CHAPTER 11

Mexico City, 1968

My father’s rooftop was in Mexico, and it was a long time ago — at a university almost 40 years earlier, in 1968. The Cold War was at its height when my father, 28 years old — the same age I was in 2001 — got caught up in its midst.

Mexico was an expansive battlefield in those years. It attracted spies and oozed espionage. Embassies in Mexico City were huge, lumbering affairs. The Soviet Union had made great strides across Latin America during the 1960s. Just over a decade earlier, Fidel Castro had launched an insurgency against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, leaving from Mexico’s eastern shore in a boat, accompanied by Che Guevara and a rowdy band of revolutionaries. Mexico had been trying, with varying degrees of success, to quell its own peasant uprisings in poor, rural areas like Guerrero and Chiapas, where communist sympathies ran high and hatred of the Mexican govern-ment was widespread. At the same time, the government, ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, tried to style itself for public consumption as the party of workers, revolutionaries, and landless peasants when, in fact, it was little more than a coalition of moneyed interests.

Many of the most virulent anti-government protests had originated with the thousands of students in Mexican universities, and throughout the spring and summer of 1968, the protests and marches gained momentum. The students’ complaints would have been familiar to the rest of the world. They wanted more freedoms — of the press, of expression, of political activism. They wanted a voice in their own governments. The demonstrations often turned violent, as students and police clashed in the streets of the capital. The locus of the political unrest was at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in Mexico City.

But Mexico City had been chosen as the site of the 1968 Summer Olympics, and the government, keen to portray a positive, stable image to the rest of the world, was prepared to ensure that the games, set to take place in October, would come off without a hitch. Worried that communist guerrillas could wreck Mexico’s chance at the spotlight, the government began to crack down. In April and May of 1968, the Pentagon, still consumed with the expanding war in Vietnam, supplied the Mexican military with radios, gunpowder, and mortar fuses. Later that summer, the Mexicans would ask for riot-control gear. And America, predictably concerned about the opportunities the protests would provide to communists, was happy to oblige. By the end of that summer, Mexico’s president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, fed up, decided to put an end to it. In September, as the summer rains began to ebb and the jacarandas bloomed, Ordaz ordered Mexican Army troops to occupy UNAM. The soldiers followed orders, beating and arresting scores of protestors on campus, and fuelling the tension that had been building in the city for months.

The army occupation of UNAM came just three weeks before the Olympics. But the students were undeterred by the attack. Early on the afternoon of 2 October, ten days before the opening ceremony, 15,000 students from across the country converged upon Mexico City. They carried red carnations to symbolise their anger. Their destination was a middle-class neighbourhood called Tlatelolco, home to the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, a colonial-era public square. As they marched, they chanted: ‘We don’t want Olympics; we want revolution!’

My father was the dean of men at the University of the Americas, just outside of Mexico City. He was in charge of helping students in trouble, organising their schedules, and meeting parents, as well as teaching a few classes. One day in early 1968, one of his students, a young man named Matthew, had asked his permission to invite the famous Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko to the school for a reading. Sure, my father said, go and ask the Russian embassy.

Yevtushenko was an intriguing character. He was openly critical of Joseph Stalin who, while no longer alive, remained a towering figure of fear within the Soviet Union. Stalin’s purges, during which up to 20 million people were murdered, were by then becoming well known. Yevtushenko travelled widely in those long, hard years of the Cold War. In 1968, he appeared before 20,000 enraptured Chileans at the Forum de Mexico in Santiago to read, in Spanish and Russian, a selection of his poems. Such public performances were immensely popular. They fuelled speculation about where the poet, and the war, would move next. It didn’t take long for rumour to spread across Mexico City. The Soviet embassy wanted to capitalise on Yevtushenko’s stardom by promoting a cultural tour, with him as the central attraction. For while Yev-tushenko was sometimes critical of the regime, he was still a great Russian poet. On the leafy campus of the University of the Americas, Matthew was inclined to believe that Yevtushenko, who would be in Mexico in the coming weeks, might be available soon.

