CHAPTER 12

Mexico City, 2002

I moved to Mexico when I was 28, to run Newsweek’s bureau. One day soon after I arrived, I took a taxi up the old Toluca highway that rose out of the city. I hoped to find his old house, the one in which the Ivan plot had reached its dramatic denoeument. The road wound past a giant, stadium-sized trash dump over which highrises had been built. There were shopping centres and movie theatres and fast-food joints. An exit ramp led to a cul-de-sac and a gated community. A guard inside a hut, armed with a rifle, peeked out.

At the location I got out of the car and walked around a bit, peering up and down the streets, wondering whether I would recognise his old house immediately, and whether the image in my mind would correspond to what was here, for there appeared to be nothing more than over-developed suburban homes — the blandness of America in a Mexican neighbourhood. I tried to picture the roof my father had clambered onto, trying to spy on the Mexican police. But all I could see were delicately trimmed hedgerows, some hydrangea, and a little blue Opel parked near the guard’s hut. The city extended below, smoggy and expansive. A curtain of rain drifted slowly across a distant hill. The whole megalopolis of over 20 million souls was quiet in the silvery afternoon.

I took out my phone and called my dad at home. He answered at once. ‘I can’t find your old house,’ I said. ‘I think it must have been demolished. Everything here looks new.’

‘Can you see a big house and a little house at the end of the driveway?’ he asked.

I couldn’t. The confluence of so many disparate elements of my life seemed to swirl around me here on this Mexican hilltop. It was the city where my parents had met and then married, where my grandparents had lived, and where my father found his calling — where all of our lives were rooted somehow.

I wandered some more, listening to the static. But the more I looked, the more I realised I was lost: on the wrong side of the highway, or too far up the hill. And then what I knew of the little house — the decorations my mother had put on the walls when she and my father were dating, the comfort and intimacy they had shared there, the happiness I imagined it contained — suddenly overwhelmed me. It was the first house my parents had ever shared as a couple: small, but huge in my imagination. I wanted, suddenly and not entirely consciously, to leave that bit of memory to my imagination alone. I wanted not to find it at all.

‘Well,’ he said.

‘Well.’

Shortly after I moved to Mexico, I met a woman named Sofia. She was a photographer, also working for Newsweek, who had showed up at my house one day with a large portfolio of black-and-white pictures she had taken of Mexican prostitutes. We sat on a patio outside at my house, which was also the office, and flipped through the images. I found myself fawning over them, and, soon enough, over her. She had blonde hair and huge brown eyes that had an overwhelming softness. She was shy and curious and observant, and she beguiled me with her quiet intelligence. Before she left, I got her to agree to see me again.

Sofia was a committed leftist. Her father, Carlos, had been a Stalinist. In 1968, Carlos belonged to an armed guerrilla movement that wanted to overthrow the government. He was often under-ground, hiding in safe houses in Mexico City, or in jungle redoubts where rebel sympathies were strong. He married a young American woman named Gilda, who had studied ancient Mayan civilisation at the University of the Americas in Mexico City during the same period my father taught there. Gilda gave birth to Sofia, their first child, in 1967.

Sofia spoke of her father in vague but reverent tones. I knew he came from a prominent Spanish family that had produced at least one military general loyal to the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Other members of the clan had splintered off. Some became hardened communists, including Carlos’ mother, who had initiated her son into radical politics in Mexico — where they had fled to safety in fear of Franco’s terror.

Sofia told me these things in the backs of ambulances on trips we had started taking around Mexico City with the Red Cross. I wanted to do a story on the medics, and gaining access to their world meant spending a lot of time in ambulances. Soon after I had told Sofia about these trips, she was coming along too. I liked to think this was more for me than the photo opportunities. We spent hours poking our cameras in the wreckage of car crashes, or sneaking around crack-infested slums, or watching medics wash blood off the ambulance floor. We went several times a week, mostly at night. We made out on seats in the back, and the medics sniggered and made fun of us, and I imagined them to be jealous. She laughed when I sang along to the English pop songs on the radio, and teased me that I knew all the words. I don’t know why it was so comforting to explore with her the misery those trips seemed to yield — broken bodies and drug-addled crack whores, beaten wives and alcoholic gang fights. Maybe it was because I had just come back from Afghanistan, and so the wretchedness of what we saw seemed reassuring and familiar. It made sense, seeking refuge in other people’s sorrows. And it was surprisingly easy to fall in love surrounded by the ostracised, the wounded, and the dead.

One day Sofia told me that her father had been imprisoned for four years when she was young, starting in 1968. Student leaders much less strident than he had reportedly been thrown out of planes at 7000 metres over the Gulf of Mexico, or shot in the head in dark alleyways, or beaten to within inches of their lives with lead pipes. Others had vanished. Even now, over 30 years later, those years were still an open wound for her. She had been raised on legends of her father hiding in jungles, running from the law. But she never saw his ginger hair and pale eyes and moustache for herself until she was four years old.

