CHAPTER 17

Baghdad, 2006

The summer of 2006, when things were at their absolute worst, I was burning through several seasons of 24, the television series about an American special agent named Jack Bauer who worked for a secret government branch called CTU (the Counter Terrorist Unit). Like some kind of supercharged feline, Bauer seemed to have countless lives, and was forever getting out of near-death scrapes with seconds to spare, killing bad guys and saving the world in the process. Bauer was an advocate for torture, too, and when he managed to bring one of the guys in for interrogation, he never hesitated to break an arm or two, affix the electrodes, or beat the perp silly to get the information he needed. In one episode, he simply took out his pistol and shot a man dead in the interrogation room.

The ends always justified the means with Bauer. That was how the world worked, after all, and Bauer was a faithful servant for the good.

Earlier that spring, I had hired a security company in the Green Zone called CTU to provide guards and consultants, usually retired British or American Special Forces types, to look after the Newsweek staff. A couple of them had the same telltale CTU mobile phone ringtones heard on the show.

Almost as soon as I had returned to Baghdad, the Mahdi army launched a full-scale rocket attack on the Green Zone. It lasted several days, and I barricaded myself in Newsweek’s office-home with my CTU security contractor, Jacko. The rockets landed perilously close to our house because it was in the fire path of projectiles aimed at the nearby convention centre, where the parliament met.

One day, early in the morning, a rocket landed on the sidewalk a couple of hundred metres from our house. It killed two Iraqis who worked at a nearby makeshift carwash and happened to be outside at the time. Not long afterwards, at about six in the morning, a rocket scored a direct hit on a house two doors down from us, throwing Jacko and his morning cup of tea straight across the room. It blew a hole in the yard big enough to bury a few bodies in. It shattered 13 windows on our neighbour’s house, blew our kitchen door off its hinges, and broke the lock. We found a piece of its shrapnel in our front yard, like a strange meteorite. It had jagged edges, small protrusions of thin, egg-shell curvatures, and it was layered and delicate like filigree. ‘That’s what’ll kill you,’ Jacko said, studying it. ‘Go right through you and shred your veins.’

I thought about the grenade we had found on Camp Peary as kids, and then put the thing in a drawer. I locked the doors and secured the blast blankets — heavy, leaden shock-absorbing curtains that stretched from floor to ceiling — in front of the windows. I told the staff outside, the guards and drivers, to stay inside their own little protected complex and not to come out, barring an emergency. The whole house was dark. Now and again a blast rumbled out. Sometimes they were close enough to shake the house; other times they seemed to be just distant echoes of thunder. We turned on the television.

For the next few hours, Jacko and I lay on the couch in the living room, distracted from the events outside by Jack Bauer. But I had to get up at least twice every hour to pee, my nerves jittery. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Jacko said each time. ‘Get a grip, bathroom boy.’

Jacko and I worked our way through 16 hours of 24 in 24 hours. Cars were getting blown up. People kept getting killed. Bauer kept saving the day. He was immune to death. He usually killed three or four bad guys during each episode. He had a daughter, but was never able to spend much time with her because the imminent collapse of western civilisation was placing substantial demands on his time. Then she got kidnapped and he saved her, and all was redeemed. For a while, Bauer’s daughter went to work for CTU as well, as an analyst, and together father and daughter fought crime — she from the bowels of CTU’s command centre, and he from the tough streets outside. Terrorists had killed his first wife, which complicated the family dynamic further. Bauer loved his family, but he loved his country more. Or maybe he didn’t love it more, but he was more loyal to it. Maybe Bauer was an emotional cripple, with nothing left to lose. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

Eventually, three days later, a friend flew in and found me on the couch, in the darkness, wearing a T-shirt speckled with potato chips and the same clothes I had been in for three days.

‘You looked like death warmed over,’ he told me later.

Long before the era of Jack Bauer — of 9/11, and terrorists plotting to inject mustard gas or sarin into subway lines, or blow up commercial shopping malls — my father started taking me along on some of his work trips. Out in suburban Michigan, ours was a more prosaic kind of guerrilla theatre. But some of the actors were the same: Arabs, Chinese, gumshoes from the FBI (for whom my father reserved a particular kind of scorn because they were mere policemen, he said, focused exclusively on issues of law and order — the lock-up or liberty — and those were such simple formulas, so inadequate for the world’s complexities).