It was on one of those bracing spring days when my father ran into Matthew again. The boy looked haggard and distraught. My father wondered if he was on drugs; so many other kids were. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. Had he gone to the Soviet embassy, as my father had suggested? What had they said?

Matthew had gone to the Soviet embassy, yes. He had enquired about Yevtushenko. A young Soviet embassy official going by the name of Ivan, who represented the cultural section, had greeted him warmly, with a handshake and a smile. Ivan was interested by Matthew’s idea of bringing the poet to the school, and agreed most enthusiastically to that proposal, but said he couldn’t make an immediate commitment. He would, of course, have to look into it first. There would be protocol and scheduling to finesse. The two men had stood in the dim foyer light of the Soviet compound, shaking hands as they concluded their conversation. Matthew left the embassy with the feel of the man’s grip on his hand, and in his mind a promise to revisit the matter again.

Matthew and Ivan met repeatedly, very often at Ivan’s request, and every time they did Matthew pressed the issue of Yevtushenko’s visit. But there never seemed to be any news of the poet. He was elsewhere, his words elsewhere, which meant the war and the sense of urgency must also be elsewhere. As the possibility of the poet’s coming began to fade, lost to obscurity and protocol, Ivan began to show a much keener interest in Matthew. He began to insist on more frequent meetings, to discuss a wider range of topics. He wanted them to get to know each other better. One day, Ivan wondered aloud whether Matthew had any other friends who he would like to bring along to their discussions, friends who might be interested in the same kinds of things as Matthew: peace, culture, poetry, and discussion. Another day, Ivan proposed that together they form a cultural discussion group, ideally to include other peace-loving students. There seemed to be no obvious forethought, no apparent malice in the gesture. Surely, Ivan said, Matthew should consider some of his own friends. Might there be some whose fathers worked for large American defence contractors, like Lockheed Martin? Or IBM? Or Martin Marietta? They might be particularly interested in discussions of peace and prosperity, perhaps more than most. Matthew should feel free to bring them along, too — should they, of course, desire such a thing.

My father listened to this tale and felt a shudder of something within him waking up. He had never thought much of Matthew, but now he stared at the boy as if at a key. This American redhead, large and impolitic, was offering him a gift. He felt his heart thump.

Matthew knew that Ivan was not really Ivan. He had realised that some arm of the KGB, the Russian intelligence service, was reeling him in, and he knew it was folly — suicide — to be taken in. It was so far from his purpose, so far from simple poetry. It was a mistake. So Matthew explained that he had gone for help. He bussed the long, slow descent from campus into Mexico City, to the American embassy. He arrived at reception. He asked to speak to someone from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was urgent, he told the receptionist. Then he sat down to wait.

Only when a man appeared, proffering a warm hand and a smile, did he allow his gaze to relax. The American was friendly, familiar, and benign-looking — even bland. His name, he said, was John. How could he help?

Matthew said he was a student. He wanted to continue with his uncomplicated student life, but the meddling of a Russian was preventing him from doing so. He explained how it had all started when he asked for the help of the Soviet embassy, but so much time had gone by without any word, any progress — time that had instead been devoted to other, frankly more sinister, probing — that he now had concerns about being manipulated by the KGB, and in particular by a man who said his name was Ivan.

John listened patiently to Matthew’s story. He asked questions now and again, intently probing this or that detail of the story. There were no guarantees in a business such as this, he undoubtedly warned himself. It could be a ruse. The Soviets could have put the boy up to it. Because this genial bureaucrat, ‘John’, was a spy we’ll name Timothy Irons — a man who spoke fluent Russian, a junior case officer in the Mexico City station of the Central Intelligence Agency. Irons showed no outward signs of emotion, but in his mind there was naked glee. As he listened to Matthew, he began to fashion a counterplot. He decided he would use Matthew as bait.