Mexico, in those months, was entering a process of self-examination, and a deep sense of recrimination about its past. The same month I moved there, in June 2002, the government of then-president Vicente Fox announced it would open and de-classify thousands of documents from Mexico’s spy and security services from the 1960s and 1970s, an era which had become known as ‘the dirty war’. The killings and disappearances of left-wing radicals, students, and intellectuals in Mexico had continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but an aura of intrigue remained around the year 1968, as if time and history had simply stopped then; as if everything that came afterwards only served as an epilogue.

I had not expected to see myself in that history, and yet here it surrounded me. The campus of the University of the Americas, where Sofia’s mother had been a student, was under constant scrutiny. Nineteen sixty-eight was significant because it was the year of the Tlatelolco massacre, on 2 October — and now, a quarter of a century later, it served as the lightning rod around which journalists and investigators began to swarm.

Carlos’s history had shaped Sofia in profound ways. Because he was a renegade, I imagined Carlos being interrogated and tortured by thugs from the Mexican secret services. As I began to picture his life, I also saw how closely it could have hewed to my father’s life, there at the university, among the students and the demonstrators, in the intrigue that flowed so powerfully through the city and its people. He was a silhouette in reverse, a shadow my father could easily have been chasing.

Carlos didn’t seem to be doing much in particular in 2002. Some-times, his name would come up innocuously in my conversations with Mexican politicians, and it opened doors. But Sofia revealed so little about him that I soon hesitated to ask. Yet everything about her seemed to lead to one place: an eerie Mexican past filled with regret that no one wanted to talk about.

My only hint was that my father had been there, too, on the other side of Carlos’s world. And now, the idea that he knew more than he had told me began to grow within me, as if I had planted it. Had I buried a seed of mistrust years earlier — mistrust of him and his motives, and perhaps mistrust of my own gut feelings? Was it now coming to life? An unintended consequence of, or unintended lesson from, my childhood was that what may appear to be so is not, in fact, just so. That general sense of distrust was never meant to be focused on my own family, and yet here I was, questioning my father. It was difficult to avoid. I didn’t want to think of him that way, but I was unable to keep my suspicions in check.

One night, sitting in my darkened house in Coyoacan, I summoned up courage and called him. I was halfway through a bottle of red wine already. But I found alcohol made it much easier to talk to him, given how treasonous I felt. That I was even considering whether he had told me the truth about something so important made me hate myself. I can’t recall how I sounded when I asked him where he was the night of the Tlatelolco massacre, only that I felt like a police officer asking for an alibi: ‘Where were you on the night in question?’ And his answer was almost immediately suspicious to me. It was a long time ago, he said, and there had been so many protests, so many riots and demonstrations. He was having difficulty remembering which night that was, and so I reminded him that it was at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, that thousands of students had gathered in the early afternoon and entered the plaza, only to be locked inside by tanks that were stationed at the entrances, and then mowed down by government soldiers rampaging about inside. It must have been a bloody, chaotic scene, I said. Did he remember anything like that?

No. What followed was a vague description of an uneventful night.

I was nervous throughout the conversation, unable to shake the idea that I had stumbled upon something he was hiding. I wanted to believe him. I had by now accepted that selective non-disclosure was part of the deal with him; he couldn’t tell me everything, and I didn’t need him to. But this wasn’t as much about information as loyalty. I had always wanted to believe I came first. But what happened, I wondered, to spies when loyalty to their loved ones conflicted with their loyalty to their masters? Who, in the end, would win? Whose loyalty was more important?

So you weren’t there, I thought. You weren’t there, and didn’t see anything, right? And I don’t have to worry anymore about who my father is, or what he’s capable of. Am I going to have to dig this out of you? Am I going to have to ask you again, later on?

But disbelief and mistrust are so corrosive. How was it possible to believe so selectively — to know that his personal iteration with me was more truthful than what he told the world? Somehow, before all this questioning, that had been okay. But now I felt that the whole concept was beginning to unravel for me, to come unhinged. Spies had two masters — their families and their epic secret. I felt like a counterintelligence officer — searching for the mole within my own organisation, the lie at the core of myself or my father, the fundamental untruth, the spy within.

On the afternoon of 2 October 1968, thousands of students had begun their march towards the city’s dingy Tlatelolco neighbour-hood. It was a hazy, warm afternoon, the low sun casting needles of light across the rain. The protests had gathered such momentum that the people now thronged the streets by the thousands. Many of them carried red carnations, which symbolised the tears Mary shed upon Jesus’ crucifixion, and thus, the sins of the world. There were mothers and fathers, children, brothers and sisters of students, the old and the young alike. They chatted as they headed toward the site of the protest, a spot where archeologists had discovered Aztec ruins and a pyramid. At that place almost 500 years earlier, on 13 August 1521, Hernan Cortes, encountering local resistance to his arrival, had killed some 40,000 Aztecs in an epic battle. That day, as the protestors walked towards the ancient square, some of them might have noticed Mexican Army units gathering nearby.

