CHAPTER 19

New Hampshire, 2006

I often asked my mother about my father. She was reluctant, at first, to discuss my dad too much because she felt a certain amount of loyalty to him. The failure of their marriage was theirs to share. And my mother took responsibility for her part.

I suspected that the long years spent living in a world of secrets had taken a toll on my father. I didn’t know exactly how, though. But my mother had wondered about it too. And I wondered how it had affected her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘he was a commercial officer.’ We were sitting in her family cottage. My aunt, Linda, was there too.

‘He wasn’t. He was a spy,’ I protested.

She nodded and looked down, picking at her cuticles. Somehow it seemed necessary to her, even in hindsight, that he be both.

Like all of us, my mother sometimes lied; hers were especially about my father. These were not harmful lies, or malicious ones, or even intentional in any meaningful way. They were simply the result of the way things were. To change just one word in a sentence of your past can change everything. Between us, there was — and still is — an endless reckoning of how to do it.

My mother came from a family of diplomats. She had been well drilled in the art of adaptation. It was a family virtue; rigidity was a cardinal sin. She had accepted the news of my father’s recruitment into the CIA as a government bureaucrat’s daughter might, with great joy and excitement. Her father had been a real state department officer. And my mother and her sister had grown up all around the world, like me.

After she and my father were married in Mexico, over the long summer of 1969, when her friends were wearing flowers in their hair and smoking pot, my father went to Washington, DC for interviews and then, after he was accepted, instruction and indoctrination. My mother took to the change willingly. As his wife, she would come to help my father in his principal task: identifying and recruiting Soviets overseas. In the summer of 1971, they left the United States for India on his first foreign assignment. They flew to San Francisco, then to Hawaii and Hong Kong, and finally landed in Calcutta at 3.00 one morning.

At the social events she attended, while graciously playing the role of the pretty young wife, my mother carried out other, less obvious duties. She assessed Soviets for their potential to become defectors. My mother had very little in the way of training — she brought no specific knowledge about what a good defector would or should look like — and yet my father trusted her intuition and observational abilities.

That was how my parents came to know Sergei and Natasha. Natasha was Ukrainian, thin and dark. Sergei was Russian, blond and handsome. The four met at a party hosted by a Mexican diplomat. In those days in India, the art of espionage was a social affair. Lawn parties, croquet matches, cocktail soirees — these were the halls and mirrors where spies dwelt.

My parents invited the couple over for drinks one night. The men tried to impress each other with theories of capitalist excess or Keynesian dynamism. My father trotted out some glossy American catalogues from Sears Roebuck and put them on the coffee table to whet his guests’ appetite for western material pleasures, but they went unremarked upon. Both of these men lacked a certain ruthlessness, or experience. They were both new at the game.

Soon, the two couples began to spend time together regularly. Their playgrounds were wide and yellow sandy beaches, with the pale brown sun sitting low over an easy green ocean. There were usually slow-moving figures in the distance, thin fishermen with their long wooden prows pitching silver filament along the horizon. The squawking of the gulls was like an ever-present multitude of voices trying to tell them something in a language they could not understand. The great wash of the Indian Ocean surrounded them. At nights, Sergei and Natasha drank from the bottle of Jack Daniels my father had given them, and my parents sipped their gifted Stoli’s.

‘What did you think about Natasha?’ my father asked, after evenings spent with the Russians. ‘Or Sergei? What did your intuition tell you? Did you have a feeling they’re for real, or do they want to defect?’

She thought, considering all the time they’d all spent together, that maybe they did, yes.

My father hoped that was the case. He put away the Sears Roebuck catalogues soon after. He didn’t make a point of highlighting his eight-track stereo or his record collection or his newly bought Italian leather shoes to show Sergei that he was living the high life. He was genuinely glad for the friendship.

The fact that Sergei was KGB didn’t change much for my mother, either. She wasn’t interested in politics, and ultimately she didn’t give a damn if they wanted to defect or not. Natasha was her friend. She was there when my mother got pregnant with me, watched her grow big, cheered her on, and promised to be there for her after the birth.