Irons’ intention was to recruit Ivan. Like any case officer worth his mettle, Irons was trained to hunt for pliable Soviets ripe for recruitment — few achievements were more coveted. It was notoriously difficult to recruit them, he knew — particularly those working in Mexico City in 1968, where opportunities for advance-ment were high, progress on the path to communism had already been made, and the shadow of the enemy to the north loomed large. But even failing recruitment, he knew that if his plan was successful, it could guarantee that Ivan would be sufficiently embarrassed that he might agree to cooperate with the Americans to avoid further humiliation.

Irons realised that recruiting Ivan, who undoubtedly worked at a reasonably senior level of the KGB apparatus, would require a meeting. His plan was simple: he would lure the Soviet into an even more complex relationship with Matthew. Then, Irons would set a trap and reel him in.

After another one or two meetings between Irons and Matthew, the spy explained his plan. Together, they would organise one of the cultural-discussion meetings that Ivan had been pursuing. During one of those meetings, Matthew would introduce Ivan to Irons, who would pose as a disaffected and peace-loving student eager to establish an underground newspaper publicising American war crimes being perpetrated in the name of democracy. Irons, of course, would go by the name of ‘John’.

Matthew, having finished his story, looked at my father. The two of them stood up and away from the others, on a shady hillock underneath a blooming tree where a slight wind blew. My father stared at Matthew, his mind racing. Matthew, really just a boy, stared back. On the footpath was an array of indigo blossoms, falling and drifting, disappearing into the crowd. A bell rang, marking the beginning of classes, and it seemed to ring for a fraction too long.

My father began to formulate his own plan before he even realised he was doing it. He wanted to be part of the action, while Matthew, realising he was in over his head, wanted out. The plan he proposed was efficient and mutually beneficial: it would enable my father to meet Timothy Irons and sell himself to him, and at the same time, allow Matthew to make a graceful and necessary exit.

Once again, my father gave his student instructions — only this time he was very specific. Matthew was to go back to Timothy Irons. But he was to deliver a story of my father’s making, a lie that, once set in motion, would give Matthew an out, and at the same time open a door for my father. He used a metaphor of fortune when talking about it: luck. He relied on the fate of the cards. But then, my father was a gambler by nature. By dealing Matthew out, he dealt himself in.

On my father’s instructions, Matthew lied to Irons the next time the two met. Matthew said that in order to be as thorough as possible in concocting the story of a student who wanted to set up an underground newspaper, he had decided to find the name of a real student. And to do that, he had sneaked into the university’s filing room to peek at the student files. The dean of men, a man named Mr Johnson, had caught him. The dean had reminded Matthew of his failing grades and his poor attendance, and told him that if he didn’t provide a written explanation of why he was sneaking around trying to get someone else’s file by Monday, he would be suspended. Matthew pleaded with Irons: please, go and talk to the dean. He added that the dean was basically a good guy. Moreover, if the dean knew what the two of them, Matthew and Irons, were actually doing with the Soviets, he probably wouldn’t kick him out of school. The dean graded papers in his office every Sunday afternoon; that might be the best time to reach him.

This was how, that very Sunday afternoon, Timothy Irons came to see my father at his little office on campus. Behind a broad, metal desk, my father was waiting patiently. Irons delivered a long and sincere explanation of what he and Matthew had been doing. My father sat back in his chair and listened, no doubt exuding a certain professorial cool. He played the part: he was now concerned, now curious. Their apprehensions, he assured the diplomat, were his as well. And certainly, if there were anything he could do to help, well … in other words, should he be able to, say, contribute in any way, he would, he supposed, be willing to consider it. In fact, he mused, it might make more sense for him to be more involved than he had been up until then. As for the unfortunate Matthew, mightn’t it be better to relieve the already over-burdened student of some share of what was obviously a very complicated and serious affair? He cocked his eyebrow at Irons. In a situation where numerous parties were being duped, my father was not, at least this far, among them. They sealed the deal that lazy afternoon.