During another conversation, long after my drunken inter-rogation, my father would tell me he was in his office at the university that morning, finishing up some paperwork. It was a Wednesday. When a journalist friend came by asking to use his tripod, my father, always up for a new experience, said he would come along to the rooftops himself. Later that afternoon, as dusk was beginning to settle, he apparently sat overlooking the plaza as thousands of students began to flow inside and chant, to raise their voices against the state.

Outside the plaza walls, the Mexican Army was gathering its forces. Earlier that summer, President Ordaz had authorised Mexican special operations troops operating outside the city to fire upon students whenever necessary, and without explicit permission from higher headquarters. The same mood of permissiveness prevailed that evening. Outside the arena, Mexican Army tanks had taken up positions. Soldiers sat lazily astride their hulks and cleaned their bayonets as they waited. They had received orders not to allow the protest to take place at all.

So, when around 5.00 p.m. protestors began to arrive by the thousands, the army didn’t wait long to move in. Cordoning off the entrances and exits, and securing them with tanks, armed soldiers advanced into the crowd.

At the same time, about a dozen officers from a civilian unit called the Olympic brigade took up positions on the roof of a nearby apartment building called the Chihuahua complex. These men each wore a white glove on one hand.

Suddenly, a flare went up. Shots were fired. The first bodies fell inside the square itself. The shooting seemed to be coming from all quarters at once. Some witnesses reported that it originated from the government soldiers. Others said that the first shots were clearly coming from the roof of the Chihuahua complex, and still others that students armed with automatic rifles on different rooftops were the instigators.

Wherever the origin, the shooting was intense, and very quickly erupted into a full-scale riot. Soon, bodies were lying in pools of blood inside and outside the plaza, as squads of soldiers rampaged through the crowds, beating protestors and bystanders indiscriminately. Stick-wielding men dressed in civilian clothes beat people senseless and left them to die, while rifle fire rained down on the crowd from on high. The trucks that arrived in the aftermath reportedly carried the dead away to secret locations. In the years to come, it was said that pilots had taken to the skies with some of the bodies, flying out high over the Yucatan Peninsula, opening the cargo doors, and letting the bodies drop. The dead, it would later be said, were uncountable.

My father, it seemed to me, was on those same rooftops that night. But he had told me he left before the shooting started. I began digging for information. I scoured the internet for documentation about the dirty war, and came across a large, recently released trove of memos from American officials on the National Security Archive website (the Archive was a Washington, DC think tank that made freedom of information requests to the CIA, FBI, and other national security organisations). Another search turned up a memo from the American embassy that listed some 15 differing — and sometimes flatly contradictory — versions of what had happened at Tlatelolco, all from either ‘generally reliable sources’ or ‘trained observers’. I also searched in bookstores for information about the period, and talked to older Mexicans about what they remembered.

Had my father been there after all? Was he just not telling me? Had he, simply and conveniently, forgotten?

One night, over dinner with Sofia, I asked innocently what she knew about the CIA in Mexico. I hadn’t yet told her what my dad did. And she said that her grandmother, the political refugee from Spain, had often told her stories about CIA spies working with the government to abduct and maybe even kill troublesome students. There was certainly some precedent: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Central America was where the CIA’s dirty tricks had been most visible.

The more I heard these things, the more anxious I became. But much as I entertained these ideas, I chastised myself for even considering them. There was simply no way that my father could have been party to something that would have resulted in a massacre, or anything even remotely like it. Everything in me revolted at the idea. But his recollection of that night didn’t seem to square with every recorded version on the public record. It was during those weeks, when I started going back to things my father had told me, that I discovered for myself Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the poet whose travails had ushered my father into the CIA. A poem called ‘Later’ caught my eye.

Oh what a sobering,

What a talking-to from conscience afterwards:

The short moment of frankness at the party

And the enemy crept up.

But to have learnt nothing is terrible,

And peering earnest eyes are terrible

Detecting secret thoughts is terrible

In simple words and immature disturbance

This diligent suspicion has no merit.

The blinded judges are no public servants.

It would be far more terrible to mistake

A friend than to mistake an enemy.

I wondered about my suspicion and its merit, as Yevtushenko warned. But I was also face to face with a woman who I cared for, whose personal history seemed to me to be evidence that what was known or admitted about Mexico in 1968 was only a fraction of the truth. It seemed to me clear that there was another, much more disturbing truth to be ferreted out. I didn’t want to make mistakes, as Yevtushenko had said. But I didn’t want to be blinded, either.