But after I was born, my mother did begin to have a problem with the double life she was leading. ‘For the most part I was struck by what a wonderful husband and father he was,’ she told me, ‘and how he doted on you, and you were the centre of his life. I saw him as almost perfect, and felt that I couldn’t measure up to him and his expectations. I saw him as even-keeled, unflappable, solid, very intelligent, and articulate. I also thought of him as positive and optimistic. At the same time, I felt he had unrealistic expectations. He was judgemental, and critical of my shortcomings and negative feelings. I felt guilty for not measuring up to his expectations.’

In 1975, two years after I was born, she wrote in a journal that my father ‘seemed to be uncomfortable with the expression of any emotions other than positive ones and to want to suppress them’. She wrote:

In a discussion, if I get very excited or get angry, Keith’s response is to tell me to calm down and control my emotions. If I get angry, he would get angry with my anger, then clam up and carry a long grudge. He seemed to want to shut out all conflict. I have become afraid to show anger, as if having that emotion makes me a bad person. I try to repress it, control it. I’ve felt that unless I was positive and even-keeled all the time, he’d come down on me. I cannot express emotions of fear, sadness, frustration, impatience, nervous anxiety, etc. When I do, I feel guilty ... guilty for having these emotions.

My mother worried that her critique of him was unjust, that he didn’t deserve this kind of unruly psychological grilling. She worried that much of her angst was of her own making, and that he was doing his best under difficult circumstances. But she ended up feeling bad all the same.

Over the years, she also began to notice one of my father’s more marked traits — his exaggerated sentimentality. It reminded her, she told me, of the way actors are in musicals. It was hard for her to pinpoint and describe the quality, but it was as if he was too effusive, and it seemed to her sometimes that his emotions lacked depth. She started researching personality types.

‘Isn’t it true that even if you’re retired, you’re still not allowed to talk about it?’ Linda asked, sliding the lid off a pot into which she plunked squash. The windows of the cottage had steamed, and beads of water dribbled down, leaving inky pools behind.

‘We became quite good friends with some of the agents,’ my mother said, looking up from the table where she has been doodling on a notepad, her brow furrowed as she struggled to draw these memories into clarity.

‘But didn’t they know you were in the CIA?’ Linda asked.

‘They probably did, but we were playing this sort of game,’ my mother said. ‘We were pretending that we didn’t know.’

‘What did they do?’ Linda put down the knife and stood with her hands under her chin like a squirrel, as if ferreting away the information for some future time.

‘There were all these unknowns,’ my mother said. ‘That’s what the whole thing was all about, to find out. Keith would say, “Lee, what does your intuition tell you? Do you have a feeling that they really are for real?”’ Her eyebrows raised with the memory.

‘You were hoping they were going to defect to the US?’ Linda asked.

‘They were KGB, but in the end it turned out they weren’t candidates for defection.’

‘So then what?’

My mother grappled with the memory of her friends, and the possibility that never came to anything. ‘For me, at that young age, it felt like a betrayal of trust.’

There was a silence. ‘But didn’t Keith tell you that’s how it was?’ Linda asked after a while, chewing thoughtfully on a piece of celery.

After so many years, all that seemed to be left of the strangeness of that time was this confusion about what it meant then and what it means now. There was not much to cling to, nor to be bitter about. Nevertheless, seduction only ever works when everyone enjoys the idea of it, and by the end of their marriage my mother did not.

‘The problem for me was that we got involved with these people as friends,’ she said. ‘There was a fine line between the professional relationship and the friendship.’

In 1977 I was four, much too young to know anything, but for months my father had been working on a Soviet named Gregori.

He had had some small success with Gregori at first. Gregori had warmed to my father’s advances, and accepted several invitations to dine at our house. Gregori had downplayed his importance. He was just a bureaucrat, he often told my father with a laugh and a shrug, a low-ranking official with little access to sensitive files or valuable classified information.

And yet my father was still thrilled at the sight of the man casually flipping through the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalogue with his wife, picking out this or that luxury item. He was even more thrilled when, a few weeks later, he dropped the couple off on a dark, residential street near the Soviet compound, and watched them disappear carrying a new stereo and two pairs of highly prized blue jeans purchased from the catalogue.