A few days after they made their pact in my father’s office, the two of them met again to hatch out the details of their plan. Over the next few days, they conspired to orchestrate a series of treacherously manipulative encounters to trap Ivan and recruit him as a CIA mole. Their plan, such as it was, had been designed so that Timothy Irons, aka John, would be the primary contact for Ivan. My father’s role would come later. For the moment they worked at drawing the Soviet in as deeply as they could.

As the spring of 1968 rolled on in Mexico, the student protests gathered momentum, and the Ivan plot began to take shape on the grounds of the otherwise calm University of the Americas campus. In several private meetings, Ivan was introduced to a student of truly remarkable potential. John was not only anti-American by temperament, but he was also interested in setting up anti-American discussion groups, and seemed generally keen on propagating a view that would serve to undermine American interests abroad.

My father and Irons met separately to evaluate their progress. They brainstormed new ways to ensnare the Russian. The spring wore on. Temperatures in the valley soared, then cooled with the moisture that flowed off the mountains and spawned blooms of bougainvillea and jasmine and lavender. The air began to fill with the anticipation of a long rainy season.

By early summer, Irons and my father were convinced that the plan they had hatched would deliver Ivan into Iron’s hands. Ivan didn’t seem to suspect anything. Irons scheduled one more meeting with him to review some of the latest, much more virulent, anti-American material that Irons had been collecting and showing to Ivan. The plan now was to set up the sting. But for the sting to work they needed a secluded place, away from the student halls and restaurants they had been using until then. And they didn’t have such a place. Irons, of course, didn’t have a real student residence. But my father did, and ever accommodating, he offered up his own small cottage. Irons agreed. My father knew that if the operation didn’t go off as planned he, as the occupant of the house, would be compromised — he would be exposed as a co-conspirator in a nefarious American government plot. But he gave Irons a set of his house keys anyway.

The afternoon of the sting was unusually clear, although a wind snarled through the city. On the horizon, the cones of the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl were luminous and imposing. Irons let himself into my father’s cottage and sat down on the sofa to wait. It wasn’t long before his quarry, Ivan, drove into the gravel driveway in a Chevrolet. Ivan parked in the shade of some trees and low bushes, got out of the car, and walked up to knock quietly on the door. Letting him in, Irons went on the offensive almost immediately. He fixed a stern gaze upon Ivan.

‘Look, Ivan Ivanovich,’ he said in Russian, ‘would you prefer to speak in Russian or English?’

Ivan, immediately aware of the trap, tried to back away, but Irons blocked his path. ‘You’ve made a bad mistake,’ Irons said.

The American thought that it would be better not to mince words or waste time. Besides, there wasn’t too much time to waste; Ivan would get frantic. Irons managed to keep him there long enough to deliver a message: if Ivan agreed to cooperate with the American government, Irons would make it worth his while. The Americans, he said, would make sure that Ivan had enough authentic sensitive US intelligence material to keep his superiors in the KGB contented. And there was the possibility that he would be given prepared intelligence from future trips he might take back to the United States. His bosses would no doubt consider him a success — but only if he agreed to cooperate. If he refused this generous offer, everyone knew that his career as a rising star in Soviet intelligence was doomed.

As Ivan recoiled, digesting this, Irons’ threats continued. He became increasingly aggressive while Ivan grew more anxious. But while the CIA may have duped Ivan, he was no traitor. It didn’t take long for him to refuse Irons’ offer. Cooperating with the Americans was simply not an option, and however difficult it would be to wriggle out of this mess with his superiors (who would no doubt consider Ivan’s stupidity a significant security breach), he wasn’t going to play along. When Irons could no longer restrain him, Ivan rushed out of the cottage and ran to his car.

But it wouldn’t start. While Irons had been working at wrangling a deal from Ivan, outside in the driveway two men had been discreetly removing the distributor cap from Ivan’s Chevrolet. The men were from the CIA’s technical services division. Having successfully removed the cap, they had disappeared into the nearby bushes to watch and wait.