Others seemed to feel the same. All that fall, the papers were filled with stories of how the noble prosecutor’s office in Mexico City was going after generals, spies, policemen, and ex-presidents who had been involved in the events of 1968 to finally put to rest one of the worst chapters in Mexico’s history. The prosecutor was hoping to indict some of them for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide. But the generals weren’t having it. That October, in an interview with the Mexican daily newspaper La Jornada, a retired general named Alberto Quintanar said, ‘What fucking dirty war? This was a clean war. We were ordered by the president to cleanse the country of Communism.’ And what Latin American country, I thought, had ever undertaken such a vast and purifying task without the help of the CIA?

I became increasingly wary of my father as the autumn came and went. Images of him 30 years earlier, crouching on a rooftop with a trained sniper, crowded my mind. At first it had been difficult to imagine, but once I made the initial leap it suddenly became much easier — and also much more frightening. Still, I didn’t know exactly what the CIA’s role had been. Had they been working with the military? Or were they just watching from the sidelines, gathering intelligence? Perhaps they were secretly working with the students in a bid to overthrow the 50-year-old sclerosis of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party with some-thing even better.

My father had been sympathetic to the protesting students, he had said. But he decried communists and Stalinists — all killers, according to him. Stalinists, in particular, as Yevtushenko had pointed out, had killed millions. And Sofia’s father had been one of them — dedicated to revolution by any means necessary. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine my father involved in an operation to bring people like Carlos down. No matter how much I rebelled at the idea, I couldn’t shake it. In those weeks, that wall of secrecy grew and grew, and wondering about what horrors lay on his side of it began to consume me.

I went to visit him over Christmas that year. One night, we sat at the kitchen table. On the refrigerator was a CIA magnet. In the hall was a CIA cap I had bought him somewhere. There was a mug, a T-shirt, pins, a coaster — our house was filled with the Agency’s knick-knackery.

I told him that I had met a woman whose father had been imprisoned in Mexico the same year he was recruited. He asked for her name. He pondered the information. ‘It sounds familiar,’ he said eventually.

‘Did you ever meet him?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

I asked about Sofia’s mother, who had been a student at his school, but he didn’t seem to recognise that name. I told him I wanted to write something about the two of them, Carlos and him, and the two of us, their children. ‘Sofia could make a movie,’ I exclaimed.

But the enthusiasm he usually showed for my projects didn’t seem to extend to this.

The coincidences that bothered me most were the proximity of our parents and the symmetry between their lives during the years of conflict. The possibility that the Ivan plot, and Robert’s careful ministrations of my father, had extended to other initiatives I’d never heard about was now foremost on my mind.

Back in Mexico, I began to sift through more of the documents from the online National Security Archive. There was speculation among American officials that the government had allowed the Tlatelolco rally to take place in order to round up suspected agitators in one place and arrest them or mow them down. The pathways of two lives — Carlos’s imprisonment and my father’s recruitment — seemed to be dovetailing. And there was no getting around the worst fear of all: that my father had played a role in the imprisonment of Sofia’s father.

That autumn, I filed several requests under Mexico’s Freedom of Information Act. In the space reserved for subjects, I wrote my father’s name. And then I waited for a response.

Meanwhile, my father spent the autumn in Afghanistan. He gave me regular updates. He was doing ‘propaganda work’, he said, which involved helping the Afghan government to craft and deliver its message of strength, tolerance, and unity with greater appeal and efficiency. Propaganda, he told me, was a misunderstood word. In its true sense, it simply meant the dissemination of information. To me, it was a distinctly dirty word — the great obstacle for journalists, the ubiquitous tool of governments and bureaucracies. The creators of propaganda were the enemy. They were worse than the individuals who peddled it. The latter, at least, may have been brainwashed. But the message itself, when it smacked of the Big Lie, was always the most revolting presence in the room precisely because it could not be ignored, ever. It had to be investigated, cognised, rebutted, and rehashed, and still it managed to return in some other form.

I looked it up just the same. It came from the Latin: congregatio de propaganda fide. Congregation for propagation of the faith.

One day, on a reporting trip, I was standing in a splendid hotel room in Baja, Mexico, looking out at an infinity pool and the blue waters of the Pacific when my phone rang. The number didn’t register. I answered, and there was a long pause. I heard the static of deep, long distance.

‘Hello? … Hello?’

‘Salaam alaikum,’ came my father’s voice eventually. The joy there was unmistakable. ‘Guess where I am, Scotty?’ I didn’t have to answer. ‘Khost,’ he said. He was beaming; I could hear it.

He said he was standing on the roof of the special forces base. I remembered the craggy men I had seen there a year earlier: long-haired, bearded operators with cargo pants and M6 assault rifles. They were the men who came before my father. And now my father was one of them. ‘I’m on the roof,’ he said. ‘The reception’s better.’

I knew it was. My roof; my country.

He was calling me from a satellite phone, as I had called him so many times when I was there. I asked him if he was carrying a gun and he said yes, a 9mm pistol, but he had never used it, which came as a relief. I imagined him standing there with his pistol on his belt and an Afghan pakol on his head and I could see what he was seeing exactly: the pink and blue mountains and the dust on the plains, the low scrub hills, eucalyptus trees, and the roadside ditches where the sewage water lay stagnant.