It wasn’t long afterwards that Gregori began telling my father how disgusted he was with the Soviet system. He could pinpoint the exact time of his disillusionment, he said; it had been while he was still in high school and one of his favourite teachers had disappeared. He was told not to ask any questions. This was an exciting development, my father knew, but it was also dangerous. The Soviets could possibly be ‘dangling’ Gregori and setting a trap for my father. He told his superiors at the station about his concerns. ‘Don’t worry,’ they told him. ‘Get him.’

Gregori had no real knowledge of the operational matters of his office at the Soviet embassy, nor access to any sensitive documents, so my father began by asking for very basic information that would verify Gregori’s bonafides and establish his willingness to cooperate. What was the internal structure of his office? Who were the undercover KGB officers? What was the physical layout? And could he draw a sketch of the offices and write the names of the people working in each one? Gregori did this without compunction. Again my father dropped him off in a side street after a circuitous tour through a darkening New Delhi.

Around the same time my father was cultivating Gregori, he was introduced to another Soviet — a man named Oleg, an economics professor who worked at the Soviet embassy. Oleg seemed harmless enough, and so did their meeting — a chance encounter at a neighbour’s dinner party — but it gave my father the inroad to invite the professor home to dinner a few weeks later.

Oleg was gregarious and cheery, full of lighthearted anecdotes about the dismal state of affairs at home. To read a Soviet news-paper, he joked, one must begin with the obituaries, to learn of those who have finally escaped. Oleg had a kind of preposterous hilarity, like a Cold War Roberto Benigni, and my father wondered if here, too, was another potential recruitment.

As they sat down to dine, Oleg excused himself. He was an obsessive, he said. He was constantly washing his hands, and he must do so now.

My father laughed and waved him off to the washrooms.

After dinner, Oleg told my father that he wanted to reciprocate the invitation. But it would be impossible to meet at his house, he said, without giving a reason. Instead, the Soviet suggested they meet in a week’s time in the main dining hall of the Ashok Hotel.

And so it was that, a week later, my father arrived at the Ashok hall, an old-style dining room that harked back to the height of the British Empire. Oleg was already seated. He was as jovial as usual, and they ordered cocktails and chatted. After ordering, Oleg said that he must excuse himself to wash his hands. My father waved him off once again.

No sooner had Oleg disappeared, however, than another Soviet appeared, slipped into Oleg’s seat, and introduced himself.

‘We need to talk,’ he told my father.

Thoughts of Gregori immediately sprang to his mind. He was suddenly worried. Gregori had been opening up more and more of late. He hated his own system, he had told my father.

‘Okay,’ my father said. ‘Let’s talk.’

The man took out a small tape recorder and placed it on the table between them. ‘We’ve been watching you for many years now, Mr Johnson,’ he said. ‘Ever since you were in Mexico.’

‘Why?’ my father replied, in the expected tone of befuddlement. After all, he was just a lowly bureaucrat.

‘We’ve been watching your contact with Gregori from the very beginning, and now you’re going to be in big trouble with the admiral,’ said the KGB officer.

‘Wait a minute, you dumb shit,’ my father said, ‘you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not in the navy, and I don’t care what any admiral says about me.’

The Soviet turned the tape recorder on. The sound was indistinct, but my father could clearly hear his and Gregori’s voices. He tried to grab the recorder, but the Soviet snatched it back.

Gregori had been dangled. My father tried not to appear rattled.

‘You may continue working Gregori,’ the Soviet told him, ‘but under our direction.’ He then offered $50,000 for cooperation.

‘Fifty thousand?’ my father laughed. ‘I’ll earn that much next year clipping coupons from my stock options.’ And anyway, he persisted, why would the Soviets be so interested in the cooperation of a lowly economics officer?

He stood up to leave, and the Soviet followed. As he passed the maître d’, my father gestured back at the Soviet. ‘He’ll take care of the bill,’ he said, and walked out.