Dusk was approaching, and Irons walked out to the car and continued to pressure Ivan while the Soviet stared disconsolately under the hood, and then into the trunk of his car, as if the answer to his engine problem might be found there. Eventually, he turned and walked resolutely to the highway, leaving his Chevrolet in my father’s driveway. He caught a public bus that was headed into the city. After he was gone, the American team emerged from the bushes, replaced the cap, hotwired the car, and drove it to the parking lot of the University of the Americas, where they aban-doned it, carefully locking the doors and wiping away fingerprints.

It was dark when my father drove home from work. He was aware that the operation had gone down that day, but not how it went. He was nervous and excited. He slowed his Karmann Ghia to a crawl as he approached his driveway, where he saw several strangers, some of them uniformed, milling about. A Mexican policeman walked to and fro, his pistol drawn. My father drove past and had just begun to pull around at the end of the lane to make a quiet retreat when a shot rang out. As he turned around to see where the shot had come from, he saw the Mexican policeman take aim at his car. He slammed his foot on the gas, and managed to make it around the corner before a second shot was fired.

Still unsure about what exactly was transpiring at his home, and too curious to leave, my father drove down a couple of side streets and parked in an alley behind several other cars. He lingered for a moment, pondering his options. He was reluctant to return to a scene that featured a Mexican policeman. And yet he had committed no visible crime. Above all, he was just plain curious, and he was willing to risk the danger to satisfy his urge. So he stole back to his house on foot. He hopped over a low wall beside the house and made his way onto the roof, where he lay down flat and slowly lifted his head to peer over the edge. From there he was able to spy on the police.

The scene was chaotic. There were several more Mexican police than he had thought, and all of them had weapons. And there was also Ivan, who was impatiently demanding that the Mexican police break into the house immediately. The police, however, justifiably confused, were reluctant to follow the orders of an agitated Russian who seemed to have no good reason to be loitering around a house that wasn’t his. My father, excited and bemused, watched from the shadows of the roof until, finally, all of them left. He returned quietly to the alley, retrieved his car, and went home to sleep.

But the next afternoon, when he returned home from work, the police were there again — this time with Ivan and two unknown Russians. And this time, my father didn’t flee. When he pulled up, the policemen brusquely ushered him into his house and began to interrogate him. The pair of suit-and-tie Soviet bureaucrats stood nearby with looks of contempt on their faces. As far as my father could tell, they were directing the interrogation, demanding answers and giving directions to the Mexican cops in Spanish.

‘Where were you last night?’ one of the policemen asked, prodded by one of the Soviets.

‘I was working,’ my father answered.

‘Where do you work?’

‘At the university.’

‘Can you prove it?’

‘Sure I can. Ask anyone who I work with there.’

As the questions came, so did more details of the story, and my father was able to fill in the gaps. Ivan told the Mexicans how he had been in the house the night before. The Mexicans wanted to know why, and what my father had to do with it. My father played dumb. The police got frustrated, but the Soviets weren’t finished yet and, dissatisfied with my father’s story, forced him to open up a large leather case sitting in a corner. They believed it held an assault rifle of some sort. When it turned out to be a movie tripod, the police got even more impatient with the Russians.

Sensing that a shift had taken place in his favour, my father tried to turn the tables. What had this Soviet communist been doing, by his own admission, in the house the day before, and who had he been with? The Russians seemed not to have a satisfactory answer for this. The Mexicans were nominally in charge of the situation; they had the guns, and it was their country. But they were also beginning to realise they were in over their heads. My father became even more aggressive. How could a Russian, he asked, much less a communist, dare to show his face around Americans after one of them had killed President Kennedy?

Until now the police had shown some sensitivity to my father. But this latest bit of self-righteous anger on his part was too much. They decided to cart him off to jail. Inside the prison, the police continued to harass him, telling him he’d better start talking or else. But my father fell into a stubborn silence. The police grew bored and eventually let him go. They didn’t even give him a warning. He took a taxi home that night, where he slept like a baby.