The Afghans called him ‘white beard’, he said, a sign of respect. Because he was older and his beard had filled out handsomely and properly, he could walk among them with at least that sympathy on his side, something that I had never been able to do. He was doing some interesting work; he couldn’t say too much, but the men he was with were ‘really neat guys’. He told me they went out on a long patrol, hunting for an insurgent lair. Every now and again, the Taliban would lob a mortar their way. ‘They always miss,’ he assured me.

Even as I wondered about what had really happened in Mexico decades ago, I listened to my father tell me how he was meeting all sorts of Afghans, befriending them and trying to help, and I believed him without hesitation. His enthusiasm and exuberance were resounding. I thought his reasons were right. I had spent time in Afghanistan, and had seen America’s mistakes up close. But part of me still clung to the notion that it would be a better place if my dad were allowed to breathe his life and his sense of right into it.

For several months, my father travelled back and forth from Afghanistan. By the spring of 2003, he was back in Kabul, and he had been put in charge of psy-ops for the whole country. His career was coming full circle. The chief of the station, whom my dad liked and respected, had once been a student of his at The Farm. He also befriended an Afghan who became a tutor and, ultimately, a friend.

Shortly after, he started taking regular trips out to Bagram Air Base, where much of the American military was based, and where a vast prison network had been set up to hold the ‘detainees’ that the Pentagon was insisting were a continued threat to America’s national security. He had started talking to Taliban prisoners, he said. But he didn’t call it an interrogation. He liked the prisoners, and he felt sorry for them. Their captivity made him deeply angry. The overriding philosophy of the war — if you aren’t with us, you’re against us — was antithetical to his beliefs. It placed him in an uncomfortably difficult position.

During those months, my father took a special interest in several men who had once been influential in Afghanistan. One of these was a man whom we’ll call Abdul Malek. When the Taliban government had been in power, he had been one of its more thoughtful representatives. Like the Taliban spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, as well as the president, Hamid Karzai, Malek was an ethnic Pashtun. But unlike so many of the Taliban rank-and-file, Malek was a moderate. Over the years he had consistently urged Mullah Omar to reject the steady charm campaign staged by wealthy Arab Al Qaeda figures like Osama bin Laden. Malek made the case to Mullah Omar early on that the Taliban should kick the Arabs out of the country, lest their alliance bring down the wrath of the west. But Mullah Omar was a simple man, and he believed that the Muslim Arabs deserved the hospitality that the Taliban were in a position to offer. So he rejected Malek’s counsel.

After 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, Malek, like many other senior Taliban figures, fled to Pakistan. During the siege of Kandahar in 2002, Malek sent a message to US forces through an intermediary — he wanted to surrender, and work with the US alliance and the emerging Afghan government to restore peace. A meeting was arranged. Malek returned to Afghanistan, where he was put in touch with a CIA official named Al, who would become a close friend of my father’s. Al told Malek that the US wanted to work together with him, and would not incarcerate him.

At the same time, the US military, having learned of Malek’s arrival, asked to take custody of him. As it was war time, they had primacy. They said they only wanted to talk to him briefly about tactical issues, but once they had him in their grasp, they kept him. Malek was moved to a prison at Bagram Air Base, outside of Kabul, where he was kept alongside hardened Al Qaeda prisoners — exactly the kind of people he had once urged Mullah Omar to abandon. There he lingered for over a year.

My father entered Malek’s life about halfway through that time. My dad was convinced of the merits of Al’s basic argument, that Malek represented a moderate wing of the Taliban regime with which it was possible and desirable to negotiate. Al and my father began to lobby hard to secure Malek’s release from Bagram. But it was slow going, partly because Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had taken a keen interest in the case, and was adamantly opposed to any kind of settlement with a senior Taliban figure. At one point, the Pentagon ordered that Malek be shipped off to Guantanamo. The US military put Malek on a plane, but Al learned of it and managed to intervene just in time. Malek was ordered to be removed from the plane during a refuelling stop in Greenland, and was returned to Afghanistan.

One day, my father met a young American soldier working at the prison who had gotten to know Malek well. She was distraught by his treatment. She had taken a keen liking to him, escorting him to the prison exercise yard whenever possible, including when she had time off, just to lift his spirits and let him have fresh air. They played checkers together regularly. She saw him as a terribly sincere and violated man. She told my father that Malek’s hair was starting to fall out, and that he was slowly losing hope. My father passed the message along.

Malek and my father met one day at Bagram Air Base, on the day that he was to be released. My father wound his way past the identity checks at the prison, which the Soviets had built as an aeroplane-repair facility, to the second floor lounge area, from where it was possible to peer down into the ‘pens’ where the detainees were held. He was escorted to a small cubicle to wait. Malek eventually came in. He had lost weight while in captivity. He wore a round cap with a scarf draped over it.