In the spring of 1973, several years earlier, my parents had gone on a trip to rest and relax. Friends of my father’s, another CIA couple, were living in Katmandu, and my father wanted my mother to see the mountain kingdom before I was born. After a week at a nearly deserted beach in Malaysia, they flew up one day in April, when my mother was six months pregnant. They sat side by side in the bulkhead seats, just behind the cockpit. A man next to my father warned him that if they didn’t touch down at the very beginning of the runway, they risked crashing. The runway was under construction, and the final extensions at the end hadn’t yet been completed.

When the plane came rolling in, the runway began to unfurl beneath them without touching down, and the man gave my father a look. And my dad turned to his new wife. ‘This is it, Lee,’ he said, and clutched her hand.

The plane crashed on the unfinished runway and caught on fire. It went catapulting down over the runway extension, a drop of several metres, and as it did the cockpit came unhinged and spiralled off to the side, leaving them exposed to the air but still moving forward. Just before reaching the second step, the plane came to a shuddering halt. My father jumped down off the smoking wing and held out his arms to my mother. And she, pregnant with me, leapt into my father’s arms from the burning wreckage through a gaping hole. Several people in the rear died later from injuries sustained in the crash.

My mother, who had been in car races with her college boy-friends, run reckless through her teens, and loved life in so many forms, was suddenly quiet. In shock, and terrified of miscarrying — and of the greater fears that lay suddenly visible on the horizon — she put her head in the arms of the other CIA wife and prayed. Those Nepalese mountains were so glorious; the winds rolled over their peaks and curled like waves. The mountains rose into a sky tinted with the black of space. But there she lay in their midst, one of God’s trinkets.

My mother went into labour in July of 1973, in Madras. I was big and she was very small. She lay in the bed at the hospital all night. My father paced the rooms outside. The rains had come again, and outside the streets were flooded; but the inside of the hospital was dank, white, and antiseptic. She pushed until she couldn’t anymore, and by that stage it was too late or too dangerous for a caesarian. The doctor had to act quickly. She was experienced, but overconfident. She rushed in with a pair of metal forceps and clasped my head, pulling me headfirst into the world and crushing my malleable skull along the way. I emerged misshapen and bruised. The pressure of the forceps had bashed my head, and it began to swell. It turned blue, then black.

There was a neurosurgeon on call that morning, and he was summoned immediately. On my first day of life, he performed emergency surgery on me: he pushed my skull back out, pressuring it back to a form much like a ping-pong ball pinched by fingers, and then released it with a pop. But my head continued to swell and bruise, and I was a mess of contusions for a while. For a year they thought I might be irreparably brain-damaged.

My mother recalled waking up in bed to see Sergei and Natasha in the hospital delivery room, before she had even been allowed to hold me. The Russians were the first non-relatives to see her, all sore and bloodied, and desperate to go home.

But my father remembers it differently. The Russians did come, but only when my mother had been cleansed and bandaged, and had held me in her arms for the first time. Sergei and Natasha brought me Matryoshka dolls, and for my father a Cuban stogie; for my mother they came bearing sympathy and considerable Russian love.

Now, years later, my mother struggled to find a word for how she’d treated them. She fiddled with her pen. She uncrossed her legs and looked at me. ‘You have to woo them,’ she finally said, as if the word were the final piece of a mental jigsaw puzzle she had been struggling with for years.

Linda took the squash out and laid four pieces on the board. ‘How do you choose what people to be friends with?’ she asked.

‘We invited them over to our house for drinks,’ my mother explained.

‘But how did he pick which person to begin with, to even bother with?’ my aunt persisted.

We lined up at the counter and ladled squash and steak and peas on to our plates. The windows had started to clear up.

‘You probably have a lot of CIA guys around here and there,’ Linda mused, more to herself than to us.

‘They have all kinds of covers — regular covers and deep covers,’ said my mom. ‘Keith was a regular cover, most of the time.’

Linda took a bite of the squash and chewed with her eyes closed as she thought about this.

‘He was almost a deep cover,’ my mother said. ‘He did function as a commercial officer; that was his job. He had to know how to do that job, but then underneath …’

‘What’s a deep cover?’ asked Linda, her eyes still closed, the celery poised at her mouth like a paintbrush.