I knew he worked for the CIA by then, but I didn’t know much more. Our home in Southfield was, I soon realised, a kind of ground zero for the Middle Eastern connection. My father’s number two at the fake insurance office was the mysterious Lebanese man I had met, and although I never got to know him very well, I did come to understand that he was well connected — which was saying something, because in Michigan in those years, half of the miserable, exiled Middle East seemed to have decamped to our bleak northern city.

But there were other interests further afield — bigger fish, perhaps — and they were beginning to take my father to distant locales. We often went to Ohio on these trips. There was a man there whom I later learned was a volunteer access agent for my father, just as my dad had been for Robert in Mexico 20 years earlier. That meant the CIA used him for introductions, which his position and long years in town facilitated. Ohio, of course, was a big military state. The air force had bases and schools there, as well as officer training centres, the air force museum, and plenty of small conservative colleges that attracted students, foreign and domestic, interested in strategic and military affairs.

Ohio also had the Cincinnati Reds, one hell of a good baseball team.

One day my father and I drove down from Detroit. We had a new car, having ditched the old Buick. It was spring, blossomy and humid, allowing us to roll down our windows, breathe, and enjoy being with each other on the road like this. These trips, off on adventures, were the best times with my father.

He told me we were going to see a friend of his who was retired. It was for work, so I should be on my best behaviour. We pulled up to a long, low house in a florid suburb — a Miami Beach transplant in the middle of Ohio. Inside, it was all fuchsia and white leather and feathers; there were ceiling fans and teak panelling and small white dogs underfoot. The man was tall and thin, with well-groomed hair, and he wore slip-on shoes. He had been in the air force, too. His wife, she of shell-hard hair and a perfect smile, lingered in the background.

We made small talk for a while, and then my father and his friend moved into the living room. The wife took my arm to usher me away. She wore lots of make-up and sported a brightly coloured blouse. ‘Would you like to see our porch?’ she asked.

The porch was mostly empty except for a giant cage at one end, which housed a parrot. ‘I’ll be right back,’ she murmured, closing the door on her way out. I sat on a hanging vinyl swing set. My feet just barely touched the floor.

She eventually came back and handed me a drink with a straw and a piece of fruit in it. She led me over to the parrot cage. ‘He talks,’ she said. ‘You can teach him words.’ She said something, and the bird responded gamely with the appropriate answer.

‘Round on the end and high in the middle,’ I said. ‘Oh-hi-oh.’

She giggled.

I peeked through the windows and could see my father and his friend bent over a table, discussing something over spread-out papers. My father laughed, and then quickly turned serious again.

The man’s wife stayed with me for a while and we talked to the parrot, but eventually she left and said that if I wanted more juice I should knock on the door and she’d bring me some. ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ she said, nodding to the vinyl couch, and I did. But the parrot went quiet, and so did I. I kept looking in through the windows to watch my father. He was serious. He had a pen and was drawing something. I could hear the rumble of his deep voice, like long-distance radiowaves coming at me through a pack of wool sheeting — no annunciation, just a steady hum of electricity, connecting his head to mine through all these solids.

The thing of it was that Jack Bauer was forever doing the wrong thing and pissing off the wrong people, and even if his screw-ups were for the right reasons, the net result never seemed to equal out for him in exactly the way he, or we, would have liked. I thought about that day in Cincinnati as I was lying on my couch in a darkened room in Baghdad, watching Jack Bauer shred his life to bits. I thought about that day and others like it because while in most ways my father was nothing like Jack Bauer — no intelligence officer really is — Bauer was an archetype for a man who was profoundly, existentially lonely, willing to sabotage his life in various ways for the praise of those he respects: a few words, a note, a nod of recognition. Saving the world was the ostensible goal, but I always got the sense that it was almost a sideshow compared to the succour of kind words and admiration and respect. As with Bauer, my dad believed in the possibility of doing some measure of good, and wanted to be seen as a purveyor of accuracy to those who adjudicate the moral world. It is astonishing, the myriad ways we can wreck or remake our lives, the ways in which our sacrifices are so disproportionate to the reward.

It wasn’t until years later that I found out what my dad had done, and was doing, on those trips to Cincinnati. My father was interested in a Chinese military officer. This man, Xiang, was in the United States on a scholarship and studying with the US air force. Xiang was a senior-ranking officer in the Chinese air force, and because of this his presence had raised flags with various American government agencies, including the FBI and the CIA. The FBI wanted to surveil Xiang, and arrest him if it could; the CIA wanted to recruit him. My father, in Michigan, was the closest field officer around, and so he took a particular interest in Xiang. The trick was to figure out how to meet him. And this was why we were in the house of the access agent in Ohio.