Malek was eager to see his family. My father gave him a Thuraya satellite phone, and he used it to call home. My dad also arranged for a family reunion. Without telling his boss, he had flown down to Kandahar in a small plane and picked up the family — two small children and Malek’s wife. On the flight back to Kabul, my father walked up and down the aisles handing out candy and nuts to the kids. He winked at them. Three were shy, but one of them stared back at him intently. My father winked and made funny faces at the child until he started to mimic them back. None of the family had ever flown before, and my father arranged for the kids to visit the cockpit. I pictured him on the plane with the kids, and I could see perfectly how he would have been able to disarm them. He had done the same with me when I was a child — winking, teasing, and smiling until I played along. He had always told me that you could never be angry if you were smiling or laughing, and I was sure he had been able to allay those kids’ fears, even without words.

The reunion took place at the airport in Kabul. ‘It was completely overwhelming,’ he told me later. He teared up as he told me the story. For him, it was a simple equation: a father reuniting with his sons after years apart. I knew he had put himself in the father’s shoes and felt the longing, the missed opportunities; felt everything human about the man he had been sent to inform upon. This was but one effort by concerned Afghans to bring about peace and reconciliation in 2002. But they were systematically turned aside by zealots in the Bush administration, as well as by Al Qaeda, which was alienated from the Afghan public and from the Taliban.

My father is a committed atheist. He is among the righteous defenders of freedom, the propagandists of the patriotic faith. My dad may not believe in God, but his belief in good, and the propensity of evil to disrupt it, is undiminished by a lack of religious faith. Somehow, my father reconciled a disbelief in absolutes with a life lived by the rules the absolutes created. He believed in evil, and positioned himself on what he thought to be the opposite side. But to do that, he had to become intimate with both.

There was, in Mexico, another man who had a connection to my father’s past. Robert, my father’s early mentor at the CIA, had a son, and that son had followed his father into the business — and was based in Mexico City. One night, he invited me out for drinks with another CIA man and their two wives. It was late when we met, and we sat outside on a patio drinking whisky and smoking cigars. I felt a thrill to be in their company; it was notoriously difficult as a journalist to get access to spies, and I felt that my father had made it easier, opened up this door for me.

Both men’s wives were from South Asian countries. They were pretty, unassuming women who seemed to accept their husbands’ jobs with what I thought was a great deal of sanguinity. As we sat down to talk, the women disappeared quietly into the back room. That was also part of the game. Conversations with men like these — spies — are from the start an exercise in self-restraint, a game whose sides are apparent to everyone. If I asked a question, it had to be with the assumption that they could only say so much. Relishing the secrecy of it all, of what they could and couldn’t say, was part of the game, too, and one had to demonstrate a certain degree of decorum and respect for the tradition.

During the conversation, they exchanged knowing glances now and then, as if weighing the options of disclosure in silent, telepathic communication. A look here, a smirk there — all of it a carefully orchestrated dance that was, I admit, incredibly seductive. I could see my father in me in that moment, sitting in Mexico just like this, with men just like this, plotting their subtle takeover of whatever situation called for their attention. I wanted to be swept up by it, too. I waited for them to try and recruit me, but it never came. I don’t know what I would have done if it had.

As a journalist, there was plenty I wanted to ask the two of them, and I did. But I was more curious about what it had been like for the son of my father’s friend, growing up in the CIA as I had. I suspected that there were a fair number of spies’ children who went into the family business, but there were many, many more that did not. What was the difference between us? This man — I’ll call him Sam — had had a real cloak-and-dagger childhood. At one point his father had been posted in an important Eastern Bloc country. The family had standing instructions that if ever he didn’t come home by a certain time at night, they were all to hurry to a neighbour’s house and wait there for further directions. It meant that something bad had happened — he had been kidnapped or arrested or detained. Perhaps he was dead. There was no telling where the danger could come from in those days of the Cold War. But it was worth it, he said. His father had been partly responsible for one of the most important defections of the Soviet era. It was a huge accomplishment. I could see that. I could also see how compelling it would be to want to replicate it.

I asked Sam if he had enjoyed growing up in that environment. ‘I guess I did,’ he said, ‘or I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.’

Maybe I was mistaken — it was late, and I had been drinking — but I was startled at what I thought was a look of anger that seemed to flash across his face.

The night had grown colder, and we bundled up against it. The other man was silent. I didn’t know what to say. Sam’s wasn’t the answer I would have chosen had I been posed the same question. But I didn’t know what his past meant for him, and I couldn’t probe any further. I had gone far enough.

I may have commented it must be exciting, or thrilling, to work in their jobs because the mood turned jovial again after that. Anyway, Sam soon sipped his whisky and leaned back in his chair, and all seemed normal. Soon their politics came out. They were conservative. They said I was in the wrong business, and the media had it all wrong for the most part. They talked about bombing Al Jazeera because it was a propaganda machine for Al Qaeda.