My father had told me about ‘illegals’, sleeper spies sent to different countries to wait for instructions from their headquarters. They lived as locals for years — sometimes decades. Their children grew up as natives, knowing nothing of their father’s or mother’s job. They remained dormant until the day a handler called them from their slumber. ‘The time has come,’ they would say. There were also spies who worked outside the confines of the embassies, in regular jobs — as energy consultants or investment bankers — who had to take that extra measure of precaution to keep safe.

But deep cover was something else as well. To me, cover involved the family protecting the secret together: the way my father spoke to me sometimes, with the timbre of his voice lowered just a little; the way my mother whispered about the difficulties of her past; the way the first answer to a simple question for all of us (where are you from? Or, what does your father do?) was always a lie — distorted, shortened, or abbreviated.

When I was young, the Russians came to our house and played with me in my crib. My father and Sergei used the living room to discuss the world. My mother and Natasha cared about each other, sharing in motherhood.

Sergei and Natasha were my parents’ friends for a time, until they simply weren’t anymore. There was nothing dramatic about the ending; it began when my parents left India. They met as friends a few more times in America and elsewhere, but it wasn’t the same. The re-examination afterwards niggled at my mother. What was the point, after all? It began to feel like a betrayal — not that the game existed; she knew better than that. But that what had seemed like real friendship was also, in fact, an elaborate ruse. Beyond the immediate goal of recruitment was a void, a space cleared of figures or light or anything at all. It seemed a relationship destined for failure. Simple pleasures became, in hindsight, opportunities for endless examinations of motive and interest and calculated response. When she and Natasha had laughed so gleefully at the sloping figure of the fisherman caught in the surf, was there some ulterior motive? They had become involved with each other as friends, or so it had seemed, but the line between the professional and the personal got blurred and was eventually erased altogether.

Even as she tried to cope with the difficulties of living in India and of being sick, my mother also became increasingly unable to sympathise with or understand life with my father. He tried to lift her spirits, to buoy her, but he failed. She tried to live up to her own expectations, and failed too.

And to herself, she explored some of the reasons why. She wondered about my father, who was alone in bearing her burdens. ‘He has an intolerance of human weakness,’ she wrote. ‘Also, his exaggerated sentimentality with me undermines the depth of his emotions, makes them seem superficial. It seems he always wants me, everything, to be happy all the time, with no conflicts or emotionally jarring experiences (like in a musical).’ She continued:

What is my response to these qualities? Anger. A sense of things being fixed, inflexible. A sense that these characteristics have created a barrier between us. I find myself suspecting him. No trust … I read in that book that this kind of behaviour masked deeper harsh tendencies. I noted: ‘Keith once said himself that he was afraid that subconsciouly he might have harsh, cruel tendencies.’ I paid little heed at the time.

Not long afterwards, my mother left India and returned to the United States. The end of my parents’ relationship was complicated, but the years of living in the shadows of the CIA hadn’t helped.

I was six when my parents divorced. I remember my mother standing in the driveway at our house on Thatcher Road in McLean, Virginia, before she drove off in her little blue car. Wind and rain enamelled the spring cherry blossoms into a street of dark tar.

My grandparents came to help my father with the separation. My grandfather walked me home from school in the afternoons. The sidewalks were filled with cracks. I scrupulously avoided every one, not wanting any more bad luck.

My mother had gone to live in an efficiency apartment not far away. When I went to stay with her, I slept on a pull-out couch in the small living room. When I got up early, I watched cartoons on her little black-and-white television and waited for her to wake up. We made breakfast together — English muffins with butter and jam, and bowls of cereal — and sat at a round table in the sunlight. We swam in the neighbourhood pool. Sometimes we visited the zoo, or the Smithsonian Institution, or even the Museum of Natural History, because she knew how much I loved dinosaurs and trilobites and fossils. At night we listened to ‘Peter and the Wolf’, and I let her hold me when the sinister-sounding violins played, indicating the black forest where the wolf was lurking. She tucked me in and pulled the covers up high, kissed me on the forehead, and told me how much she loved me. I don’t remember my father during that time at all; in my memory, my life with him began just after. It was as if he simply disappeared for a while, the period when I was saying goodbye to my mother.