During these meetings, the two spies devised a plan whereby my father could be casually introduced to Xiang. The plan called for a female FBI agent who would pose as my father’s fiancée and accompany him to baseball game. My father posed as a state department officer working in Washington, DC, who travelled to Cincinnati regularly to visit her. The access agents in Ohio would arrange to take Xiang to the same game. It would be a cultural experience, they’d say. My dad organised for the female FBI agent and himself to be sitting a few rows down from Xiang and the access agents, one of whom was female. During the seventh-inning stretch, the two women would spot each other in the crowd, wave, and agree to meet up later. In this way, my father and Xiang would be thrown together haphazardly. It would be up to my father to take advantage of the situation and make inroads with Xiang.

When the time came, it worked perfectly. My father met Xiang, made friends with him, and the two of them agreed to meet up again later for some other, equally benign activity where they would begin to get to know each other better.

So over the coming months, my father began to cultivate Xiang. In Ohio, and later in New York, where Xiang moved on the next leg of his American tour, the two of them became increasingly friendly. Over time, my father slowly revealed that he would be interested in knowing more about Xiang’s activities with the Chinese air force and, if possible, to know more about what the Chinese military was involved in. As time went on, Xiang came to trust my father, and began to tell him stories.

Xiang was from Beijing and had two children, a boy and a girl. In 1989, when the Tiananmen Square demonstrations began, Xiang’s son had participated in the protests. He was a pro-democracy activist and was soon to be a college student. But he got caught up in the security nets as the secret police and army chased waves of students across the square. In the melee, some overly zealous member of the police or army struck Xiang’s son on the head with a baton. He fell to the ground. He suffered major head trauma, and had to be hospitalised for months. The beating was too much for Xiang to forget.

By the following year, my father and Xiang were meeting often, usually in a shabby Boston motel room where they would talk for hours. By now they were joking with each other. They exchanged stories about their children. My dad showed Xiang pictures of me as a boy, and Xiang did the same of his son. ‘I remember telling him that if anything ever happened to you, if anyone hurt you the way the Chinese police had hurt his son, I would be so unthinkably, so murderously angry,’ he told me once.

One night, Xiang volunteered to provide my father with sensitive information about the Chinese military. They stayed up late into the night, with my father asking as many questions as he could. He took copious notes. I don’t know all that Xiang revealed to him, but the information did provide evidence of Israeli perfidy.

The next morning, my father went into the New York CIA office and filed a cable to Washington. With very little editing, the cable was sent directly to the national security adviser with an ‘urgent’ note attached. That afternoon or the next, the cable was returned to my father with a note from the adviser. ‘Excellent work,’ it read. ‘Congratulations.’

That was all Bauer needed — a nod from the president, say, a quiet thank you. Of course, families need more. They need differently. Spies — real spies, not the Jack Bauer simulacrums — need like the rest of us. But I suppose to be a spy also required that one leave unanswered, or unasked, the question of the profession’s effects on his or her emotional life. Anything else, I realised, could be a serious liability. After all, that’s how foreign agents got to you — by pressing on your weaknesses in exchange for information. That’s what the CIA taught its case officers to do. It must have also taught them how to protect themselves against the same tactics.

On a visit home around this time, I remember going out to dinner with Janet alone one night in Spokane, Washington. She started drinking white wine, several glasses, until she was quite tipsy. She flitted her hair, an old habit, but now the curls were no longer as lustrous — they were straighter and drier. She glanced around the restaurant, trying to piece her thoughts together.

‘You know,’ she said with a sad smile — she wanted me to understand that she didn’t want what she said to be taken badly, because I was his son, after all, and she knew where my loyalties were — ‘he always told me that his work was his work and that it doesn’t affect us, our marriage, or our family. But I don’t think he sees it.’ She looked at me to see if I understood what she was saying. I nodded. So she went on. ‘It’s like he can’t actually see that there’s a carryover. I mean, hello! He’s a spy, for God’s sake!’ She took another swig of her wine glass and fiddled with her food.

‘How do you think it affected you?’ I asked.

She shrugged, because some things don’t need to be said. She laughed. ‘He’s, you know, good at getting people to do what he wants. He’s charming.’

‘He is that.’

‘And he’s so smart.’

‘Do you think it makes us all weird?’ I asked her. ‘I mean, none of us really trust each other.’

She looked at me. ‘Oh, Scott, I hope not,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s just different.’

But I also knew, or felt, anyway, that in Baghdad I was some-how trying to match my father. I sit here all cooped up like this, I thought, watching it all on television one day, trying to awaken it in real life the next.