Here we were, two sons of the CIA, and yet we had such different worldviews. My father had always imparted to me a judicious, temperate view of the world and of other people. Journalists were friends — or at least they were meant to be. I felt alienated from these men, who toiled in the temple of American intelligence alongside my father.

Maybe it was uncomplicated: there was good and evil in the world and it made sense to be on the right side of that equation. If they believed the sides were so sharply drawn, how could they take any other position? It was a compelling argument, especially in those days, a year after 9/11. But definitions of good and evil sometimes seemed so malleable as to be meaningless. Because for many people, including the woman I was beginning to love, the CIA was on the wrong side of that equation. Organisations being what they are — bureaucratic, amoral, and subject to the banal grind of the bottom line — that certainly made sense. But what of the people who made up those organisations? Were they more susceptible to becoming predators in the service of their jobs? Or would they simply be the first victims? Either way, they would always be the first to carry on the message to the next generation. They were, indeed, the propagandists of the faith.

In the following weeks, as I continued to dig into the National Security Archive, I discovered that most of the information that had subsequently emerged about Tlatelolco came from ‘raw’ and ‘unfinished’ reporting from the CIA’s covert office — which is to say the Mexico City station, with whom my father was in close contact back then. According to a confidential CIA memo released in 2002, students were the first to fire shots at Tlatelolco. I shivered when I read the description penned by officers at the CIA station — my father’s friends:

The outbreak of rioting in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas which commenced at about 1800 hours was considered to be under control at 1915 hours, although as of 0000 hours on 3 October intermittent firing continued. A senior officer counted eight dead students and six dead soldiers, but there were many more fatalities. A nearby Red Cross installation had one hundred twenty-seven wounded students and thirty wounded soldiers, but the majority of wounded soldiers had been taken to the military hospital. The general officer commanding a paratroop battalion that was engaged in the encounter received a bullet wound to the chest, and he is not expected to survive. The first shots were fired by the students who had taken up positions in the Edificio Chihuahua, an apartment building in the plaza. Some of the students were in possession of automatic weapons. Army troops who later entered this building discovered many weapons and considerable quantities of ammunition. An American expressed the opinion that this was a premeditated encounter provoked by the students.

The last sentence gripped me. Who was this American?

One night Sofia and I decided to go out for dinner. She had asked me to get dressed up, so I put on a jacket and shiny shoes, and doing so felt something like adulthood. After we arrived at the restaurant, we started ordering shots of tequila, which was something we had always loved to do together. Soon the table was littered with little shot glasses. We were drunk and, looking at the table, the stout cups seemed almost comical to me.

I thought I had to tell her that night; I thought I owed it to her. I was scared and excited, and though it didn’t occur to me then, I realise now that what I felt must have been something like what my father felt when he told me. I wanted this disclosure to bond us, but it had to be done in the right way. There had to be complicity, not coercion. I knew there was an element of betrayal in what I was about to tell her. So I ordered one more shot, raised my glass to her, and leaned in over the table.

‘I have something to tell you,’ I said. And I whispered my secret to her.

She began to laugh. It sounded forced and overly loud, a persistent, cackling exhortation that shuddered out of her mouth and lay between us.

‘Que?’ She squinted at me with incredulity. ‘What?’

I told her again: that my father had been a CIA spy, recruited in Mexico City in 1968.

She looked down at her plate, confused. Her eyes were rolling as if they had become momentarily unhinged, and somehow, in my drunken state, I thought she was attracted by what I had said. In fact, she was scared, but I didn’t know that yet.

For a long moment we both just sat there, unsure of how to proceed. I wanted the moment to build to more intimacy, but it seemed to be slipping away instead.

To cover our unease, we kept on drinking tequila, ordering shot after shot, and each one brought more kisses and more declarations of love, and with them, more hollowness. A couple at a table next to ours kept watching us. We grew louder and more frenzied. The waiters brought more food, more tequila. We bought a bottle of wine, then another. When she went to the bathroom, I looked out at the room with drunken confidence, waiting for her return, the woman I had wanted to win. But when she did, she crumpled into her seat with a deflated look. She looked distant and troubled. She smiled, but not with her usual wide-mouthed grin. Instead, it was a half-smile. And she looked at me with pity.

Then she began to cry, and I knew I had waited too long to tell her. I asked her to talk about it with me, but she refused. She said she needed to think about what I had told her. She was kind and gentle, but also distant.

The next day, we went for a walk and she was quiet. At lunch she sat silently, playing with her food and shaking her head. When I asked what was wrong, tears began to roll down her face.

Afterwards, we wandered through rows of stunted and dusty hedges in a tree-lined park called Los Viberos near my house. She rolled a joint, and the smoke drifted into the grey day. On the way back to my house, she stayed close to the walls. She studied the cracks in the pavement to avoid speaking, and left me at the door.