The CIA paid my father a few hundred dollars for his assistance in the Ivan plot. After it was over, the station learned from a friendly contact that the Soviet embassy had been discovered to be trying to infiltrate the University of the Americas, and had been seriously discredited in the eyes of the Mexican government, including the president. As far as the recruitment of Soviets was concerned, however, the operation wasn’t successful. In the larger scheme of things, what good came out of the weeks and months spent massaging such intricate and convoluted intrigue? A small plot to infiltrate the University of the Americas had been disrupted momentarily, but it would no doubt start again. A Soviet had been compromised, but he was replaceable. This was an aborted throw of the dice in the Great Game. This list of caveats was of little or no consideration to my father, however, whose appetite had been thoroughly and definitively whetted.

The Ivan plot came to an end just as the student protests were gaining momentum that summer and fall. For over nine weeks, the protests had been getting bigger and more unruly. As preparations for the Olympics continued, activists from elsewhere across Mexico had begun to converge on the capital. Yevgeny Yevtushenko had by then vanished off to some other front, almost as if the swirling storm that was gathering over Mexico was too much even for him to calm. The Mexico City station of the CIA was buzzing with activity. Throughout the summer, they sent memoranda back to Washington detailing the increased frequency and vigour of the protests, and warned that the situation was becoming harder for the Mexican government to control.

Throughout the long months of that rainy summer, the CIA kept a close watch on the vast student population in Mexico. Their main focus was the radicals on the campus of the UNAM, the university that President Ordaz had targeted in September when he sent in troops. But the events at the University of the Americas came under close scrutiny as well. Which was why, even once the Ivan plot was over, my father’s involvement with the CIA only deepened.

Timothy Irons left Mexico shortly after the Ivan plot was over. But before leaving, he turned my father over to another first-tour officer at the station. My dad’s new ‘handler’ was Robert. Tall and handsome, Robert was also young and ambitious, and to my father, the epitome of the smooth elegance that until then had existed only in the pages of spy novels. Robert assiduously cultivated my father’s friendship. He invited my father to CIA parties with other members of the Mexico City station and exposed him, casually at first, and then more forcefully, to an inside look at the world he was trying to get my father to join.

My father was a useful asset. Robert began to use him as an ‘access agent’ — a handy go-between when a quick meeting was required with an unknown person. The two of them would arrange for accidental run-ins when my father dined or drank with somebody Robert was particularly keen to meet. After striking up an acquaintance, Robert could work the target at his own pace and on his own terms.

After each of these meetings, Robert gave my father more access to his world. They often went for lunch together, in Roma, or Lomas, or La Zona Rosa (‘the pink zone’). They talked about politics and power the way men with dreams do, with camaraderie and complicity. My father was not a great connoisseur of auto-mobiles, but on one occasion, when he saw one he liked on the street, he exclaimed on its beauty. ‘Well,’ responded the older man, ‘if you join CIA, you’ll be able to afford a car like that.’

My father and my mother, Lee, met that same year. Her father was a diplomat stationed in Mexico City. She had come to visit that summer and had gotten a job as my dad’s secretary. They married in March of 1969. The wedding took place in the Union Church on Reforma. Afterwards, at the reception, the band played mariachi and she danced on the cool patio tiles with my father. When the clinking of glasses rang across the verandah and the long-leaved plants quietly ushered them along the floor, she was able to think serenely about the future, and the way the two of them both seemed to fit together, and the eagerness they had in common. She imagined the beaches they would lie upon, the oceans he would fill with her image while he was travelling — all of it laid out in a neat and glassy panorama. She leaned into my father’s chest. They must have spoken softly to each other. I can hear her giggling, and his deep bass voice, reassuring and comforting. I can also see Robert standing on the sides, happy to see his protégé now, finally, coming into the world.

Soon after, my father and mother boarded an American Airlines flight from Mexico City to Washington. As the wheat fields and purple mountains rolled through his mind, he looked out the window, down at the country he had left but loved, and would leave again and again.

He took classes in Washington, and later at Camp Peary. Within a year, he had been hired by the CIA’s directorate of operations, their clandestine service. He was a case officer. A spy.