, planted bugs in many of the rooms, and stolen one of my mother’s photographs, which he produced to prove he had been in our house. Once, on his way in, the Indian had spoken to one of the servants, telling him he was from the government and had authorisation to be inside the house. He had asked the servant what kind of man my father was, and the servant had said that he was a good man, a very good man.

The Indian spy had pondered this. Unhappy with his Soviet employers, he decided that he was working for the wrong people. And, just like that, he determined to switch sides. It was a betrayal brought about by little more than a passing character judgement. ‘I learned a great deal about what the Soviets were up to from this guy,’ my father said as we walked along the riverbank, ‘and there wasn’t any deception on my part.’

He then told me about one of his first spy teachers, a Russian case officer who had been the principal CIA handler for Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet military officer who had defected to the United States with vital information about the weaknesses of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. As my father spoke, he looked at me with a crooked eyebrow and I knew was to understand something; I had known my father all my life and some languages will always be unspoken. ‘You’re never going to be able to recruit a Soviet by cajolery or coffee-table books or Sears Roebuck catalogues on the living-room table,’ the teacher had said. ‘Soviets recruit themselves. They decide when they want to come over to our side. So all I can tell you is, get to know as many Soviets as you can. But just be a typical American. And be the kind of person who, when they decide they want to come over to our side, decide they want to come to you.’

As that summer ended, I left my father and returned to Paris. When terrorist planes hit New York and Washington two months later, I spoke to him on the phone. He was having nightmares about bodies falling out of windows, he said. He had tried to come out of the shadows, but the world didn’t seem to want that. And now he didn’t want it any longer, either. He wanted the shadows back, and the shadows wanted him.

‘I wish I was back in,’ he said. ‘So that I could know what’s really going on.’

‘What do you think is really going on?’

‘I don’t know.’ He added that he intended to find out.

I left it there. His mind was working; I would have to wait and see what came of it.