‘I’m sorry,’ I pleaded with her. ‘I didn’t know it would upset you so much.’

Later she called, but we didn’t say much. I didn’t know what she could be imagining. I had revealed my family secret to many people, and had been doing it slowly, carefully, for many years, but that was the first time it had ever hit me with any kind of force. Sofia’s response wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to a vague and undefined threat, and it wasn’t simply ideological or naïve. Her fear was rooted in her personal history, the arrest of her father and his absence for the first years of her life. The CIA had likely been involved in the arrests, the kidnappings and disappearances and deaths of Mexicans. Yes, it was true, so had the Soviet Union, and so had various corrupt governments, and militias and thugs, and all sorts of random assortments of people. But none of them had quite the mystique, the power, or the backing that the CIA had, and for that reason she was well within her rights to be suspicious. I wasn’t one of ‘them’, but I had committed the sin of omission, and pro-longed the truth for long enough that my motives became suspicious.

But just a few days later, Sofia and I were in a jeep on a work assignment, climbing up verdant slopes into the maze of palms and long grasses and cloudy forest canopies of Chiapas. Our nerves were still raw since my disclosure about my father. I knew she was having trouble digesting it. I had miscalculated badly.

When my father had told me about his work, back in that Michigan mini-mall, I had been almost giddy with happiness, so relieved to discover that everything I had been imagining had a source, and that I was part of something bigger. The fact that it came from a man I loved and admired had made it more powerful. He had chosen to induct me into his world, and I had been able to accept his challenge. In hindsight it almost seemed like a rite of passage, and so far I had succeeded at navigating its treachery.

I had tried to do the same thing with — or to — Sofia. Maybe it was because I loved her, and wanted to meld the worlds we came from together in a way that made personal and historical sense, but I thought I could induct her into my world the way my father had inducted me into his. I had failed. All I had managed to do was isolate and terrify her, and tell her that a chapter of her past she thought closed had now been reopened — and not just by anyone, but by someone to whom she was getting close. This was how she felt as we sat in that jeep, getting further and further away from the safety of the known world.

We were working on a story that involved spending some time in territory controlled by a leftist rebel leader named Marcos, whose exhortations to revolution had galvanised a population of margin-alised indigenous people and turned them into a potent political force in the mid-1990s. Marcos lived in a more neutralised universe now. Mexican president Vicente Fox’s government had margin-alised him; there were rumours that he had even been bought off by Mexican intelligence. His area of influence had shrunk to a few villages in an autonomous zone deep within the jungle, surrounded by Mexican Army patrols, and camps where every major artery inside had become as tight as a US border crossing. It resembled a war zone with an endangered zoo creature stuck inside.

In the back seat of our jeep was Daniel, a priest who had agreed to help us out. As we drove, Daniel asked me what kind of journalism I did, and I told him all sorts.

‘You don’t understand the history down here, what we’ve lived through in Latin America,’ Sofia shot at me with a spit of anger, as if I had been partly responsible for the continent’s woes. ‘Every single war, every single conflict that has come here, America has had its bloody hands all over it.’

She talked about Guatemala, and the 200,000 people who had died or gone missing in the civil war that had erupted after the CIA had helped to put a right-wing strongman in power. She railed on about Chile and Argentina and Panama and Nicaragua. I was ignorant of the facts, she said. I didn’t realise the nefarious things my government was doing. I might even be complicit.

I shot back lamely that communism was worth fighting, but I was outmatched in that car and didn’t push it. I was suddenly more unsure of what I believed than I had been in a long time. I had been wrong about the effect my father’s life might have on her, so maybe I was wrong about other things, too. The war with Iraq was looming, and even there I found profound resistance to ideas I took for granted. I didn’t necessarily believe Saddam Hussein was going to develop a nuclear bomb, but I didn’t discount the possibility that he would do something else, something terrible and deadly. But even this, Sofia countered — presciently, it turned out, but at the time with little more than the conviction of her story and the family history that overshadowed everything else for her.

‘Weapons of mass destruction,’ she scoffed. ‘Please.’

But she also seemed to be saying that the revolution her father was fighting had never really ended. We were right in the middle of it, in fact. Couldn’t I see that?

Several days later, back in Mexico City, I found another CIA memo. This one said:

Several trained observers at the scene reported that the encounter was a premeditated provocation by the students, who apparently were well armed. Student strike leaders, perhaps believing they had already won a significant victory in their reoccupation of the national university, after the troops withdrew, pledged to continue the campaign against the government and broadened their demands. They now appear determined to try to force cancellation of the Olympics, which they recognize as of the utmost importance to the government.

I thought about my father again, on that rooftop 30 years earlier, imagining Ivan the communist twitch with discomfort as his plan to infiltrate the university came unravelling before him. And then I pictured once again those ‘trained observers’ peering down on the slaughter from their rooftop perches above the plaza. And the two images seemed to splice together, the one on top of the other, so seamlessly it gave me chills.