When I was in high school — not in Michigan but in Virginia, right around the corner from Langley, the CIA headquarters — my father had an alias. Alan something-or-other. He had a driver’s licence that showed him in a moustache and glasses and bore Alan’s name, and I used to spot it now and again on the telephone stand or in the kitchen next to his wallet and keys. I picked it up once and looked closely at the picture. I fingered the card’s plastic edges, examining the watermarks and reading the details.

Height: 6 feet

Weight: 185 pounds

Hair: black

Eyes: brown

But everything else was wrong: the date of birth, the address, a funny kind of dead look in his eyes behind the thick, square bifocals. I remember feeling like an intruder had come into the house and was sitting by the phone, as if waiting for the owner to get home because there was something urgent the two of them needed to discuss.

In 1989, shortly after we had moved to McLean, Virginia, my father pulled me aside and handed me a small card. It was red, white, and blue, and listed the names of several countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Beside each name was a series of letters and numbers. The markings showed the origins of the anonymous diplomatic vehicles that were on constant patrol around the suburbs of northern Virginia. Most diplomats were allowed to drive wherever they wanted; but when they did, they aroused suspicion. If I saw any of those countries’ vehicles nearby, my father said, I should let him know immediately. I carried the card around in my almost bare wallet, next to my social security card and driver’s licence. But I never looked at it or pulled it out, and eventually it grew weathered and torn, until finally it disintegrated and I had to throw it away.

When my father moved to Spain in 1992, we had to pass a battery of psychological tests. I was called in to see a CIA psychiatrist. He sat behind a small desk, a white-shirted, bespectacled little man with a sheaf of papers and a checklist. I had been smoking a lot of dope the week before the test, and my blood was filled with THC. I knew I was going to have to take a blood test, so I just came out with it: I told him I had smoked pot, but he couldn’t tell my dad.

‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘Is this going to change whether we go to Spain?’

‘Anything else?’

‘No. Pot. That’s it.’

He took notes. He didn’t look like a psychiatrist. And he likely wasn’t; he was probably a government interrogator. Maybe he was the same one who issued the polygraph tests my father hated so much. But I was scared he wouldn’t let my parents leave the country because of my indiscretions.

I had to fill out a long questionnaire at home and return it. I answered all the questions and checked all the boxes. What would you do if … ? How do you feel about … ? What is your best … ? What is your favourite … ? And how many … ? And what kind … ? There was a score, but I never knew what it said, or if I passed or failed — or which of those would be worse.

A few days later, I went to pick up my father at Langley. I waited outside, in the parking lot. The building was a giant silver box. It was my first time there. A couple of guards stood behind some bulletproof glass in a hut, but otherwise I saw no people. There were American flags everywhere. Not a piece of litter on the ground. The grass was ultra-green. I turned off the engine and let the radio run. Finally I saw him coming out, walking briskly. I loved the way my father walked; he was as at home in his stride as a gunslinger. But he looked stern. He saw me, but he was sucking on his cheeks in concentration. He slid into the passenger seat and instructed me to drive us to a nearby park. He wanted to talk.

We parked near an open stretch of grass and got out. I knew what was coming. I never should have trusted that interrogator. My dad asked me why I was smoking pot, and I told him it wasn’t as bad as all that.

‘Look,’ he told me, ‘you can smoke it if you want, but if you get into trouble with it, I’m not going to help you out.’

Lying on my dirty couch in Baghdad, watching Jack Bauer beat the world into submission and compliance, I thought about all of those moments with my father and his company. And all of it — the FBI man and his parrot, talking with Janet in Spokane, the CIA psychologist — felt like theatre, an imagined world. And yet it wasn’t. I knew that the work he did was necessary and important. Every country had people like my father — people who protected the rest, sheltered them, and made tremendous sacrifices for some notion of the greater good. But this work took a toll on these people. And as much as they might try to shelter their families from the lives they secretly lived, it was nearly impossible to keep those worlds apart, to keep one safe from the other.

My father was able to contain a huge amount of conflict within himself — more, I think, than most people. It was a tremendous feat. Within the CIA, people like him, who worked as case officers in the clandestine branch, were often referred to as ‘the chosen ones’. This was no accident. They had to be particularly skilled at juggling those razor-thin boundaries where identity shifted into mask and back again. They had to understand people more than they understood themselves, anticipate them, think for them, and feel their way into the dark places no one else could. Psychologically, it was a colossal challenge. They were chosen, cultivated, and groomed by masters of manipulation for lives and careers that would require all of their emotional energy. It was no wonder if their resources could only stretch so far.